Varun Bhanot, head of business development at Hubble, explains why the business should win the Startup of the Year category of the Guardian Small Business Showcase competition:
Hubble is an online marketplace to match those looking to rent office space with those who have it.
We know how difficult it is to find a home for London companies and how so much excess office space goes unused. Our mission is to provide the simplest way to find & create the perfect home to grow businesses, nurture cultures and share space that would have gone wasted, while saving on rental costs.
We raised a seed round from Dragon’s Den’s James Caan at the end of 2014, but subsequently had to do a rebrand from our previous name ‘Spacious’ to ‘Hubble’ due to a trademark issue. We worked hard to push out the new name ‘Hubble’ through a wacky ‘paper toss competition’ where companies had to challenge each other on Facebook to video the craziest paper tosses in their offices. We managed to get 30 offices to video a stunt while our own video went viral with 20,000 views.
The result was over 300 sign-ups who ended up searching for offices on our platform, and 50 new office space uploads. From doing one office space deal per week, we now do one per day. From having just 50 offices on our platform, we now have over 500, and our revenue has been rising 25% month on month.
All entries which meet the competition criteria are published and our judging panel select a shortlist of the top three for each category. Winners are announced at an awards ceremony in summer 2016.
