We’re growing with Seedrs!

Good news!

Vrumi continues to expand, and we wanted to tell you about it.

Say Vrumi!

We’ve got where we are on a shoestring, and we are now raising money for further investment, with the single aim of growing the Vrumi community of hosts and guests and connecting professionals in need of workspace with homeowners that have idle rooms.

We will spend the money on making the website even more brilliant – adding some amazing features, and spreading the Vrumi word.

We are also in the process signing several exciting new partnerships involving thousands of additional members – and looking forward to them joining the family.

We’ve decided to raise the money partly from angel investors, and partly via crowdfunding, so anyone can invest from £13.60 for one share to larger amounts. We’re using the good people at Seedrs.com, who make investing in small growth companies easy, and handle all the paperwork (hey, someone’s got to do it!)

Check out our campaign on Seedrs, where we explain where we’ve come from, what we’re doing, and where we’re going. There’s also a video of all of us in action, working hard in our own Vrumi workspace.

Keep Sharing!

If you have any questions regarding Seedrs, or any of the topics mentioned, please do not hesitate to contact us on invest@vrumi.com

7 of London’s wackiest work spaces.

This week, Transport for London announced that they are looking for investors to turn disused underground stations in to pubs, restaurants, galleries and most interestingly, work spaces. However, this won’t be the first of wacky work spaces in London. British workers are now spending on average up to 70 hours a week in the office. (Yes you read that right, 70!) Which is a rather astonishing amount of time to spend somewhere dull and drab, isn’t it? Luckily, London is leading the trend in interesting office space, be it collaborative, corporate or residential. Here’s 7 of our faves.

Ziferblat

Image via timeout.com

Kooky collab spaces are a dime a dozen on London’s Silicon Roundabout, but this one is our clear favourite. It is a community project and relies on the honesty of its workers to look after the place and keep the creative juices flowing. Self described as a “tree-house for adults”, Ziferblat is a melting pot of East London’s finest, handle bar moustaches, top knots, vintage dresses, horn-rimmed glasses and all.

Shabby chic flat, Hackney

Shabby chic flat in Hackney

If taxidermy is more your bag, have a gander at this converted 1930’s warehouse in Hackney. Filled to the brim with British wildlife such as foxes, badgers, peacocks, pheasants, ferrets and even a couple of parakeets, it’s a truly unique workspace. Ideal for photoshoots, out of the box thinkers and lazy bird watchers.

Fruit  Towers – Innocent Drinks HQ

Image via inspiringinterns.com

It’s well documented that Innocent like to think creatively, and their HQ, Fruit Towers is evidence of this. The building is 5 stories high, with artificial grass, foosball tables, and of course lots and lots of fruit.

Tranquil Garden Shed, Brent

Tranquil garden shed

If it’s good enough for Roald Dahl, it’s good enough for us. The favoured work-space of the Grandfather of Storytelling provides workers with the opportunity to think imaginatively and privately. This particular shed has been left untouched since the owner’s children went off to University, and is well suited to the lone worker. Who knows what kind of nonsense you can come up with?

Mind Candy HQ

Image via mindcandy.com

The company behind Moshi Monsters (an online children’s game) lives by the ethos of work hard, play hard. Literally. The walls are aligned with colouring book style wallpaper of all the differing Moshi Monsters, and is laid out like a giant tree house, with artificial grass and vines from floor to ceiling. Children can also be found hanging out in the office, as Mind Candy regularly product tests its games on its target market, making the running of a multi-million pound start up look like child’s play.

Large Dutch Barge

Large Dutch barge

Ahoy mateys! For just £15 a day you could work from one of London’s best locations – underneath Tower Bridge. Fitted out with Wifi, tea and coffee and the boat cat, the Mage, it’s one of the most unique (and cheapest) spaces to work from. Perfect for someone with sealegs – the boat doth rock!

Red Bull’s London HQ

Image via OfficeSnapshots.com

We won’t speculate as to whether Red Bull employees get free Red Bull all day, but there can’t be many other uses for an adult slide, except, we think, a caffeine-induced frenzy.

If you’re looking for somewhere different to work, Vrumi has over 200 spaces across London with prices starting from as little as £15 per day.

“Socrates tutoring Plato in my flat would be really cool!” Meet the Vrumi Host: Amanda

We talk frankly to Vrumi host, Amanda about her experiences. Amanda runs her own business and lives in Hammersmith and Fulham with her Mother. She has been a host since December. You can view her space here.

Vrumi Host, Amanda

Hey Amanda, first things first, how did you hear about Vrumi?

Word of mouth! My friends, Tom and Nick [who are also Vrumi hosts] told me about it and I thought why wouldn’t I? We had all this space that wasn’t really being used so I thought I may as well. It’s kind of like Airbnb, if you already use Airbnb then it’s a no-brainer.

How did you find the Vrumi registration process? Did it take a long time?

It was super straightforward, really easy, I did it in a quiet moment at work. It’s perfect.

When you got a booking, how did it fit around your schedule – was it a bit of a chore to organise?

Not at all! My guest arranged to come in the evening, so I was there to let them in, they went and had their therapy session in the room downstairs then let themselves out, I didn’t need to do anything complicated. They were in and out!

And you met them in person?

Yeah, I did. I let them in and they’d go downstairs to work.

So you didn’t need to hand over a key?

Nope. The guest was a life coach, so only wanted the room for an hour in the evening, once a week. I would let the guest in, and for privacy and confidentiality, they would let their clients in and see them out.

You were clearly able to trust the guest, why were you able to trust them?

Yeah, of course, I was able to trust them because of the [ID verification] record that Vrumi keeps, therefore you know who they are before they arrive. Plus, they were always happy for me to be in the house throughout the sessions.

Great! So the booking went smoothly, there weren’t any problems at all?

No nothing, it was perfect. When the time comes that I can do it again I will, 100%.

Because the guest’s a life coach and they had their clients round, did it feel weird to have all these strangers in your house?

No, not really. I actually think that the younger you are, the more used to the sharing economy you are. We’ve grown up with things like Airbnb, crowdfunding platforms, even music sharing, everything is available online, and sharing and privacy aren’t really issues anymore. My mum found it weirder, she sees the home as a private sanctuary, but I don’t think that’s such big a deal. To be honest, it’d be weirder if I had people using my bed and shower for a whole week, rather than my living room.

Do you have any advice for other Vrumi hosts?

Yes, I think leaving guests to their business is really important because ultimately they are there to work. You’ve also got to make the pictures look as nice as possible and have the room look really clean. No one wants to go and work in a dump. But that’s easy for me to say because my Mum’s a bit OCD!

Finally, who would be your dream guest, be it real or fictional, dead or alive?

That’s a hard question. If it was someone I really liked I wouldn’t be able to leave them to their business! Maybe, Socrates tutoring Plato, in their Ancient Grecian togas sitting in my flat. It would be really cool, there’d be some real s**t going on in there. Some real thinking.

Thanks, Amanda!

With Vrumi, you can let spare space in your home to professionals on your own terms and at your own pace. To find out how you can be a host, please read our guide for hosts.

Chelsea Carter is Vrumi’s Content and Social Media Editor.

When should I accept a booking request on Vrumi?

My name is Ian, and I’m in charge of operations at Vrumi. This is a question that we’ve been asked a number of times, so I thought it was worth addressing here on the blog.

It’s natural, of course, to feel nervous the first time you do anything and as the old saying goes, knowledge is power, so let’s cover some of the things that you can do and understand what we do to help verify who your potential guests really are.

The first thing to do when you receive a booking request is to read the explanation of what the guest intends to do in your room. They can’t submit a booking request without this, so this is a great place to start.  But also remember to take a look at the profile of your potential guest.  Everyone on Vrumi has the ability to upload a photo of themselves, write a little description, and if appropriate can include a link to their company/ professional website to help demonstrate what business they are involved with.  Additionally, some of our guests may link their Vrumi account to one or more of their social media accounts to deepen your understanding of who they are and what they do.

You can see from my profile page on Vrumi that this can be a great starting point in deciding whether you are comfortable accepting the booking request.

It’s important that you feel that you can trust your guest, although that trust will obviously build over time. Hopefully your guest becomes a regular user of your room – maybe you’ll even become great friends! But for now, you need to trust them enough to accept their first booking request of your room.

To help you with this, we now direct anyone submitting a booking request to go through our new online ID verification process.  This isn’t a guarantee but will enable you to have more confidence that they are who they say they are before you make your decision.

Don’t forget that you can ask questions of your guest or set restrictions of what they can and can’t do by using the built in messaging system on Vrumi.  I would really encourage you to make use of this. Anything you discuss becomes part of the agreement between you, so having it recorded on the Vrumi messaging system adds an extra layer of protection for both you and the guest too.

Hopefully at that point you’ll feel ready to accept the booking request but you’re under no obligation to accept.  Only the details of your room and your public Vrumi profile will have been exposed to the guest so don’t feel under pressure to accept a booking.  We only release more detailed information about you (e.g. your full name, contact number and address) if you accept a booking request in order that the guest knows how to contact you and find your room.

We’re continually improving the site and plan on including a review system soon so that you can also see what others have said about their experience of that Vrumi community member.  But what would you like to see us add to make your experience better or build trust amongst our community?

Add a comment and let me know what you think.

‘That’s brilliant, I get it’

Vrumi’s co-founder William Sieghart on going into business with school friend Roddy (and why the idea of a dating website for Made in Chelsea types didn’t get off the drawing board)

‘Roddy is one of my oldest friends and also the cleverest person I know. So I was already intrigued when he came to me last year with what he claimed were two brilliant business ideas. The first was a dating site he’d nicknamed burningbush.com, and the second he described in a sentence: ‘Make money from your home now, while you work, with a daytime version of Airbnb’.

I have to admit it was the latter that instantly made crystal clear sense to me.  I’ve had three or four ideas like that in my life (National Poetry Day and StreetSmart among them) and what they have in common is that people respond by saying ‘That’s brilliant, I get it.’ In fact they often assume whatever it is has been in existence for years; after the inaugural National Poetry Day, for example, I was amused to get a letter from someone saying, ‘I enjoyed yesterday’s event – it was so much better than last year’.

Roddy has a mathematical, business brain; I’m more the creative type. I felt our talents were complementary, but there was another reason why I wanted to invest in his idea for flexible workspace (London).

It had been 15 years since I’d had a business of my own and I found I rather missed it. After so long away from the commercial world I was also aware I would be making a leap from the Stone Age to the digital age.

And yet I realised there could be some similarities too. When I set up my first company, Forward, with Neil Mendoza in 1986, we were the only people in London producing a magazine using the desktop publishing software on a brand new kind of personal computer Steve Jobs had christened the Apple Mac.

It was a time when marketing was dominated by gigantic advertising agencies and the corporate communication departments of global companies; our task was to convince brands to take a chance with a boutique, agile, young agency doing business in a different way. We went on to help found an industry which is now called ‘branded journalism’ or ‘content marketing’.

(We also realised we could draw on a neglected pool of talent consisting of all those women with children who had previously worked in Fleet Street and who either couldn’t or wouldn’t go back there, a decision which created a whole different kind of working culture at Forward.)

In the same way, Vrumi is a minimum viable product (Lean Startup terminology for a basic, ‘starter’ product that does what it says on the tin, and gathers consumer feedback to refine and develop its offering).  We believe we are revolutionising the way Londoners regard their work and home space. In these hard times, easy ways to make money from your home while you work are immediately compelling. And as an entrepreneur, I know how hard it is, when you’re just starting up, to find London office spaces that don’t cost an arm and a leg.

There’s one respect, however, in which the commercial landscape is unrecognisably different to 30 years ago. Thanks to the web, a businesswoman in Shanghai can browse the Vrumi website, make a booking request for workspace the very next day, and communicate with her host via our peer-to-peer messaging system to confirm​. The internet has made the sharing economy possible, and with it, a business model in which everybody wins.

The moral of the story? That dating website never really stood a chance.​