Much as we hate to face facts, we’re not going to live in Harvard’s cozy house system forever. So, what happens when we get to the real world? Loss of community? Inability to figure out who your building manager is, let alone contact them? Not if Aleeza Hashmi (below) and the rest of the team at Doorbell, launching in select buildings now, have anything to do about it!
Her Campus Harvard: How did you come up with the idea of Doorbell?
Aleeza Hashmi: I grew up in a close-knit community in Baltimore, lived in the same house for 23 years. When I got to college, I loved the community aspect that was built into Harvard’s house system. Secret Santa in Kirkland is what inspired me to run for HoCo chair, where it meant so much to me to be the bearer of community building. I took a year off from Harvard to work at a firm called Edelman in DC. While I was there, I lived in a really beautiful building. And I was so excited to live there, but after I moved in I realized that months had passed and I had yet to really meet any of my neighbors. There was no clear way to facilitate interactions between the residents, and not even a simple way to communicate with the building manager. I found that so frustrating, because there were nights where I’d be cooking dinner, and I’d need a little extra onion, but I had no idea if there was anyone I could reach out to, since my interactions with neighbors had been limited to saying hi by the mailboxes. When I got back to Harvard, I started thinking about this a lot, especially keeping in mind that I’d be moving to Seattle after graduation and potentially facing the same problems in my living situation there. My co-founder, Ben [Pleat], was also from a small community and lived in NYC over the course of a summer, where he knew only a handful of the people in his building. And our tech guy, Steven [Petteruti] loves the close-knit community he grew up in Rhode Island, so we were all on the same page. We started thinking about the kinds of places we were accustomed to living in and considering, from a practical standpoint, why is it that when we move to cities, where we suddenly are close to a lot more people, we feel further apart.
HCH: Are you envisioning this as a sort of “real world” house list, like what we have access to here at Harvard?
AH: It would encompass the whole house experience in one app, so it would be more than just a mailing list. Our first feature that we’re rolling out, though, is a peer-to-peer marketplace, which acts as a sort of “need feed.” It’ll be very social, like how on Venmo you can see what people are buying and selling, but our feed would show goods (like borrowing a vacuum), services (like tutoring someone), and experiences (like finding a new gym buddy).
HCH: What other things would your app do? The community aspect sparked the idea originally, but will that be the centerpiece of Doorbell in practice, too?
AH: Our social mission is to build community within cities. We believe buildings should be cities, and should be fostered as such. The actual value proposition of what we’re building out is both function and convenience. For example, we could have a user who doesn’t care about the community, doesn’t really believe in our mission, but still wants to use the app for paying rent or filing maintenance requests. That’s what’s fueling our development more than the social mission as we push forward.
HCH: How do you envision getting buildings involved?
AH: We’re working on this in three different ways. The first is that we are having users within buildings act as recruiters for the app. So right now we’re launching in two Harvard grad housing buildings, and within them we’ve contacted and interviewed residents who were interested in taking part. Our second approach is getting the property manager or building manager on board, meaning that if they think this is something that will be useful for them (both for the convenience and because long-term happy residents results in more stable tenants with less turnover). We’re also focusing on local businesses as well. For example, Noch’s could say, “if there’s four people in this building who order between 7 and 10 pm, everyone gets 50% off.” People would then be motivated to join the app because of the exclusive deals they would have access to.
HCH: When you move to cities as a whole, how are you going to go about deciding what neighborhoods, let alone individual buildings, to approach with this idea?
AH: Something that we’ve been working on a lot is building out really great advisors. We actually just signed on the Chief Marketing Officer for AvalonBay, one of the top five largest property managers in the country. The reason we’re doing that is that the more property managers we have on board, the more credibility we’ll have to show that we could have the power to improve quality of life within buildings. Now that AvalonBay is signed on as an advisor, if they end up liking our app and its results, they could help us connect to buildings more quickly. We’re also looking at neighborhoods like TriBeCa, where people are a little younger and have more time and resources to take part in this kind of community.
HCH: Are you hoping to get colleges involved too, or do you envision this primarily as an app for the world after college?
AH: So we’re currently testing three marketplaces. We’re looking to launch this in Lowell, Kirkland, and Mather. We’re doing the grad school houses. And eventually we are launching in a building downtown in Boston. And then we’re going to see where the app works best. It could also be great for schools like NYU, where a lot of people live off-campus, so they live near a lot of other students but without that built-in community of social life and resources afforded to us by the Harvard house system.
HCH: Is there anything else you want to share with our readers about the program?
AH: Just that we’re launching now! And in a broader sense, I would want to tell people not to shy away from being student founders. I know so many people go into better-established industries, but the start-up world is so cool and exciting. Also, your background is not that important to success with these kinds of projects. I came in as a premed, I worked in Ghana one summer, I worked at the Law School… I never would have imagined as a freshman that I would be involved in something like this.
HCH: Are there are lot of women in this line of work?
AH: Not really at all. A Venture Capitalist came to campus a couple weeks ago, who also talks to students who work at start-ups at Stanford, and he said Harvard had a way higher number of female founders… which was interesting because of the twenty people in the room, three were women. As women founders, we definitely have extensive challenges, but it really pays off in the end. Breaking the cycle of the male-dominated start-up world is important!