hello hello
we are super excited to finally introduce a flatsharing platform for students that is co-developed with students. we want to enable students worldwide to connect with each other to create a home to live joyfully together.
06. September 2021 is when it all started
Now, looking back we know that, but back then, we were just four students having their first day at university, not knowing what was going to come!
On that day in September, all four of us - Emily, Otto, Mathieu and Benedikt - had our first day studying Innovation & Entrepreneurship at Antwerp Management School. We found each other on the first day of our studies pretty much randomly but with a united passion for digital platforms and the aim to build a company.
The coming 10 months - full of stress, pivots, hard work as well as joy, fun and passion for our ideas.
We spoke to hundreds of students, tested various features - some we still laugh about - and ultimately aimed to find a problem we could solve. Being students ourselves, we experienced aaall the pains of student housing ourselves. We have looked into all sorts of ideas to solve this problem, ranging from flats with additional services when moving in, to huge co-houses and even relocation agencies. But we always felt that these were only temporary solutions that often come with a loss of living quality for students…
But at the end of the day, what is studying all about?
Yes, hard work, learning and growing, but also majorly about making friends, having connections for your life and enjoying your youth! And how could you do this better than by flatsharing, where you actually live with other students? Flatsharing is the number one way of living for students worldwide, so we wondered: why is it still so complicated to find future flatmates, and why are there so many vague bureaucracies around it?
This was the starting point for building flatm - our passion to solve a problem by building a kick-ass company from students, for students!
We want to enable all students around the world to easily find flatmates to flatshare with. We aim to be the number one platform for all flatshares and be top of mind in student lifestyle!
Get to know the team
Emily is a true creative soul that has already lived in flatshares in different countries. With her talent for design, she early on set the tone to make flatm also visually appealing and real for the rest of the team. She constantly keeps challenging the “normal way of things” which very often leads to us developing even better ideas and solutions. Coming from Germany, Emily always wanted to move close to the sea and sun. In Antwerp she is at least somewhat close to the sea, maybe not so much to the sun 😉
Bene truly loves the entrepreneurial spirit, growing up in a family business, founding a start-up before and also interning in a start-up. It was somewhat obvious that his path would lead him to another start-up, and we are even happier that it is flatm! He keeps pushing the team towards action in times where he feels we might get stuck in theoretical frameworks and plans. Privately he also can definitely be called a “foodie”, for which there are worse places than Antwerp. On Sundays, you can find him on the market in Antwerp selling cakes and Austrian Kaiserschmarr’n with his girlfriend, as we said a foodie & entrepreneur 😉
We often jokingly call Otto the work animal of our group. With his enormous effort and eye for detail, Otto is a person that every team would love to have. No matter what task it is, he will always want to fulfil it with the best possible quality while also ensuring that every smallest detail is correct. This is especially valuable in an entrepreneurial setting where we sometimes can be tempted to jump to quickly from conclusion to conclusion. Privately, just as Mathieu, also Otto likes a good Belgian beer (or two), but remarkably he is always on time in the morning, no matter how long the night was!
Mathieu is the social animal of the group, a person that can feel comfortable and have a talk in every setting, may this be a student bar or an investors boardroom. This open mind has made it easy to become friends with Mathieu but also to unite the whole team together on a private as well as professional level. These social skills are essentially also what we see as the spirit of flatshares, being open-minded, being open to new opportunities and always trying to make the best of the situation you are in! Coming from Belgium, Mathieu is obviously a big soccer fan and enjoys the food & drink scene of Antwerp.
