Mietz founder Lena Tuckermann on the ups and downs of being a founder while revolutionizing how we rent flats
"You get punched in the face all the time, but that's part of it."
"Swipe Match Move"
that's the slogan of the new Mietz app, which helps movers find a place to live. The whole process works similar to Tinder: You fill out your profile, upload your documents and can now swipe through rental apartments that match your criteria. Instead of writing a separate email for each contact, one swipe is enough to contact the landlord and send him all relevant information and documents.
It's a simple concept that saves both tenants and landlords a lot of time and nerves. Because as everyone knows who has ever looked for an apartment in a big city like Berlin or Hamburg, searching for a new apartment is not only tedious but also nerve-wracking. The Mietz platform wants to change that by not only digitizing the process of finding an apartment, but also automating the exchange of relevant documents.
The company was founded in 2021 by Lena Tuckermann, Maximilian Schelbach and Johann Kim. Lena Tuckermann, a law student at the time, came up with the idea when she herself was looking for an apartment in Hamburg and realized how time-consuming and difficult the whole process was. The digital rental platform "Mietz" is now intended to make things easier for others in the future. The AI-based system not only brings tenants and landlords together, but also simplifies the exchange of documents. In the future, it will even be possible to issue and sign the rental contract digitally.
The fact that the former law student did not come from a start-up environment, did not have a network at the beginning and accordingly knew little about starting up, was actually an advantage from Lena Tuckermann's point of view:
"It was just good that I didn't know anything [about starting up] beforehand,"
says the young entrepreneur: "[Starting a business] brings with it many challenges, ups and downs. There is a lot to learn. On the one hand, it's a great opportunity, but it can also be daunting when you're just thinking about whether or not you want to go down that path. For me, it was the right way to go first to see how it actually works and only find out over time [what a startup actually entails]."
The learning curve seems to have been steep, because a lot has happened at Mietz in the first year alone: the completely bootstrapped company has now grown to 6 employees and has already launched the beta version of the app. Lena Tuckermann is particularly proud of the fact that the team has not lost its enthusiasm despite the roller coaster ride that a start-up entails.
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In general, she considers tenacity to be one of the most important qualities a founder should have:
"One quality that is very important is a certain fighting spirit. For me, [being a founder] can be compared to a kind of boxing match: You get punched in the face constantly, but that's part of it. But it can also be an opportunity to grow if you go for it."
And growth is not only on the agenda for Lena Tuckermann as CEO, but also for the start-up itself: In the meantime, the company is in the process of getting over 2,000 apartments on board to officially launch the app in Berlin. After that, the plan is to expand to other cities (and countries).
Although networking is important, for Lena Tuckermann it also worked without it: Because as a law student, she had neither an existing network in the real estate sector nor in the start-up scene:
"The market is very conventionally shaped. You first have to get in from the technical side and also gain trust."
And yet neither was impossible by any means:
"There is also a great deal of openness,"
says the young entrepreneur. After all, the platform is intended to make life significantly easier not only for apartment seekers, but also for landlords.
All in all, Mietz seems to be on the verge of bringing apartment hunting into the 21st century. If you want to learn more about the young start-up and Lena Tuckermann's path to founding, then listen in to the podcast.
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