Can you tell us how Love Home Swap started?
I set up my first business, which was a marketing agency called Mantra, when I was 25 and spent much of working life on a plane. But when I had my children I realised that staying in a hotel, which I’d always loved, was a complete nightmare.
I had a particularly bad, and very expensive, family holiday, sitting in a small darkened room, eating room service while my tiny children were sleeping. I’d also just watched the film, The Holiday – which is the ultimate home swap film. Together that gave me the idea for Love Home Swap.
Within two months of thinking of the idea, in 2011, I had put together the prototype for the site. By the end of that year, I had raised my first round of venture capital for the business. Now we offer swaps with 75,000 homes and 160 countries.
Why did you think the idea had business potential?
I looked at the home exchange category and thought it was in need of innovation. It’s an old idea – it has its roots in the 1950s with teachers swapping homes for the school holidays. But, before we launched, there was nothing on offer that was glamorous.
I felt like there was an opportunity to launch something different. But also to consolidate some of the sites that already existed, so we made an acquisition of another [home swap] business and now we’re looking at potentially acquiring some more.
Has competition grown with the rise of Airbnb?
We’re different because we’re a pure swap of your home with someone else’s. It isn’t about paying to stay somewhere on a nightly basis, as you would a hotel, nor is it about making money from your existing asset: it’s about saving money.
And the thing that really drives the consumers’ engagement with Love Home Swap is the swap. This is a community of like-minded people who think, “I want to life swap my life with someone else’s for a few weeks”, and that is quite different from Airbnb. But Airbnb has made the sharing economy more mainstream. It has helped us get used to a notion that even five years ago seemed impossible: that you would have a stranger stay in your home, or you’d stay in a stranger’s home.
So we don’t vet homes, we let our members’ experiences do the talking through their reviews. But we do have an insurance product; and we do identity verification of our members.
Why have you been so successful in securing funding?
It helped that I’d built a business before and had a significant exit from that. Let’s be clear, raising venture capital is hard.
I was in a position to seed fund the business, so I didn’t have to go through the process of finding angel investors. But I think it definitely helps to shape your business’ story and to understand its mission.
What are your plans for the future?
We have a partnership with Wyndham, the hoteliers, and are planning to work with Marriott Hotels and RCI (the timeshare business). We’re looking how to reinvent the timeshare model for the sharing economy. Our main focus is scaling up.
What’s your advice for budding entrepreneurs?
This stuff is hard, it requires grit to run a business. And staying power matters more than the initial enthusiasm that comes with the idea. If I could give out three pieces of advice, they would be: don’t listen to anyone who tells you your idea will never work; develop a thicker skin – things go wrong every single day, not everybody will like the business, get over it and move on; and be prepared to let your idea develop and change.
It took us about 18 months of experimenting to find out what was needed for Love Home Swap to work, and it’s made the business what it is today.
Debbie Wosskow is CEO of Love Home Swap.
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