Renting headaches inspired property website
The property rental website 99.co was founded by (from left) Mr Conor Mclaughlin, Mr Ruiwen Chua, Mr Anuj Bheda and (far right) Mr Darius Cheung. Mr David Yap (second from right) is part of the website’s team.
Serial entrepreneur Darius Cheung, 33, gets all of his start-up ideas from personal hurdles that he has had to overcome.
His latest start-up, 99.co, is a rental site which carries listings from landlords looking for tenants, and covers both private and HDB properties. After many painstaking searches for a place to rent over the years, he said he yearned for a site which would simplify the search through online classifieds.
Mr Cheung was 13 when he came to Singapore on a scholarship from Hong Kong. He has lived in rented homes for the past 20 years. "Searching for a place to rent is not a great experience and searching online is inefficient," he said.
Some online sites carry duplicate listings and bogus ones, he said, because landlords and agents post listings on multiple websites in order to gauge how the market reacts.
"People try to game the market and it's very frustrating for tenants," he said.
When Mr Cheung set up 99.co with three partners, they sank in about $300,000 of their own money.
They chose the name because nine in Chinese symbolises longevity.
"By helping customers find their best home, 99.co wishes everyone longevity," he said. They have also registered the name in Chinese.
Their company's aim is to improve the search process.
They decided that it was worth the effort to manually verify and refresh listings to ensure that each is legitimate and unique.
They send a photographer to each address to take pictures of the place to give potential
tenants an accurate idea of what they are about to rent. It is labour intensive and it takes time, but it is worth it, said Mr Cheung.
After about half a year of work, the site now boasts 2,000 unique listings.
This is like how Airbnb runs its online rental service, he said. Both renters and property owners must register profiles on the site and their reputations online matter a lot.
Users with dodgy profiles are far less likely to connect with other users. The system encourages good behaviour and discourages fraud.
"Yes, we take a lot of inspiration from Airbnb. We're like a long-term Airbnb, I guess," he said.
"They do a lot of education work, teaching people how to be a good host, and how to take photos for their listings," he said of the added level of detail Airbnb puts into its working process with property owners.
This is Mr Cheung's third start-up. His first was launched not long after he graduated from the National University of Singapore (NUS) with an electrical engineering degree.
He joined the NUS Overseas College programme, which took him to Silicon Valley, where he interned with an interactive marketing team for half a year. Then in 2005, he started TenCube, a mobile security firm, with two other engineers.
The idea for that, he said, came from losing his own phone and realising he needed to secure the data in the device remotely.
"It was a specific idea that we were convinced had value. We were probably in the right place at the right time, because more people were starting to carry (expensive) smartphones, as well," he said.
In 2010, TenCube was sold to the anti-virus giant McAfee, which renamed it WaveSecure.
The whole team went to McAfee as well. Mr Cheung worked there for 18 months, before the start-up bug bit again, and he left to start BillPin.
This service allows people to split bills among friends and keep track of payments more easily.
"It started because it was a need I had when I was in my mid-20s, when a lot of activities I did, such as having group meals, needed an easy way for me to split the expenses," he said.
Unlike TenCube, BillPin did not get sold to a bigger company and the team decided to move on.
The service had acquired 100,000 active users by then, but the team decided there was a ceiling to its potential.
Such a service works for a specific age group and bill splitting tapers off once people hit their 30s, explained Mr Cheung.
"People either grow out of a group activity lifestyle, or they aren't splitting bills as frequently," he said.
BillPin did not evolve into a payments company.
They had hoped it would after it attracted a sizeable base of users willing to transact on the platform, but they realised it would never become PayPal. "PayPal does payments better and on a much larger scale as well," he said.
With three other BillPin founders - Mr Ruiwen Chua, 31, Mr Anuj Bheda, 24, and Mr Conor Mclaughlin, 25 - he moved on to 99.co. "We gave Billpin a serious shot and it was a clear decision to move on," he said.
They got cracking on 99.co at the start of the year and just announced a $700,000 injection from venture capital firms East Ventures, 500 Startups and Golden Gate Ventures.
They plan to grow 99.co into a property listing site with Airbnb-style emphasis on user reputations to give it an edge over the competition. Providing an interface which connects renters and property owners directly will be that edge, they think.
Unlike with TenCube, Mr Cheung is not setting up 99.co to be acquired so soon. "I hope I can build something meaningful in order for the company to be a good place to work at. It underscores my attachment to this city," he said.
As for his next start-up idea, he said ideas percolate all the time when he thinks about hurdles he faces.
He pointed to writings from the famed computer programmer Paul Graham: "People understand problems that they face themselves, and that's the pattern I follow when I think about new start-ups to create."
His latest start-up, 99.co, is a rental site which carries listings from landlords looking for tenants, and covers both private and HDB properties. After many painstaking searches for a place to rent over the years, he said he yearned for a site which would simplify the search through online classifieds.
Mr Cheung was 13 when he came to Singapore on a scholarship from Hong Kong. He has lived in rented homes for the past 20 years. "Searching for a place to rent is not a great experience and searching online is inefficient," he said.
Some online sites carry duplicate listings and bogus ones, he said, because landlords and agents post listings on multiple websites in order to gauge how the market reacts.
"People try to game the market and it's very frustrating for tenants," he said.
When Mr Cheung set up 99.co with three partners, they sank in about $300,000 of their own money.
They chose the name because nine in Chinese symbolises longevity.
"By helping customers find their best home, 99.co wishes everyone longevity," he said. They have also registered the name in Chinese.
Their company's aim is to improve the search process.
They decided that it was worth the effort to manually verify and refresh listings to ensure that each is legitimate and unique.
They send a photographer to each address to take pictures of the place to give potential
tenants an accurate idea of what they are about to rent. It is labour intensive and it takes time, but it is worth it, said Mr Cheung.
After about half a year of work, the site now boasts 2,000 unique listings.
This is like how Airbnb runs its online rental service, he said. Both renters and property owners must register profiles on the site and their reputations online matter a lot.
Users with dodgy profiles are far less likely to connect with other users. The system encourages good behaviour and discourages fraud.
"Yes, we take a lot of inspiration from Airbnb. We're like a long-term Airbnb, I guess," he said.
"They do a lot of education work, teaching people how to be a good host, and how to take photos for their listings," he said of the added level of detail Airbnb puts into its working process with property owners.
This is Mr Cheung's third start-up. His first was launched not long after he graduated from the National University of Singapore (NUS) with an electrical engineering degree.
He joined the NUS Overseas College programme, which took him to Silicon Valley, where he interned with an interactive marketing team for half a year. Then in 2005, he started TenCube, a mobile security firm, with two other engineers.
The idea for that, he said, came from losing his own phone and realising he needed to secure the data in the device remotely.
"It was a specific idea that we were convinced had value. We were probably in the right place at the right time, because more people were starting to carry (expensive) smartphones, as well," he said.
In 2010, TenCube was sold to the anti-virus giant McAfee, which renamed it WaveSecure.
The whole team went to McAfee as well. Mr Cheung worked there for 18 months, before the start-up bug bit again, and he left to start BillPin.
This service allows people to split bills among friends and keep track of payments more easily.
"It started because it was a need I had when I was in my mid-20s, when a lot of activities I did, such as having group meals, needed an easy way for me to split the expenses," he said.
Unlike TenCube, BillPin did not get sold to a bigger company and the team decided to move on.
The service had acquired 100,000 active users by then, but the team decided there was a ceiling to its potential.
Such a service works for a specific age group and bill splitting tapers off once people hit their 30s, explained Mr Cheung.
"People either grow out of a group activity lifestyle, or they aren't splitting bills as frequently," he said.
BillPin did not evolve into a payments company.
They had hoped it would after it attracted a sizeable base of users willing to transact on the platform, but they realised it would never become PayPal. "PayPal does payments better and on a much larger scale as well," he said.
With three other BillPin founders - Mr Ruiwen Chua, 31, Mr Anuj Bheda, 24, and Mr Conor Mclaughlin, 25 - he moved on to 99.co. "We gave Billpin a serious shot and it was a clear decision to move on," he said.
They got cracking on 99.co at the start of the year and just announced a $700,000 injection from venture capital firms East Ventures, 500 Startups and Golden Gate Ventures.
They plan to grow 99.co into a property listing site with Airbnb-style emphasis on user reputations to give it an edge over the competition. Providing an interface which connects renters and property owners directly will be that edge, they think.
Unlike with TenCube, Mr Cheung is not setting up 99.co to be acquired so soon. "I hope I can build something meaningful in order for the company to be a good place to work at. It underscores my attachment to this city," he said.
As for his next start-up idea, he said ideas percolate all the time when he thinks about hurdles he faces.
He pointed to writings from the famed computer programmer Paul Graham: "People understand problems that they face themselves, and that's the pattern I follow when I think about new start-ups to create."
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