Why I spend my time building a marketplace for senior living

The short answer: I love senior living.

Those who know me aren’t surprised by that. I grew up driving around looking at properties with my dad and having him tell me why they’d make a great retirement home. I had my first “beer with cookies” before memory care communities existed. Besides being a lifelong senior living operator like my father and grandfather, I’ve seen first hand the positive effects that belonging to a community can have on residents and their families. I’ve also seen it with my own family.

Both of my grandmothers are widows, and they recently moved into the same senior living community. After years of living home alone, and even trying to live with family, they both decided to move into a community. They are thriving now. One even has a new boyfriend and their not-so-healthy in-law rivalry is in full swing again. Let’s call it “Mean Girls 2”.

Despite the overwhelming belief that staying home is the “good way” to age, living in a senior living community can be infinitely better than remaining at home and being isolated. However, the variability of people’s care needs as they age, combined with unique personalities, require people to find the right fit to thrive in a senior living community. The good news is there are about 35,000 communities in the US.

Our mission-driven team here at Seniorly is focused on solving the problem of connecting families with the right senior living community. In time, Seniorly will become the world’s best destination to grow old.

Finding Product-Market Fit

We’ve always focused on building a consumer-centric company in the senior living space. Our product, however, has changed over time as we’ve tried to find the right path for our journey.

We first launched Seniorly in San Francisco in January 2015. We started as a local online marketplace where our team went out and visited each community. We took photos, inspections, and only listed those communities that worked with us. Senior Housing News published an article about us, “Local Focus Pays Off For Senior Living Search Startup.” A good start.

Over time we realized that most of our customers were coming from hospital referrals. We also realized that there was an opportunity to take over a unique segment of moves: short-term respite stays. Patients that did not qualify for skilled nursing stays, but were not safe to go back home, would stay in assisted living for two weeks to two months. We built a true online marketplace where the patient didn’t need to tour communities, but could search, book and pay online. We went hard on this concept, and became “the Airbnb of assisted living.” We learned that having hospitals as customers is . very, very, very hard to scale, and that the direct-to-consumer demand wasn’t there yet. After a few months of flat growth we had to rethink that strategy, and so we did.

Today, families can search over 30,000 community listings and see all the senior living options near them on Seniorly.com. We partner with over 200 local senior living referral agents, or Seniorly Partner Agents, who live near our customers and can give local help. Since they visit communities on a daily basis they can answer specific questions in a hyper-local market. They meet with families, take them on tours, and help with the entire move-in process (more on how our free service works).

We hit many milestones in 2018 including having over 1 million visits and partnering with 200+ agents throughout the country. Our Net Promoter Score with agents is 70 with top performing agents adding more than 25% in additional annual revenue to their business. We’ve also built some amazing technology to support and scale our business.

Building a Company

It was highly likely that I’d start a company in the senior living space given my family’s entrepreneurial spirit and expertise. My grandfather started building retirement homes back in the 1950s. Senior living is in my blood. When I was a teenager I first started learning about customer acquisition by handing out flyers at our local grocery store. In hindsight, I may have offended a few 50-year-olds telling them I had the best senior living community for them (and not their parents).

About halfway through my last year in college, I took over my family’s 49-bed assisted living community in Redwood City, CA. We had some staffing issues and I ended up taking over many roles myself, from caregiving to housekeeping to marketing. Fast forward a few years, we sold our family business, I moved on to help private equity investors and developers enter the senior living space. Then I worked with a regional senior living operator, and finally started at Berkeley-Haas to pursue my MBA. Go Bears!

Haas was great. I wanted to build my knowledge outside senior living, but did consider using it as a path to work in private equity or for a senior living REIT. I had tried to build a similar concept to Seniorly before Haas, but it wasn’t until I met my co-founder Sushanth Ramakrishna that I decided to push for it again. Sush had been an engineer at Salesforce and had a passion for technology and helping people. Sush and I met at orientation and were lucky enough to be in the same carpool. Over the next few months we talked about senior living and technology. Eventually, Sush drank my Kool-Aid and Seniorly was born.

We initially considered it for a business plan competition at Berkeley, but instead decided to recruit a couple people to help us get an MVP into the market as quickly as possible. Our first recruit was Sush’s undergrad college roommate, Kunal Shah, who leads engineering here. Our second recruit was an industry veteran who seeded the early supply of the market. During these early days I was constantly asked how I was able to be in business school, have kids, and start a company. It’s easy when you have a wife like mine! Building Seniorly required a partner in life (my wife) and a business partner (Sush).

Our first product was launched in January 2015 and we’ve been at it ever since. Shortly after we launched Marlena del Hierro joined the team to focus on bringing in customers. Sush and I both decided to finish business school while we worked on Seniorly. In a poetic twist of fate, our last day of business school ended with Sushanth and I mock-negotiating a deal against each other. We were one of the only groups in the class who didn’t reach an agreement because we were being so competitive! Our amazing partnership has been a key to our success thus far.

Besides Sush and my talented operating team at Seniorly, I am also lucky to have some amazing advisors and investors to lean on. People like Lily Sarafan(CEO of Home Care Assistance) and Daniele Farnedi (Founder at Solv, former CTO of Trulia) have been part of the team since the beginning and have given so much support during the good and hard times. There are many others to acknowledge like Ned Spieker, Hamid Moghadam, Paul Levine, Geoff Donaker, David Hehman, Alex Chang, and Hany Ben-Halim to name a few. Team is everything.

Along the way I learned that building a company requires sacrifices. These sacrifices are not just eating ramen or “dirt sandwiches” as my head of growth (and just about everything else) Stephen Anderson likes to say. I’ve truly learned that time is your most precious resource in life, and startups consume time. Being a father of two boys, I’m constantly thinking about how I spend my time. Recently my son gave me the best gift. He surprised me at his school when he drew a picture of me after being asked to draw his hero. The quote said “Dad is my hero because he helps older people find houses.” When looking for signs if you are doing the right thing, I don’t think you can ask for anything more.

2018 was also one of the hardest years of my life. My mom lost her battle with cancer. My mom was amazing and it was devastating. I missed a lot of good times because I was working. Yet, despite all the missed calls and times I chose to stay late at work, I know how deeply proud she was of me and what I was building at Seniorly. I know that my work ethic and deep passion for others stems from her. A legacy for both of us.

Looking forward into 2019 I know that it will be a huge growth year. Both for the company, and me personally.

Big Things Happening in 2019

2019 will be a year of exciting changes in senior living. 2018 marked some blockbuster deals that foreshadow what is to come. For instance, Welltower is betting big on owning the entire continuum of care with major investments in higher acuity facilities and major partnerships with care providers. Aetna announced it would grow its new service for its members to help them find high quality senior living communities. Brookdale has started to right itself with dispositions of communities and shaking up its management team. The launch of Eclipse under the guidance of Kai Hsiao last year was exciting and I expect them to stay very active this year. Atria’s $3B deal with Related Companies will redefine luxury in senior living around the world. Operators are starting to understand the need to build segmented products and correlating brands to help differentiate themselves in a competitive market. The 55+ active adult communities will continue to grow as more developers and operators try to build communities that cater to the baby boomers. I think Amazon will make a big splash into senior living in 2019 and believe Alexa and other AI-voice technologies can be a game changer in extending the length and quality of stay in Independent living communities.

We’ll stay focused here at Seniorly in 2019 on building our discovery portal, partnering with the best local agents in the country, and learning more about what our customers want. In the long term, continually delivering an excellent experience to our customers through our platform will help us grow into the best destination for people as they age. Let’s do this!

This post first appeared here on Medium.