Rent Round

Raj Dosanjh built Rent Round from his own frustration. Managing his property portfolio meant endless phone calls and web searches whenever he needed to find a letting agent. "I thought to myself, I should be able to find a letting agent just like I do with my insurances; type in my details and up pops a comparison I can choose from," he recalls. This wasn't his first rodeo—he'd tried a cosmetics business targeting gym-goers and a student mentoring platform before, but both failed due to pricing issues and lack of product-market fit. With Rent Round, his philosophy shifted: create something with genuine value first, and profits would follow.

Raj took a lean approach. He spent 2 months building a basic prototype with an offshore development team he'd worked with previously, keeping costs low while he validated demand. In parallel, he drafted a marketing plan based on cold calls and emails to letting agents. The strategy was deliberate: test the market before scaling. But luck intervened when Rent Round got featured on a major property platform, suddenly driving massive traffic and agent sign-ups. What followed were countless all-nighters as Raj struggled to keep up with the growth, but the spike in organic interest validated his core hypothesis.

The initial customer acquisition was brutal and unglamorous—cold outreach. Raj personally called and emailed letting agents, essentially "begging" them to try the platform. He was transparent: "This was heavily based on cold calls and emails." But the real growth came later through two channels working in tandem: Google Adwords for immediate visibility, and a longer-term SEO strategy built on high-quality content. He invested heavily in creating property-related articles and getting them featured on reputable websites. The breakthrough moment came when Rent Round ranked first for "compare property managers"—not the highest-volume keyword, but a decisive validation that SEO was working.

Content marketing emerged as the most effective growth driver. "Producing well written, insightful content has been the most fruitful," Raj says. High-quality articles attracted backlinks and improved search rankings organically. The brand redesign also triggered "generous revenue spikes." What didn't work: a poorly-timed technical upgrade that coincided with a major advertising campaign, wasting marketing spend. Raj learned to manage his excitement and slow down when necessary. He also discovered early that some traffic was coming from tenants, not landlords, so he refined landing page copy and keyword targeting to focus on the right audience.

By mid-2020, Rent Round was generating £5,000/month with quarterly revenue growth of 20-30%. Raj had recouped his initial investment within 6 months and was moving away from paid ads as organic SEO became stronger. He's begun delegating day-to-day tasks to his offshore team while maintaining hands-on control over content, AdWords campaigns, and SEO optimization. Looking ahead, he sees massive opportunity: 16,000 letting agents in the UK and he's only scratched the surface. Expansion into the buy/sell market and international markets are on the roadmap, though COVID-19 temporarily paused marketing investment in 2020.