Easy Housing - origin story
Find a shorter version of this story on the website of MIT Solve, or read the blog below.
In 2013, right after completing my master's in environmental technology, I started a solar panel company with one of my best friends. We did everything ourselves, from sales up to installation of residential solar systems. Hard work, but also a lot of fun! And driven by a strong passion to protect the environment.
While laying out these solar panels on rooftops, we used to philosophise about the future of our planet and how we could help save it. One hot summer afternoon, we were having a beer on a terrace, after finishing a job in our hometown Eindhoven. We came up with this crazy idea to build an off-grid home out of a shipping container. Fully self-sufficient for water and energy, and fully mobile. So that you could live anywhere and it could be shipped around the world. We were committed to pulling this off. In 2015, my business partner, two other friends and myself got funding from an incubator in Amsterdam and an angel investor in order to launch Sustainer Homes.
We built the prototype in three months’ time and presented it live at the demo day of the incubator. In the months that followed, we towed it across the country (Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Eindhoven, Utrecht, Hilversum) to show it off. It looked very dope and everybody loved the concept. But using a shipping container as a building envelope turned out to be impractical for various reasons. After six months of trying to find a launching customer, we realised nobody actually wanted to buy it. So, just before going broke, we pivoted the company to a modular mass timber building system for the Dutch market. We managed to get market traction and grew the business into a scale up. In the years that followed, we managed to build more than 100 homes across the country. It was a formative experience and an amazing adventure. Sustainer is still going strong today and has evolved into a digital building platform for sustainable mass timber construction.
In 2019, my partner got a job offer in Senegal and I wanted to join her. So I decided to phase out my role as CTO of Sustainer. It was not an easy decision to leave behind such a wonderful team and the business that we built from scratch. But I felt the company was ready for it and I was slowly approaching the founder's trap. My strengths were no longer aligned with the shifted responsibilities and tasks of our consolidating organisation. In Dakar, I was contemplating what my next entrepreneurial endeavour would be.
Funny enough, after considering many options, my love for building with timber prevailed and I decided to bring my building skills out of Europe. Reading about the huge housing gap in the Global South, I decided to design a timber building system that could be shipped like an IKEA building package from Finland, where the engineered timber is produced, to anywhere in the world. With a technical design that was simple enough to work in settings with basic infrastructure. I thought it was quite clever.
In May 2020, right in the middle of the first global covid lockdown and probably the worst time to start a business, I incorporated Easy Housing. We had returned to The Netherlands and during that summer, I organised an army of volunteers, sacrificed my savings to buy a truck of timber, and together with family and friends we built the first prototype in Hilversum; proof of concept! Ready for action, but it's rarely that simple.
A few months later, my wife got a job offer at the Dutch embassy in South Sudan; the newest country in the world and unfortunately not safe enough for partners to be allowed to join at the so-called hardship post. Here I was; no income, a new company that was just a wild idea with no market validation whatsoever and a partner who, for most of the year, was about to be stationed in a country where I was not allowed to go.
Quite a rough patch and I really felt I had to find something abroad to keep myself busy. And, frankly, I also just needed a salary. So, while I was slow cooking my new startup, I managed to get a job in clean cooking in Gulu, northern Uganda. Irony had it I was based only a mere 250 kilometres away from Juba (South Sudan), where my partner was based, but it was not safe enough to cross the border over land.
For one year, I did business development for this scale up in clean cookstoves (African Clean Energy) and rolled out a renewable cooking fuel program throughout Uganda. I fell in love with the country and it was an invaluable learning opportunity on what it actually entails to work and do business in an emerging economy. On the side, I kept developing Easy Housing and during 2021, one of my best friends, Niels, decided to join as co-founder and COO. This was a game changer as it elevated the idea from a one man show to an actual team.
By the end of that year, we found a partner (Casa Real) that wanted to build a first project with us in Beira, Mozambique. Beira is an old coastal city that is very prone to climate change and severely affected by increased hurricane incidence and floods. An amazing opportunity to showcase our climate resilient concept, but... the project had to be finished in three months. Global supply chains were severely suffering from the pandemic and both shipping prices and delivery times had gone through the roof. Just getting the building package shipped from Finland to Mozambique alone would take around three months.
Once again, the container aspect of the business model turned out to be very impractical. We decided to notify the partner that this timeline was not feasible for us and that we were not able to take on the project. Missing out on this opportunity made us see the flaws in our approach. The whole business idea suddenly felt doomed to fail and we realised we had to pivot.
After doing a brief technical assessment, I concluded it was feasible to switch from exported engineered timber to locally and sustainably sourced normal timber, while maintaining the circular design principles and prefabrication approach of our system. We found an amazing sustainable forestry company (Levasflor) based near Beira that was able to supply the sustainable timber we needed for this project. A few days after cancelling the project, I reached out to the partner again and told them we could still do it if we did it this way. They responded with enthusiasm and the next day I decided to quit my job in Uganda and go all in again. I booked my ticket to Mozambique and four weeks later I arrived in Beira to start the construction of our first project abroad. If we had not made that pivot to localised value chains, I don't think Easy Housing would have survived.
I believe many founders can relate to the hardships we faced as impact entrepreneurs. The ones mentioned in this story are just a glimpse of all the struggles we had to overcome – whether it's running out of money, technical flaws, unsatisfied clients, overworked team members, unfavourable policies, or trying to convince the market they should buy your product, you name it.
For me, the key to startup survival is adaptation and perseverance. And a team and co-founders you can build upon. But most importantly, the energy you get from doing things from the passion and conviction to make an impact towards a more equitable and sustainable world!
