Welcome to the Jazz Shapers Podcast from Mishcon de Reya. What you are about to hear was originally broadcast on Jazz FM however the music has been cut due to rights issues.
Elliot Moss
Welcome to Jazz Shapers with me Elliot Moss, bringing the shapers of the business world together with the musicians shaping jazz, soul and blues. My guest today is Hannah Chappatte, founder and CEO of Hybr, the student accommodation platform. While a student at the University of Bristol, Hannah experienced the anxiety of trying to find a place to rent and saw how vulnerable first-time renters were to unresponsive agents and rogue landlords. Unfortunately, many of us have been there. With 3 million students in the UK, she saw the need for a platform that takes better care of them, guiding them through the renting journey and the jargon. Shortly after graduating and after a brutal series of cold calls to landlords to better understand their pain points, Hannah launched Hybr in 2020. Hybr is now active in ten major cities and they’ve expanded their focus from undergraduates to other first-time renters, including graduates. Welcome to Jazz Shapers. Just in your own words, why have you just had, in the last year and a bit of so, the confidence of investors to put £3.3 million into your business? What’s going on? What are they backing?
Hannah Chappatte
Yeah, it’s a great question. I think a lot of the initial conversations when we were first kind of raising investment kind of two or three years ago was around the, the passion and the story, the origin story of why I created this business and so this very much came from my own anxiety as a student not knowing where to go to find a house, not knowing who I could trust and that really helped me understand the student problem, but then to get to the next level and to raise the £3.3 million rounds, we had to show that we understood the other side of the equation so, the supply side of the marketplace, which is landlords and agents and what we kind of realised is that the only way to really transform the way young people rent to remove the painful process of renting is to empower agents and landlords to deliver a better renter experience because ultimately, the landlord and the agent are the ones in control of the renter experience so, to raise a seed round, we needed to show that we understood the pain points from landlords and agents and why that relationship was breaking down and what the solution was.
Elliot Moss
What I love about the eminent wisdom of investors is that they say, “no” and “you’re mad” and even the people in the industry when you kicked this off five years ago or so said, “Hannah, you, you’ve got to be off your rocker.” Why did they say “you’re off your rocker”? What is it about the rental market that makes it look like this is a silly idea?
Hannah Chappatte
Yeah, that’s a really good question. The optics of the renter market is because rents have been increasing 10% to 15% year on year, people think there’s no problem, people think it’s a really lucrative market and so it’s not broken, whereas actually smart capital can see those margins and see actually if they can be optimised further by having better work flow, management tools, then actually you can be making even better margins so, I think when you’re looking at the rental mark and seeing that rents are increasing, seeing that there’s a supply constrain market meaning there’s not enough student housing, you would just say oh actually, this market is booming, there’s nothing more that you can do and actually that’s the opportunity because it’s been overlooked because it’s not really considered a, you know a sexy market for disruption from AI companies, people have left it alone and that’s been kind of our opportunity.
Elliot Moss
And you, Hannah, I mean, you know you’re, you’re one of the youngest, I think, people I’ve had on the show, one of the youngest founders.
Hannah Chappatte
Oh wow.
Elliot Moss
Not the youngest but pretty close.
Hannah Chappatte
Okay.
Elliot Moss
Again, a lot of belief. What were they, what are they backing in you?
Hannah Chappatte
Definitely I think being a young female founder, you have to have traction. It was not one of those, I raised £3.3 million off an idea, I raised it from the traction of showing that you know the first time we raised money, we had a profitable business, from day one we were generating revenue, we were matching students to landlords whilst you know spending no money and then showing that we were able to kind of scale that up, so it’s very much traction is really important being a young founder and being a first time founder and then it’s very much the passion and storytelling. I think a lot of geniuses, great founders, if you can’t tell your story in a succinct way of the, the why you’re the right team to be solving this problem and really understanding the kind of pain points and why your solution is unique, then you’re not, you’re not going to land the point and luckily for us, a lot of our investors have recently been through the trauma of their children going to university and thinking, my god, this is a very outdated and, you know, inefficient process, surely there could be something better in the 21st century.
Elliot Moss
So, they back you because the idea is good. They back you because from day one Hannah has said there’s a pain point and the, and the investors have had children who are, and like me, the trauma of finding the rental thing and working and it all feeling above board and all that but young founder, we’ll come to the woman versus man thing in a moment, but young, young founder who gets going on stuff, who has rejected the, the milk round in the consultancy world, who suffered from dyslexia, who’s kind of decided to go and set this thing up, where’s all that from, that sense of, I’m not going to call it rebellion, Hannah because that’s a big word but there’s something in you I think which looks a little bit like the system isn’t for you and I’m trying to work out why.
Hannah Chappatte
So, when I was in my final year of studying, when I was, as you said, rejecting the kind of consulting route, it was very much because I was fascinated by the gap in the market that my housemate at the time and I were discussing every weekend, you know, how were there 3 million students, growing population by 2% years on year, market worth over £13 billion, huge opportunity and every brand wants to target students, the first touchpoint in their consumer life cycle so such a underappreciated, overlooked cohort and such a raw pain point of how much students really hated renting, I mean you look at any student mine survey and 50% of students experience say that mental health is at its worse and always kind of go back to the financial struggles and how hard it is to rent so, thought how could there be such a palpable pain point, yet there was no platform that was really trying to serve that group and that just, I couldn’t believe that no one was talking about this as a, as a, as a business, as a problem and so when I was going into doing more applications, I was just feeling horribly miserable and I couldn’t see a future and then when I sat down to think about what Hybr could be, I was excited, I was energised and I think there’s a bit privilege starting a business right after university because you really can’t fail, at the time I was doing some waitressing work, all my friends were still studying or they were travelling, no one knew what the wanted to do so, you know if I’d failed in that year or two, three years after, you know I wasn’t going to be judged for it, I didn’t have a mortgage, I didn’t have a family, I didn’t have any sort of, you know, financial pressures so, I really had the luxury of being able to just start writing a business plan, creating a very basic square space, no code needed website and just jumping into it.
Elliot Moss
But so many of your coll, your friends at the time and I think back to the time when I was graduating, you know I looked at the graduate jobs, I looked at structure, I looked at all these things and went that looks kind of cool, I think I’ll do that and I know that times have changed and obviously people now want to set up their own business and it’s cool to set up your own business now versus when I graduated in 1837.
Hannah Chappatte
Or even five years ago.
Elliot Moss
Yeah, and even five years ago, people, that’s the last thing you’d do but, but you were comfortable, I get the low consequences of failure but you were comfortable with no structure, is that because you’d got used to no structure, I mean you went to school, you got you’re A levels, you did very well, you’d gone to Bristol University, all those things. Where was that comfort with nothing around you from because, again you go into consultancy to learn how to write the business plan, to learn how to work out, quantify the total addressable market, the thing you just reeled off, £13 billion is the TAM and all that. Why did you feel so comfortable just getting on with it?
Hannah Chappatte
I found actually that it was a confidence building exercise, I found the more I worked on Hybr, the more my own confidence grew in myself because I felt really for the first time ever like I had a mission and I felt really energised and excited by that mission and it was the most confident I had ever felt and the more I worked on it the more my confidence grew, which I think is a great lesson for anyone you know thinking about starting a business, but to answer your question directly, it was very much my brother’s influence so, my brother is ten years older than me, he was BCG and he went on to be MD of Africa’s first unicorn so, he really started talking to me about the startup space, I did summer internships at his startup and he was the one that kind of gave me that push of “you can do it” you know “this is what a startup even is” because I had no…
Elliot Moss
It’s no different to this, it’s this.
Hannah Chappatte
Yeah, but then I didn’t even, I wasn’t even part of the Bristol Entrepreneurship Innovation, nothing, I’d never even heard of startups so, he was the one that gave me that exposure and then his wife at the time was also looking at starting her own business so, I think as soon as that ladder is in front of you and you realise that there’s a route to a new path and it becomes, it becomes doable.
Elliot Moss
And that’s what happened, you climbed the ladder. Much more from my guest, Hannah Chappatte, coming up in a couple of minutes and she’s going to be revealing more without knowing she’s going to reveal more. Right now though we’re going to hear a taster from the Mishcon Innovation Series, which you can find on all the major podcast platforms. Lydia Kellett invites business founders to share their practical advice and industry insights for those of you thinking about starting your very own thing, in fact just like Hannah. In this clip we hear from Tariq Rauf, architect and founder and CEO of Qatalog, a digital work hub aiming to give people a radically simpler way to coordinate their work.
You can enjoy all our former Business Shapers on the Jazz Shapers podcast and you can hear this very programme again if you pop Jazz Shapers into your favourite podcast platform. My guest today, in case you haven’t noticed, is Hannah Chappatte, founder and CEO of Hybr, the student accommodation platform. You mentioned, and I love the way you said it, about the “confidence grew” as you did more of the thing you were doing, i.e. setting up this business and you talked about having a mission and again, I, I read a lot about this stuff and obviously I’m very privileged, I get to meet a lot of people setting up their own business and people throw around the word “mission” and what they really mean is, “I found something that was going to make me some money”. Where does the money feature in all of this for you? I mean obviously you need to drive a successful business but what’s the, is the bigger purpose to solve the 3 million people problem or is the bigger purpose to create a next, you know, a unicorn?
Hannah Chappatte
I think they’re very closely tied and I think the key word that just said there is ‘purpose’. I can only speak for myself but I genuinely believe that purpose is happiness and wholeheartedly focussing on nothing else but building Hybr gave me purpose and that built my confidence but to answer your question, it is and it was all about making renting painless, making renting easy, starting with those most in need which is students and venturing on that journey is of course about financial freedom and creating you know that opportunity for my family and the next generation below me but also a big part of that financial freedom is also the kind of the opportunities that come with that so, being a young woman in the space and wanting to showcase that it’s possible for all the other young women to come after me, I think, needing more female role models is a big drive of what I’m doing and wanting to be in the room where there’s often not enough women involved is a big driver in what I’m doing.
Elliot Moss
Do you think the investors could smell the conviction? You know, we talked earlier about why investors invested in you. I imagine they saw the conviction I’m seeing now and the purpose, you mention happiness, but the purpose of actually solving the problem of 3 million, would that also be true of them? Is that why, do you think they also said here’s some money?
Hannah Chappatte
Definitely, I think often investors talk about investing in the founder, especially in early stage businesses, it might pivot you know three times over but you back that the founder has the drive and determination to make the business a success no matter what that business ends up evolving into and especially for me, you know in the last round, it was all about showing how we were approaching this, this problem from a different perspective so, the mission is all about making renting painless but understanding that why renting is painful is because the lack of infrastructure that landlords and agents use so, we were going about the age old problem that you know everyone’s tried to solve in some sort and there’s been a graveyard of student accommodation businesses that have tried to solve this problem and they’ve all failed because marketplaces are really hard to build and we’ve gone about it in a way of being a software enabled marketplace because we understand that the reason why renting is painful is because landlords and agents are set up to fail, they cannot deliver a good renter experience because they lack that infrastructure, so that was our approach and I think showing that we were, you know, tackling a archaic, old sector but with a new, fresher, innovative approach, that was really what interest them.
Elliot Moss
In the investment raising process, the funding process, again, a conversation I’ve had many times is “it’s brutal”, it’s not very nice, you know, it’s like your worst exam but exacerbated by a hundred times. Were there moments when you felt like it was going to happen? I mean obviously the, the structure of a fundraise is relatively clear and you put papers out, you say this is what we’re worth and this is what we’re going to get and so on and so forth but were there moments when you were confident it was going to happen, you know that you could see that people were going to stump up the next amount of cash?
Hannah Chappatte
The hardest thing of raising money is that you’re, you know, building the plane whilst flying the plane, whilst trying to fund the plane so, if you’re trying to, you’re juggling lots of different plates at the same time so, the whole time I was going to raise, I’m also actively involved in the business, you know driving sales, working on the product etc and so you’re always looking at the different routes in front of you and trying to build you know a sustainable, profitable business so that you don’t have to be as reliant on, on capital. Obviously, the way we’re going to here is, try and get to profitability at scale so that we never have to raise, we can choose our investors at the right time. So, I never want to put all our eggs in one basket, I’m always looking at the different options in front of us to ensure long term survival so, I’m never overly reliant on one investor, I always know that the round will eventually close and depending on how much we raise, we’ll approach growth in a different way.
Elliot Moss
Have you managed to balance that though, you said the flying the plane, the making the plane and then the funding of the plane, where do you, I mean if there’s a, if that’s an hour of your time, what percentage goes on each in that moment through that period? Because this is something again, I talk to founders about and they’re at it, it’s a 24 hour job and I don’t, I don’t get how you can keep going, I mean where, where was the focus for you because people often say you’ve just got to be a fulltime fundraiser.
Hannah Chappatte
Yeah, it’s very much a luxury to be able to be a fulltime fundraiser, I think in a co-founder dynamic, that’s definitely possible for one founder to focus more on fundraising but as a solo founder you have to be fundraising but also driving sales, thinking about the team, the culture, thinking about hiring new people depending on the raise so, planning.
Elliot Moss
So, it’s messy basically. It is messy.
Hannah Chappatte
Yeah, planning for when you raise that money, how you’re going to spend it and already be getting that team in place so, as soon as the investment round closes, you can be onto the next chapter.
Elliot Moss
Was there someone in, is there someone in the mix that you go to for advice when you, or, or more of a not quite a shoulder to cry on because I remember once I, I needed a shoulder to cry on and someone said, “I’m not your shoulder to cry on”, it was like many years ago and I thought it was pretty harsh but I know what that person meant. Is there someone you can go to who is a mentor or who’s going to give you fantastic advice?
Hannah Chappatte
Definitely. We have a board, we have advisors, I have my, my brother and my, my sister-in-law who are also entrepreneurs who understand the, the difficulty of juggling many things. It’s always that balance of being decisive because you have to make decisions quickly and being humble because you should always know that you can know more and go to people around you to ask questions and learn. There’s always that kind of balancing act of the two.
Elliot Moss
Stay with me for my final chat to find out how decisiveness meets humility. I’m with my guest today, it’s Hannah Chappatte. And we’ve got music from Emma-Jean Thackray, that’s in just a moment, don’t go anywhere.
Hannah Chappatte is my Business Shaper just for a few more minutes. The last year or so, you have got a lot of recognition from lots of different places and I’m going to read: 2024, Hannah, “Forbes 30 Under 30, The Times inaugural Young Power List, recognising 25 most inspiring people under 30. 2023 Property Week Resi’s Young Trailblazers and go on and on, plus the endorsement that you have raised £3.3 million with notable people, including people who’ve been on this programme before, Charlie Green, co-founder of The Office Group, Debbie Wosskow leading the charge in terms of raising the amount of money that VC, Venture Capital gives to female founders. How have you remained humble?
Hannah Chappatte
Very easy.
Elliot Moss
Is it?
Hannah Chappatte
Being a founder is being like slaps in the face every day, you’re kind of punched in the stomach and you just have to constantly get up, get up, get up. So I think it’s very easy to stay, to stay humble in the early days of building and scaling a business, it’s constantly around how do you, as I said, build a profitable, scalable business that is really building, you know, value for your target audience so, it is a difficult journey to be on and it’s very much humbling. I think it’s important to disconnect from the brand exposure, which is incredible for the business, and do the day-to-day running of the business which is all about how to create the most value.
Elliot Moss
How are you so calm? I mean, I really mean that, this is like you know you’re, you’ve gone into a startup world, you’re a few years in, you’ve raised a fantastic amount of money, the business is going well, you’re looking at expanding, it’s working and you know you’re mature beyond your years, but how? Where, where’s that from, Hannah? Is this just who you are or have you developed this as you’ve gone along the journey since founding this business?
Hannah Chappatte
I think it’s really important to be self-aware as a, as a founder because you have to know your flaws and you have to know your strengths and then building that team that can fill any of those gaps to give you the best chance of success so, I think being self-aware and constantly questioning yourself on are you responding with emotion, are you responding, are you being as practical as possible? So I think that the importance of kind of checking in with yourself because it’s constantly a mixture of a marathon and a sprint, you have to sprint at certain periods but it is a marathon that you have to survive in the long run so, I think being really self-aware and understanding every day what energises you, what takes away your energy, how can you set up yourself so you can actually work long hours but be as productive and keep on adding value to the business.
Elliot Moss
But it doesn’t feel too difficult. You know there’s that bit before certain A levels where you go, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to get my A or my A star, does it feel like you’re meant to do this as opposed to you’re playing a role of someone who’s meant to be enjoying it?
Hannah Chappatte
100% and I think it goes back to that drive and the feeling of purpose, of what are you doing, are you doing something that’s going to you know be net positive for society and because I really strongly believe in the mission and I can still really see that gap in the market, that’s what makes this all so worth it. As well as just the incredible creative freedom that you have every day of here’s a very complex problem to solve and the intellectual and creative freedom of how are you going to tackle that today, this year?
Elliot Moss
And actually, I went on the website and it’s unbelievably simple, literally just one page, and you have to do all the logging in stuff on you know actually start filtering what you want so, it’s like, and I would describe that as getting out the way of the product, the product is there, but it’s also immediately irreverent, I, you know, it’s the f-word with lots of stars on it and all that, you don’t seem an irreverent person. Is this, I don’t mean that, I mean that in a complimentary way, maybe you are irreverent but again, how are you balancing that sense of what your brand is going to be and how you manage yourself because again, that, it feels like you’re, you’re doing both and I’m still intrigued on, as to how you’re, you’re not going bonkers with all this pressure. Do you feel the pressure?
Hannah Chappatte
I feel the pressure to get a return for our investors and I feel the pressure to deliver a valuable product for the people serve, which are student renters and agents and landlords and it is a privilege to be able to work on the solution which is for us, kind of lettings management platform that enables agents and landlords to manage the rental process so, kind of marketing channels, enquiries to offers, that’s where the complexity and the product really comes from is building that workflow management tool for the supply side of the equation, that then ensures that the student renter has a great experience so, that’s really where the, that’s what keeps me sane because I love the problem solving side of it.
Elliot Moss
Keep solving those problems, it’s been great to talk to you. I’ve got a feeling this is going to fly. You’ve done already fantastic things and it feels like that’s going to happen more so in the, in the coming months and years. Thank you for spending some time with me. Just before I let you disappear to do more of it, what’s your song choice and why have you chosen it?
Hannah Chappatte
Stan Getz, The Girl from Ipanema. The reason why I’ve chosen it is because it very much relaxes me when I listen to it and it reminds me of the glory days being 18 again before starting on the kind of student renting experience, journey, lying on the beach and being introduced to this song and thinking wow, life is wonderful.
Elliot Moss
Stan Getz and The Girl from Ipanema, the song choice of my Business Shaper, Hannah Chappatte. She talked about the actual activity of building the business as a confidence building exercise, in other words you gain your confidence through doing it, don’t worry and wait for the confidence to emerge before you start, just get going. “Purpose is happiness”, what a lovely and simple way of defining what purpose is all about. And finally, she said making sure you maintain that judicious balance between being decisive but also having humility, I love that.
You can hear my conversation with Hannah all over again, whenever you’d like as a podcast, just search Jazz Shapers or you can ask your smart speaker to play Jazz Shapers. Alternatively, you can catch this programme nice and early again on Monday morning, just before the Jazz FM Breakfast at 5.00am. That’s it from Jazz Shapers, have a lovely weekend.
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