ErasmusInn was my first real company. We built a peer-to-peer accommodation marketplace for exchange students — think Airbnb, but purpose-built for the 4 million+ students who move across Europe every year and have no idea where to live.
Over three years, we grew to 10,000+ rooms across 12 European cities, generated over EUR 3M in GMV, and were backed by 500 Startups. We were finalists at Startup Turkey 2016. It was the most formative experience of my career.
The supply-side problem
Marketplaces live or die on supply. Early on, our biggest challenge was convincing landlords to list on a platform nobody had heard of. We solved this the old-fashioned way: I led a 6-person sales team and we went city by city, door by door. Berlin, Lisbon, Madrid, Istanbul — we'd spend weeks in each city building supply before even thinking about demand.
What worked was hyper-local execution. Every city had different landlord expectations, different payment norms, different trust thresholds. A playbook that worked in Berlin completely failed in Lisbon. You had to adapt constantly.
What broke at scale
The biggest lesson was that growth exposes every weakness in your business. At 500 rooms, our manual verification process felt thorough. At 5,000 rooms, it became a bottleneck. At 10,000, it was unsustainable. We should have invested in automation earlier.
We also underestimated the importance of payment infrastructure across borders. Students paying from Turkey to landlords in Portugal, in EUR, with different banking systems — every edge case became a support ticket.
What I'd do differently
I'd focus on fewer cities, deeper. We spread across 12 countries too fast. In hindsight, dominating 3-4 cities completely would have been more defensible than being present in 12.
But the core insight was right: students need a trusted, purpose-built platform. And the experience of building a cross-border marketplace — with all its operational complexity — shaped everything I built afterwards.