First off, I’d like to thank Jon for mentioning us on this blog. I’ll write a little about our history below, but I’m more than happy to answer any questions people may have!

I started toying around with the idea of FlyRig late last summer, after going through a horrific process of apartment searching here in New York. At first, it was just an experiment in seeing what I could do – I started building a website that collected Craigslist listings and mapped them with Google Maps (a la housingmaps.com). It ended up being much easier than I thought, and I intended to continue building on Craigslist until I read their policies regarding 3rd-party use of their data (very limited to not allowed at all). I decided to go ahead and rebuild a new site, sign up brokers, and see if I could make it successful (still waiting on that part!). The first issue was building the site. Fortunately for me, I had a good development background and knew a few people that could help pitch in. The development process could have been the most money and time consuming piece of my business, but I was very lucky in regard to the resources I had. I did about 90% of the development myself using a LAMP architecture (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) on a $10 a month web hosting provider. After 3 months, I was ready to launch and leased some machines in a dedicated hosting provider located in Texas. The second issue was getting brokers to use us and build up our listings database. I approached a real estate broker who helped me find my apartment and he agreed to help out. Due to the extremely competitive real-estate environment here in New York (there are over 5,000 brokers in the city), it was pretty easy to get brokers to try us. The third issue was getting renters to visit our site, and was somewhat tied to our second issue. Brokers wouldn’t continue posting unless they got leads, and people wouldn’t visit unless we had listings. It was a chicken-or-the-egg problem that plagued us for our first few months of operation. The easy solution to get visitors was an advertising buy, but any type of effective advertising was expensive, and I didn’t want to spend more than $1,000 a month. So I scoured the web for blogs, directories, and message boards and wrote in to all of them. The majority of them didn’t answer, but a few did, and we slowly built up our traffic through their posts and word-of-mouth.

We’re still far from being well-known and have a long ways to go to supplant Craigslist as the destination for rentals here in New York, but we’re slowly picking up steam. As long as we keep improving our site and increasing our listings database, we should continue on an upward trend. Because I funded this myself, I’ve had to keep costs as low as possible. Our monthly costs are under $2,000, half of which are currently used for Google Adwords. I’m able to keep things low because nobody is getting paid. I’ve been lucky enough to find people who are willing to sacrifice the immediate financial rewards for the prospect of being a part of a successful business.

I agree, more information about the sites development process + costs would have been interesting but some people aren’t comfortable handing that information over.