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MARKETPLACE
June 1, 2023

How CircleHome Went From Idea to Funding in Under a Year

These founders built a home-swapping service on Bubble, and raised funding to help more people travel affordably.
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How CircleHome Went From Idea to Funding in Under a Year

€120,000

pre-seed funding

60,000

potential users signed

$0

marketing spend

Many of us would love to get out and see the world, but travel can be prohibitively expensive. Renting out your own home while you’re away can help offset costs, but what if you could just swap housing directly with other travelers, no money required? That’s the idea behind CircleHome, a Spanish startup with a platform built on Bubble for travelers who want to trade homes-away-from-home with other travelers.


Less than a year later, cofounders David Liria and Xavier Lloveras have not only graduated from one of Europe’s biggest startup accelerators, Startupbootcamp, but also raised a €120,000 pre-seed funding round and acquired active users in more than 10 countries. Here’s how they did it with Bubble.

The non-technical founders disrupting travel housing

David and Xavier conceived of CircleHome during their capstone project in business school in Barcelona. The idea was for a barter-driven take on Airbnb, a concept powerful in its simplicity: match up travelers who’d rather stay in each other’s homes than pay for a hotel or vacation rental. They quickly recognized that CircleHome could become much more than a school project and decided to push their concept beyond graduation. 

“We saw the real potential, so we decided to try it,” David said. The only issue was that neither of them had technical experience. “We had no idea how to code,” as David put it. Undeterred, David surveyed the low- and no-code marketplace in search of a tool they could use to build their platform anyway. He found Bubble. 

“It’s not just a website builder. Bubble is a platform with a backend and a database that has everything.” 

Bubble fit all the criteria, allowing David and Xavier to not only build CircleHome’s marketplace of available homes, but also manage user profiles and accounts with an eye toward a subscription revenue model. “It’s not just a website builder,” David explained. “Bubble is a platform with a backend and a database that has everything.” So the founders divided up the labor: Xavier would focus on user acquisition while David dove into learning and building with Bubble. 

David’s been building CircleHome on Bubble himself ever since. “I think Bubble is pretty self-explanatory. You can do it without any prior coding experience,” he said. His background in Python helped him understand Bubble’s built-in database architecture more quickly, but mainly, David just dove in and started playing with the visual development tools. “Bubble is a really powerful tool that I really, really like,” he added.

An accelerator and pre-seed funding in less than a year

The first version of CircleHome took roughly four months to build, with David working on the platform part-time as he finished his studies. “It was very basic, but it was something,” he said. Basic or not, the first iteration was enough to land CircleHome a spot in Startupbootcamp, a major startup accelerator in Europe.

The co-founders headed to Amsterdam for the accelerator last fall — and then secured a €120,000 pre-seed funding round. While they briefly considered raising a bigger round, that would have likely taken months to complete. “Summer is the key moment of the year for us, and we wanted to be able to work through it,” David said. Armed with enough funds to ramp up user acquisition, CircleHome plans to focus on the vacation season now and turn to raising a seed round of investment once the busy travel season is over.

A growing user base — and global footprint

After only a few months of operation, CircleHome has active homes in more than 10 countries. And through Xavier’s work brokering partnerships in the business-to-business space, they estimate their potential user base to be about 60,000 (and counting). Between corporate travel and the rise of travel nurses over the past few years, in particular, business housing is a lucrative market forever in search of better solutions. “We have partnerships with institutions and enterprises to get our platform in front of their members or employees,” David explained. 



Currently, CircleHome operates on a subscription basis. Users pay €99 a year, which lets them browse available housing and chat with prospective home-swappers within the platform. Once tentative arrangements have been made, swap agreements are brokered through CircleHome. Every home swap includes insurance, arranged by CircleHome through a third-party provider, to cover accidents, property damage, and the like. “Our goal is to make it high quality,” David said. “You don't have to worry about anything. Everything is secure. Everything gets taken care of.”

And although they’re focused on Europe for now, CircleHome already has some listings for housing swaps in Australia, Thailand, and the United States too. “Our main target is younger people,” David said, “So users between 25 to 45 in the biggest cities around the world.” 

And one thing’s for sure, in David’s mind: No matter where CircleHome ends up traveling next, it will fly on Bubble.

Raise a funding round and grow to enterprise-scale, all on Bubble

CircleHome went from idea to pre-seed funding in less than a year. So can you.

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