Alexandria Procter, a former UCT student representative council member who later started an online accommodation marketplace. Picture: Supplied
After serving in her university’s student representative council (SRC) during her undergraduate studies and being alarmed by the growing accommodation issues among students, a former University of Cape Town (UCT) student decided to take matters into her own hands and founded her own online student accommodation marketplace to feed the demand.
Alexandria Procter, a biology and philosophy student at the time, said being in the SRC exposed her to the recurring struggles of housing that students faced, especially those who urgently needed off-campus accommodation.
“I was dealing first-hand with hundreds of students looking to me for help in finding student accommodation. Landlords would call me and say they had spare rooms, vacancies, beds to fill and wanted to know how to advertise these rooms to students.”
Procter said that was where the idea to start her online accommodation marketplace as a student-focused platform, with the sole purpose of matching up sellers (landlords) to buyers (students) came from.
After working on the website while studying towards her undergraduate degree, she intended to keep the pace up as she started her honours degree the following year.
However, she soon realised she had to choose one or the other.
“My DigsConnect.com business was gaining traction quickly and it became apparent that I was onto something. I spoke to my student advisor about it at length and he was really the one who encouraged me to take the leap and launch it as a startup. I dropped out of my honours and turned to my app full time, and have been going at it ever since.”
She said the journey was not always sweet as she had a bitter taste of feature failures and cash flow crises, and added that “sometimes it’s easy to be plagued with doubt”.
“The business only works because we have an incredible team now. We have a really strong bond as a team and superb working relationships,” Procter said.
“I honestly believe that what makes a company great is the people behind it. The people who put their time and their lives into envisioning a better future, a better way of doing things and then building that future.
“We all work insane hours – generally only leaving the office after 9pm – we all put every spare penny into this and we’re more than a little obsessed with building a truly remarkable product and experience to the degree that it consumes all of our lives.”
After finding the right team and feeding into the demand across the country, the platform now lists more than 70,000 beds, serving students in major regional universities including Cape Town, Stellenbosch, Johannesburg, Pretoria, Grahamstown and more.
It has also partnered with private institutions in the country, including Varsity College, Vega and Rosebank College.
“Our busiest time of year is from December to February, when students are looking for accommodation for the following academic year. Our growth over this past season was really insane.
“One of the highlights was when our app was at number one in South Africa on the trending list, it was so exciting!
“It’s a massive sense of achievement when we realise that we’ve begun to enable access to higher education that has been so elusive for so many students.”
– jenniffero@citizen.co.za
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