Rany Burstein is the CEO and Co-Founder of Diggz, a roommate finder and rental search platform based in New York City. Born and raised in Israel, and educated at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he studied business and graduated Summa cum laude.
After over a decade working at a big bank on Wall Street, he decided to take a shot at entrepreneurship, specifically in tech. Tech was his first passion; he was building websites when the Internet was just getting started while he was still in high school. Most notably, he developed and owned the website for Israel’s biggest soccer club, Maccabi Tel Aviv, which he sold back to the team during his military service. Rany has also been an active volunteer with Junior Achievement of New York for over ten years, where he teaches in NYC public schools about financial literacy and was awarded as ‘volunteer of the year’ in 2012. Rany currently resides in Soho in New York City.
What is Diggz all about?
Diggz is a roommate finder platform that connects like-minded roommates who share similar lifestyles and criteria. Diggz will help you find a roommate whether you are looking for a room for rent, offering a vacant spare room, or looking to partner up to find a place and sign a lease. One of the things that make us unique is our proprietary algorithm that suggests and ranks personalized roommate prospect results one can find the right roommate much faster.
Interactions on our app work similar to popular dating apps, where you “Like” to “match”, but we offer a way to skip that part with Instant Messages meant to be used for one’s favorite prospects. We also focus a lot on safety and security to keep the platform scam and spam-free. To that end, we use A.I. as well as human eyes to prevent bad actors from joining in the first place. We started only in New York back in 2015, and today we operate in most major metro areas in the U.S. and Canada. We estimate to have matched over 250,000 roommates since inception and during the pandemic, Diggz has been there for the many folks who saw their roommates abruptly leave and helped many find suitable replacements.
Tell us a little bit about your background and how you started your company?
I was born and raised in Israel, and in high school, I started building websites. I was doing everything from writing the HTML, producing the graphic design, and writing the content. Most notably, I developed and owned the website for one of Israel’s biggest soccer clubs, which I sold back to the team during my military service. Due to the dot com bust, I decided to change course and moved to the U.S. to study business at UNC Chapel Hill. Once I graduated, I moved to New York for a job at a big Wall Street Bank where I held various positions for over a decade.
However, I was always looking for a way to revert back into the tech space, and then I came up with the concept and the opportunity to start Diggz. The idea for Diggz came to me after several bad roommate searches and living experiences in New York. The tipping point was when I thought I had solidified an amazing roommate with a room through craigslist. After exchanging a lot of emails, I came to sign the sublease, but the girl slammed the door in my face. Apparently, she assumed I was a girl. I ended up having to scramble for storage, rent a U-Haul and sleep on my friend’s couch for a while because I had to move out from my place that very next day. I was so frustrated with the amount of time I wasted and that something so trivial like gender or a profile picture didn’t exist on Craigslist. This experience got me thinking of a better way to connect with like-minded roommates. I liked the dating apps style, which requires two people to match first with a mutual intent, then chitchat further before meeting in person. I pitched the idea to my co-founder, Ben Blodgett, and together we launched Diggz in 2015.
What was the biggest problem you encountered with your business and how did you overcome it
Our biggest early days problem was a technical one. How to accommodate our product for scale. We had a very functional MVP that worked great and quite fast. However, as we started to grow and acquire more users our algorithm started to slow down and impact the user experience. If I remember correctly, our roommate search page took longer than 10 seconds to load. We never really built it for scale or had that in mind initially. We didn’t want to compromise on our vision and dumb down the features or remove the algorithm altogether.
To solve it, we sought guidance and advice from several growth experts. We learned about what technologies are available and that we should use, like Varnish, Redis, and more. We also got advice and had to rethink how to construct our algorithm and database to work more efficiently. We were able to implement multiple of the proposed solutions, and that got our app working much faster. Not only for back then, but we had set it up correctly for continued growth and scale. We were fortunate that there were some helpful folks out there willing to help a new startup without us having to shell out major dollars. To those that helped, we still very much appreciate it.
What were the top mistakes you made starting your business and what did you learn from it?
One of the biggest mistakes I made was rushing into building a large feature without properly vetting the actual users’ need for it. We built a tenant screening feature where users can request and send tenant background checks to each other. The problem was that in New York, for any sublease usually the management company or landlord will require his background check, so asking a prospective roommate to fill out both was redundant. To make things worse, we designed this feature with too many use cases and made it more complicated than it needed to be. It was a really cool feature, but ultimately not so needed or useful to our end users. It cost us a lot of money to develop and also took away the time of our developers from working on our core product and service.
The lessons learned from this experience are to first vet the business case, the usefulness of any large feature you intend to roll out. Especially if it’s not within your core product. The second lesson was that if you intend to roll out a major new feature, it’s better to start with the most simplistic business requirements first, test it out with real users, and then add the bells and whistles to it. This could save you a lot of effort, time, and money.
What is one thing that you do daily to grow as an entrepreneur?
Every day I spend at least thirty minutes reading and learning about something new. I try to understand the basic aspects of things that I am not great at so I can at least have an intelligent conversation about it with my team or service providers. For example, If you don’t handle your SEO or don’t know much about it, at least learn the basics. Don’t just blindly delegate it to someone else. I regularly read various blogs, newsletters and do deep dives into new services and technologies to keep up.
What are three books or courses you recommend for new entrepreneurs?
There’s a lot more that I would recommend than three books, but here goes. “Zero to One” by Peter Thiel, which I should probably read over again. “The hard thing about hard things” by Ben Horowitz and “Startup CEO” by Matt Blumberg. These are all useful books that will get you thinking about things you might have not have thought of before, or help prepare you to what’s next as an entrepreneur. I’d also recommend picking up some marketing books, whether it’s content marketing, SEO, or just general ones.
What is the one thing you wish you knew before starting your business?
Focus on SEO right off the bat. Initially, we focused on the product, not really keeping SEO in mind. Whether it was headers, page descriptions, or other components. We wanted our pages to be short, to the point. We didn’t think about the content to be SEO effective. Today, every page and every piece of content has SEO value taken into consideration.
What has been your most effective marketing strategy to grow your business?
Ultimately, I think SEO has proven to be the most effective for us. Whether it’s investing in technical SEO, content, or link building, our organic traffic accounts for most of our user acquisition. We also use Google Ads, especially for new markets and that is also been an effective strategy for user acquisition.
If you only had 1000 dollars to start a new startup, knowing everything you know now, how would you spend it?
I would spend the $1000 to test my idea or new venture. Buy a domain, build a landing page, and depending on the product, spend a bit of those dollars on Google or Facebook ads to test initial demand.
A $1000 can go very far if you outsource some tasks to freelancers on platforms like Fiverr or Upwork. If you can get customers interested in what you intend to sell or offer, then go forth and build your MVP or set up your shop.
What’s your best piece of advice for aspiring and new entrepreneurs?
Don’t be afraid to take risks. It took me a while to step out of corporate life into entrepreneurship. If I had to do it again, I would’ve done it a few years sooner. Just get started, and don’t be afraid to make mistakes. It’s part of the process.
What is your favorite quote?
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Albert Einstein
Besides the obvious social media tools available, what are the top 3 most useful tools or resources you’re currently using to grow your company?
There are a few, but these are my favorites. Unbounce, for creating landing pages that increase our PPC ads conversion rates.
Glockapp, to optimize our email marketing delivery rates.
And finally, Luckyorange, which allows us to see actual recordings of users use of our site (it’s anonymous) and identify issues or opportunities to optimize the user experience.
How is running a tech company different than what you thought it would be?
There are so many aspects you need to be aware of and the complexity of each is enormous. I also realized that software or a tech product is something that is continuously evolving. You cannot just build it and you are all set. it’s constant work to keep tweaking, expanding, and optimizing it.
How can readers get in touch with you?
You can reach me directly via my email rany@diggz.co or get in touch via our social media channels on IG @diggzny, Twitter @DiggzNY, or our Facebook Page.
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