We got offered $10,000 to build a property management app in Hong Kong, here's why we said no.

Working closely with my good friend and colleague Jacob we’ve built and launched a bunch of awesome projects this year. The proudest of our paired output this year has been Flatm8, which deserves it’s own post eventually. However, we have carved out some space here to reflect on the start, fast burning development, and then shuttering of, our vertical community development app EstateM8, shared here in the spirit of building in public.

In response to a call for entrants via the University of Warwick for a competition in Hong Kong, we ideated something that follows the ethos of software design I’ve decided to commit to, and submitted it for consideration. Excitingly, we won! We were offered a week long trip to Hong Kong to experience the business ecosystem and pitch our ideas to investors. We were also granted a 10,000 USD ideation grant to develop MVP and further explore launch in HK - all with no equity asks from the funders - a pure blue sky grant! After careful consideration, we decided to turn down the offer and focus on our existing projects. A few years ago this would have been a decision I’d have let change the direction of my life, but now I feel ready to say no to such an opportunity. The dollar sum attached to this decision demands reflection!

The Idea

EstateM8 was billed as ‘A platform that brings together building management and residents, transforming high-rise apartments into genuine communities’. It aimed to simultaneously provide low friction management tooling for high rise building managers as well as a suite of community development tools to de-alienate and socially connect residents by providing ‘official’ resident services like pet walking, parcel collection, grocery-carrying-up-stairs-pairing, and other simple things. We had appetite for letting people who lived in the same high rise bargain collectively for buying staples like rice at bulk discounts, or organise lending libraries to share luxury goods that got little use.

The big heart of the idea was that we could tackle the loneliness and isolation epidemic in HK by producing a vehicle for connection as a second-stream of a platform that could be parcelled up to enhance the experience of high rises who used it; management won based on a refined digitalised approach to building management, and residents won by being programmatically introduced to each other in high-impact, high-trust ways that would have social compounding effects. The full value prop is still on the website now, and we’ll likely leave it up until the domain expires next year.

The competition and it’s outcome

Being completely honest, we only began to ideate in response to the competition, with no real aspirations to such an app before this. We were asked to produce something that would fit the HK market. Jacob plays neighbour to a lot of Hong Kongers, and my brother-in-law lives in HK too, so we felt at least acquainted with the culture. We built the idea into a site and shot off a 5 minute pitch video to the judges. We were emailed a few months later with an invitation to HK for a week, and an application form for the ideation grant.

We came home with an offer of 10,000 USD for ideation over the next year, where we’d meet industry experts and HK-specialised teams for incubation. It truly was an excellent offer from a very welcoming and energised team.

So why did we say no?

After the trip to Hong Kong, we realised that only the prop-tech half of the app was getting interest. The real estate management market definitely did seem to be available to lean platforms that will help cut management costs, but the novelty of a dual-focus platform that also provides social connection opportunities for residents was hard to digest for the investors we spoke to. At best it was a marketing gimmick, and at worst it was a liability.

Great - so let’s gut the community building and build a prop-tech platform right? Half the features for the same funding… We decided against that too. EstateM8 is parented by Turtledove.dev, which is mine and Jacob’s digital agency. We founded turtledove as a vehicle for pro-social software and digital solutions that served to effect change; primarily by producing platforms that serve as ‘digital twins of an alternative present’. It’s a hobby project that spends most of it’s time pre-populating grant applications for social groups we want to uplift with funding - ourselves placed as the enablement partners. We want to build platforms and products that empower and inform as a byproduct of convenience in the day-to-day. Lopping off the community features to make a palatable prop-tech platform wouldn’t meet this spec at all. Turtledove has emerged from our belief in the social function of technology, so it tumbled into a feeling of mis-alignment with our overarching goals for these projects.

Lastly - and honestly most importantly, we are busy doing good work already! I run a cybersecurity consultancy, Jacob is a full time consultant and developer, and we both work on side projects we’re enjoying greatly; A new project would be a huge time cost to us, so it had to line up with our ethos perfectly to be squeezed in around the rest of our lives. When we couldn’t find that alignment we (admittedly feeling quite confused) decided to shelve [^1] EstateM8.

Lessons learned

All-in-all it was an affirming experience. Even a few years ago I was so hungry for opportunity that I would have contorted myself and my life to accommodate a chance like this. Now I do work every day that I feel proud of, and so this experience helped me (and maybe Jake, who will agree or disagree when he reads this) how much respect I have finally been able to place on my own time. That has been a very valuable lesson indeed.

[^1]: Shelve not archive! Drop me a line if anyone wants to pick this up, or open source the MVP we built — it’s essentially NextDoor but for people in the same building with scaffolding to err towards meet-ups, swaps, and services. It works and it looks good.