Building Products for the Future With Ajay Yadav
Photography by Ken Pao
Roomi Founder and CEO Ajay Yadav joined us at our launch event to discuss building his startup, creating user trust, and the future of the sharing economy.
Here are some of the most important insights that we were able to take away from our conversation with Ajay:
First things first, build an actual product. Roomi is a two-sided marketplace, serving one market for those seeking shared housing and roommates, and another for people who are willing to share their apartment. Fundamentally, it's about connecting supply and demand, and Ajay had a singular focus at the time: create supply and thus create his product. For Roomi, their supply came from apartment listings, so, in classic entrepreneurial fashion, Ajay collected listings from Craigslist and Twitter, and posted them on his own platform (which at the time was a Tumblr Blog Page). He explains, "one by one I was scrapping listings and would publish them on my blog." The simple truth is that, in the beginning, you don't need a glamorous website or product, you just need to have an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) that does the job.
A pitch deck isn't a "one size fits all." To date, Roomi has raised 17M in funding, but we learned that getting funding during the early stages was an extremely tough process. Ajay guided us through his journey of pitching to over 300 investors and getting rejected by every single one of them. But he didn't stop there. Instead, he followed up with investors and asked WHY they opted not to fund Roomi. During this process, Ajay created a spreadsheet with every investor that he had a relationship with and noted their reasons. In our discussion, Ajay mentioned that a shared concern among investors was that he was a solo founder, which brought on more risks. Soon, Ajay took a different approach and started adjusting his pitch deck so that it aligned with what the investors were looking for. In essence, he researched what each investor was looking for in their portfolio, and fine-tuned his pitch to meet their interests. Eventually, things started to come together, and Roomi began to raise capital. Ajay now looks back and realizes, that "there isn't one pitch for all investors."
Focus on the one thing. When I asked Ajay, "what is one thing that you recommend any aspiring or current entrepreneurs do right now?" his answer was quite simple: focus on your idea, focus on the one thing. If you're really passionate about what you're doing, then focusing on the one thing in your startup that matters the most will call for all things better. Ajay tied it back to his startup, "I usually only come out to 3-4 events a year because I'm so focused on my work [Roomi]."
Ajay Yadav is the Founder & CEO of Roomi, a peer-to-peer marketplace making it safer and easier to find room rentals, sublets, and roommates. He has guided Roomi through its debut in New York and expansion to several major cities across North America. To date, the mobile platform has raised $17M, as they continue to add new markets. In 2017, Ajay was selected as one of Forbes magazine’s 30 Under 30.