Cercles: A Home for Digital Nomads & Remote Workers with Ahmad Mansour [002]
Episode Summary
In this episode of Founder Facing, we sit down with Ahmad Mansour, founder of Circles, a private community for home sharing. Ahmad shares his journey from digital nomad to entrepreneur, the pain points of finding quality mid-term housing, and his vision for creating a community that connects like-minded professionals who want to sublet their homes at fair prices.
Key Topics
- The challenges of finding quality mid-term accommodations while working remotely
- Why Airbnb and traditional options fail to meet the needs of digital professionals
- Building community and meaningful connections through home sharing
- Creating a curated platform that facilitates trust and fair pricing
- The importance of surrounding yourself with the right people ("Who's in your circle?")
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Introduction to Ahmad and Circles
Gus: Hello, everybody, and welcome back to another episode of Founder Facing. As you can see, things are a little bit different today because we're doing this live in person. I'm joined with Ahmad Mansour, who is the founder of Circles, which traveling is part of your DNA. You traveled all the way out here to Austin, Texas, so we could do this live and in person. And yeah, I'm really excited to jump into talking about your startup, why you're building it, and how it kind of all is coming together for your launch in about a month or so.
Ahmad: Me too. Thanks for having me. I'm excited about I think the most exciting stages of a startup are the early stages, customer discovery, building a product and really learning what the pain points are. So I'm happy to share this and happy to learn from you and plug into this community.
Gus: For sure, man. We're excited to have you. Let's start with it's always cool to have founders on this podcast who are like solving a problem that they have personally experienced, because I feel like a lot of the times if you're looking for a problem, you might not have the right solution. But tell me a little bit about what your product does and how you came to creating this and figuring out that this is a problem that needs solving.
Ahmad: Yeah, exactly. In a nutshell, Circles is a private community for home sharing. So it's basically a community where top professionals can sublet their home to and from each other at a fair price. The story started in June of 2020. So I left New York, it was COVID. And I started traveling all across. I went to Mexico City, I went to Miami, Paris, Berlin. So I started living a few months in those different cities. And for me, remote work specifically was kind of an eye opening. It was a very liberating experience, because I got to do my work from exciting cities and meet really amazing people.
"Circles is a private community for home sharing where top professionals can sublet their home to and from each other at a fair price."
– Ahmad Mansour, Founder of Circles
The Problem with Current Housing Options
Ahmad: When I was traveling all across, finding a beautiful apartment at a fair price was a pain in the ass. It's an incredibly pricey, painful and complex experience because the options you have really are two main options. The first option is Airbnb, right? And the problem with Airbnb, there's a few problems with Airbnb. Problem number one is that it's incredibly pricey specifically for midterm and longer stays. Airbnb was built for short-term, short-term vacation rental platform, right? And I was joking with my friends that booking an Airbnb for a midterm stay is like booking an Uber from San Francisco to LA, a seven-hour Uber, that's $1,000 and doing that every weekend. You can afford it, but it's probably not the smartest option.
Gus: Yeah, it's not the best way to solve that problem.
Ahmad: Exactly, exactly, exactly. So it's kind of a quick fix. Now the reason, and I dig deeper into why is Airbnb still very expensive? Why hasn't the marketplace kind of adjusted, right? And I realized that Airbnb's host base is 90% almost of their host base is professional, I wouldn't say professional, but property managers. So you have 70% who have almost around three to five apartments, and you have 20% of them who have 21 plus apartments that basically are making a living out of it.
Gus: Yeah, it's their business, right?
Ahmad: It's their livelihood. And that's why they jack up their prices when it comes to a specific season, when it comes to a specific event that's happening. And Airbnb actually enables and empowers that.
Ahmad: The second issue with Airbnb was really the experience. So as a remote worker, you want to go into an apartment that's comfortable, that's beautiful. A lot of the Airbnb apartments today, unfortunately, are kind of cookie cutter IKEA furniture apartments.
Gus: Oh, yeah.
Ahmad: You really don't want to stay there. So when I started visiting all of these cities and I started getting surprised by a lot of those apartments, sometimes they catfish you also, like they post these beautiful photos. And then you go in and it's like, this is not what I signed up for the week.
Gus: Yeah, and then you'd be stuck there for a week or a month or something like that.
Building a Community of Like-minded Travelers
Ahmad: I started reflecting after, you know, living in Mexico City for almost three years in a row in the winter, and having a wide kind of community and a big community of really close people, I started reflecting, actually, we were organizing a birthday party, I wrote the names of the hundred people. And I said, why am I friends with those people? And so I went name by name, I know it sounds a little bit strange, but I went name by name, and I started thinking, what is the superpower of this person? And then I realized that there are a few things that are that, you know, that these people have in common.
Ahmad: The first one was that they are a bunch of really inspiring people. They are people who think big, who are very bold, who want to push the boundaries of what's possible, and who want to shape kind of the universe in a certain direction. And I think that's very, very, very inspiring for me. The second thing about those people is that despite the fact that they're very, you know, go-getters, they are very warm and caring and loving people. So you need some warmth and care and love in your life. And I think a lot of that combination of, you know, hard working and go-getter and warmth, I think is a combination that's very, very precious. And the last thing I think is those people are people who are very generous and kind. So values for me is something that's very important.
"The mission of this company is to really make everybody reflect who's in your circle, who are the five people closest to you."
– Ahmad Mansour, Founder of Circles
Gus: Were a lot of these people like people who lived in Mexico City, or were they also like fellow travelers who were kind of like in and out and that type of situation?
Ahmad: They were a mix. So in Mexico City in the winter, there's a very good community of New Yorkers, of Miami people who go there in the winter. And it's a really, really vibrant community. The city is amazing from the food to lifestyle, etc. So I would say half of them are expats. And I think the half is Mexicans who really connect with the expat because they're very cosmopolitan and global.
The Business Model and Regulatory Challenges
Ahmad: One of the key complicated pieces here, the most complicated piece of the puzzle is regulations. Airbnb is banned almost in every other major city.
Gus: Oh yeah.
Ahmad: In New York, in New York, basically in every city, they have a different kind of restriction. So for New York, you're not allowed to rent less than 30 days unless you're in the home. And there's very weird ways that they find if you're in the home, like you need to leave the key of the master bedroom. They have some weird rules about that. And in London, you're not allowed to rent more than 90 days. I think the same thing in Paris. So every, Barcelona has issues. Every major city has, has an issue. Every major expensive city has an issue.
Ahmad: The innovation that we're thinking of in terms of the business model is that we want, unlike Airbnb, which blocks you from even exchanging your phone numbers in the beginning, we want to enable, we want to empower, and maybe even we want to encourage offline transactions. So think of it as a curated, as a platform of curated people and curated homes that are advertised. And then you can pick which one you want and you can talk to the person. You can see first their Instagram. You can see their LinkedIn. You can see how many friends they have in common. You can see where they work. And you can take this transaction completely offline. Don't tell me about it. I don't need to know about it. Nobody knows about it.
Ahmad: I think that model, as long as it's offline, I think could be a game changer. It could be a game changer because the problem with offline transactions is the trust, right? But you took that away in the beginning when we're verifying the people, when you're creating the people, so the trust is there. And on top of that, I think what could be potentially a game changer is if you offer insurance, even if the transaction is offline. And if you offer some contracting services, even if the transaction is offline.
Launch Events and Growth Strategy
Gus: Tell me more about these launch events. So you, you had one in Mexico City already. How did it go?
Ahmad: Yeah, we had one in Mexico City. It went, it went really, really great. And I was lucky because I, I kind of met a lot of those people through previous events and they were friends and friends of friends. But I really, really realized getting people together, talking to them about the mission and the why, I think was really, really exciting.
Ahmad: And so for me, the mission, and I think we kind of, I forgot to mention that when I mentioned the kind of people I, I, I kind of look to, to have in this community, we started kind of synthesize and summarizing this kind of vision or mission by saying, who's in your circle? It's basically the, the kind of the, the sentence we're asking everybody.
Gus: Little catchphrase.
Ahmad: Little catchphrase that we have, because really, I mean, they say the five people like that you surround yourself with this, like the, you know, the cliche is like, oh, the five people you surround yourself with, but it's actually really, really true. Um, and we want people to reflect the mission of this company is to really make everybody reflect who's in your circle, who are the five people closest to you.
Ahmad: And so we started giving people this hats and, you know, if you're a founding member, I should give you one also as well. I have one here.
Gus: Hell yeah, man.
Ahmad: Um, the hat basically has the logo and that on the side, it says, who's in your circle. So always be reminded that who's in your circle matters really, really so much. And then the homework I usually give people when I give them the hat, I say it's a gift, but I want you to reflect on who's in your circle. Who are the five closest people to you? Write their names down and write what do, what kind of value do they add to their life? And how do you reciprocate that value?
"Finding a beautiful apartment at a fair price was a pain in the ass. Booking an Airbnb for a midterm stay is like booking an Uber from San Francisco to LA, a seven-hour Uber that's $1,000 and doing that every weekend."
– Ahmad Mansour, Founder of Circles
Conclusion
Ahmad: I mean, you can go to the my.circles Instagram. There's a link there. And in the link, you can download the app. You can visit the website to learn more. Once you download the app, submit the profile and we're kind of going to review the profiles very, very soon and start accepting people in November, beginning of November or end of October.
Ahmad: Enabling, inspiring people to connect, I think is one of the main things I wanna accomplish here. And it's not gonna be about home exchange only. It's not gonna be about sublet only. That's just like a piece of the puzzle. But just like when I find those opportunity to bring people together and interact on a more human level.
Gus: Awesome, man. Well, I think it's time that we wrapped and grabbed a beer and I'll show you around this awesome city. Hopefully you'll do a launch event here sometime.
Ahmad: Thank you so much. You're a great conversationalist. It's my first time on camera. I wanna say hi to my friends.
Gus: For sure, for sure. It's gonna be very weird to see myself on camera and to hear my voice.
Ahmad: Hey, you crushed it, man. First of many, hopefully. We got a lot more to discuss. So we'll have you back sometime. Really appreciate it.
Gus: After the launch. Thank you so much. You're a great conversationalist. Thank you so much. Take it easy. Everybody, we'll see you next time.
Resources Mentioned
- Follow Circles on Instagram: @my.circles
- Download the Circles app from their Instagram bio link
- Upcoming launch events:
- New York - mid-October
- Amsterdam, London, Paris - coming soon
