Buying a house is one of the most painful consumer experiences we go through. The decisions are hard, the cost is high and the process is time consuming.
These conditions usually lay the groundwork for a plethora of companies to wick away that friction. However, the network effects that property discovery benefits from severely limit the competitive pool, transacting on such a high value asset makes the classic marketplace cold-start problem even harder and the giants in the space have been reinforcing their advantage since they managed to achieve escape velocity in the early 2000’s. Occasionally, another rocketship joins their ranks, usually competing on some previously unmet consumer need. Property aggregators did so by listing much greater densities of property per area compared to local estate agents. Purplebricks did so by allowing sellers to directly list their properties with a much cheaper closing fee.
I think Jon is building that next iteration at Chimnie.
Rightmove edges out margin from a 1.25-1.5% estate agents fee. Purplebricks charges a magnitude less at a fixed rate of £1,199. Chimnie charges nothing.
However, that means nothing without a critical mass of listings. How does discovery work when there’s nothing to discover? Chimnie lists every house in the UK by default, including yours.
If they’re listing your house, what happens when someone is interested? Good question. You get a letter in the post telling you where to claim the listing and the enquiry already sitting in your inbox. Not interested? Ignore it. Curious what they’d offer? You’re closer to selling off-market whilst barely lifting a finger.
I think Chimnie represents a step change in how we discover our future homes. Making decisions easier, lowering cost and meaningfully simplifying the process.
Whilst Chimnie as a concept has everything I look for in an idea, a good idea means relatively little without excellent execution. That ability to execute comes in the form of Jon Francis.
I met Jon at Google in 2019. The workshop we were sat in was a data storytelling workshop delivered by the creators of The Guardian’s data journalism team. It was abundantly clear, very early on, that Jon was in his element. Finding data, transforming it and making it useful is his bread and butter. In hindsight, this isn’t a surprise. Jon was a creative technologist at Google, spending the previous 8 years working with the worlds largest brands to develop proof of concepts as part of Zoo, Google’s internal agency, with a unique mix of a technology backbone and intense creativity.
Fast forward to 2022, and much of what made him so successful at Google is evident in Chimnie. A scrappiness that quickly and cheaply (in)validates assumptions, an extreme focus on growing the metrics that matter and an obsession over product are all core to his approach.
I’ve chatted to Jon in depth and at length about Chimnie, in fact, he’s given me far more time than my small cheque into his seed round warrants. In that time he’s checked off every item in my internal checklist of how a pre product market fit company should be operating. We’ve talked about far more than what I’ve written about here, and in the process of having those conversations I’ve come to the belief that Chimnie has a disproportionately high chance of creating an immense level of value through improving property discovery.