Tom Coe is on a mission to improve the user experience for everyone who is passionate about homes. When he created Abodely, he wanted to provide a community of like-minded people.
“Abodely provides a canvas for those who are house proud to showcase their homes, either to friends and family or to the Abodely community. Today their needs are met poorly on the ubiquitous ‘horizontal’ social media platforms,” Tom says.
“Abodely provides a unique opportunity for home discovery to find specific homes or homes with quirky features that may otherwise go undiscovered. Have you ever searched for a spiral staircase four-bedroom home in Manly, or an apartment with a rooftop pool in Parramatta?”
Tom says Abodely is being built on social media to support and build better experiences for home owners or discoverers, instead of simply being a lead or data being sold to the highest bidder.
“This evolution of social media is what I refer to as social media 2.0, with social media being used to build trust and transparency, but also providing a private and safe community.”
“Australians are property obsessed, but our tools and processes are set back in the last century. The current setup leads to poor and antiquated experience for any kind of home search or showcase, whether that’s sharing home updates or transacting a home.”
Tom believes social media provides some amazing applications to improve the entire experiences for all stakeholders.
“In 2020, the American property portal Zillow had 9.6 billion views. They surveyed these folk and discovered 83 percent of the viewers had no intention of buying. That’s eight billion views of house porn on a site designed to just sell an individual property. It’s not hard to imagine Australians face similar experiences.
And we know from a buying, selling or renting perspective the experience is also poor, costly and lengthy.”
As for Tom’s biggest success so far:
“In life, undoubtedly my family and friends. They’re the best and greatest inspiration, without these folk and their support I wouldn’t be me or doing what I’m passionate about.
On the Abodely front, it’s too early to say. But I’m pretty proud of the user insight collected to date, which hopefully should lead to a better experience for all!”
Tom feels lucky to have the support and energy from the Fishburners community.
“It’s great to have tangential conversations with other co-founders, who may have really simple answers to complex questions or challenges that I face.
They’re facing similar uphill challenges and they can empathise with my own journey,” Tom says.
“The universe is against startups. Starting something and taking it from zero to one is not a natural occurrence. It’s places like Fishburners and the community it serves that assists in making all the difference.”
Any advice for other startups?
“Keep hustlin’; you need to explore every avenue, then look left and right and then keep going down the next. It’s the most unlikely of places you’ll find your next step or outcome and this is likely going to come from 99 percent of the time by talking to people.
If nothing comes of it, then move on, but at least you’ll have refined your pitch and possibly either further validated or de-validated your hypothesis.”
“Keep supporting the community, it’s one of the few weapons startups have to build momentum. If you love homes and are keen to support Abodely, please sign up to the community to be part of our private beta launch in August. If nothing else, it’s free and you’ll see some cool looking ridiculous houses.”
