#WIB – Q&A With Alexandria Procter Co-Founder Of DigsConnect
1. Can you please tell us more about your business?
A. I started a little project when I was an undergrad student at UCT, to solve a problem I was dealing with. I was elected onto the Student Representative Council, and my portfolio included student housing, so I was dealing first hand with hundreds of students that hadn’t gotten into res and were looking to me for help in finding student accommodation.
Within the border narrative and context of our country, this situation wasn’t surprising. The universities were built pre-1994, and while enrollment had grown beautifully, supporting infrastructure at public institutions had not been built at a rate to support this, so a chronic shortage of accommodation has become prevalent across the country.
I was originally matching up landlords and students manually, using an excel sheet, or WhatsApps, but I realised it would be so much easier if I just knocked together a little website where people could connect by themselves without having to go through me. Over a weekend I bought the domain and coded a super simple website where you could 1. list accommodation, and 2. search for accommodation. The website was launched in January 2018. Thus DigsConnect was born, as an online marketplace to connect sellers (landlords) with buyers (students).
Before I knew it, I was suddenly strapped to a rocket headed to the stratosphere. I had stumbled upon something that was in huge demand, and thanks to good timing, the platform just exploded. Within a couple of months, I had about 50 000 beds on the platform, from Cape Town to Stellies, Joburg, Pretoria, and almost everywhere in between! It was just something that people wanted – landlords wanted to find student tenants to fill their properties, and students wanted to find great, affordable, and decent housing close to their campuses.
A couple of months later I dropped out of my postgrad at university to pursue it full time. We now have 1.3 million beds listed on our platform in over 30 countries worldwide.
2. When, how and why did you start your business?
A. See above answer.
3. What is your role in the business?
A. I’m co-founder, CEO, and head of product.
4. Where did you study and what did you study?
A. I did a Bachelor of Science degree at UCT. I’m also pursuing a private pilot’s licence at Stellenbosch Flying School.
5. How did you finance your business?
A. I launched DigsConnect in January 2018 with almost nothing, as a student at UCT. The first version was an excel spreadsheet, then I got a hosted domain for R50 a month. After that, I borrowed money to put up a drywall in my apartment and rented out half my apartment on DigsConnect to fund the business. Then in February 2019, we raised a R12 million seed round from local investors. It was one of the largest seed rounds raised at the time and remains the largest seed round raised by a female founder in Africa to date.
6. Describe your average workday, if such a thing exists.
A. Mostly I obsess. I am obsessed with every part of the business. Every element on every page of the website, and on the app. I am obsessed with our analytics and understanding the data behind our conversions. I am obsessed with every email we send out to users, every push notification, blog post, sales communication. About the features, we add or remove. About our company culture, our team, their futures, and how to nurture their talent and abilities so that they constantly feel like their work is rewarding. I obsess over our long-term vision and the day-to-day nuances that are going to get us there.
7. How do you balance your home life and your work life?
A. Not well! Haha! My mantra in life is “create more than you consume”, and so my home life tends to be me just taking on more work. Aside from DigsConnect, I was recently appointed to the board of the National Youth Development Agency by President Cyril Ramaphosa, so I also have to factor in time to perform my NYDA duties, and to exceed what is expected of me – I have the youth of South Africa depending on to get it right!
That all being said – last year my gynecologist called me and said that some pre-cancerous cells had been found in my cervix, so I had to go for an operation to get them cut out. It was a bit of a wake-up call that I have to prioritize my health as I go along my work journey. I’ve been trying to get in more time in nature – I love the ocean so when I have a minute I’ll head down to one of Cape Town’s incredible beaches and just soak up some seawater!
8. What drives you and inspires you?
A. There have always been forces that guide my life – forces of curiosity, of defiance, of wonder, of rebellion, of compassion, but mostly of explosive passion, I feel everything very deeply – and just by following these and staying true to them I’ve sort of found my way into the place where I’m meant to be. There’s always pressure to conform, to submit, to bend, or acquiesce because it feels good to fit in. But every day I see reasons why the world does not need more people copying what was done before.
There’s nearly 8 billion people on earth, so that’s 8 billion conscious minds, each holding the potential for great thought, great productive output, great creativity, what a waste to just repeat what has been done when we have an infinite universe to fill and engineer! And I want to restate this now again, this message of being true to your vision, because as the stakes get higher, the pressure to play it safe grows proportionally, which is why your strength and courage must grow proportionality as well. As long as you are guided by authentic good intentions of building incredible things to push the frontier of humanity’s reach and do good for the world and spread joy for humans, I think you don’t need to be checking over your shoulder for buy-in.
I deeply love work, the act of building, and I love that everyday I have the opportunity to add so much value to the world and shape the way that humans experience “home”.
9. Where and when do you have your best ideas?
A. One of my proudest achievements is the incredible team I’ve built at DigsConnect.com. Everyone on the team is whip smart, and so whenever we’re having team discussions or workshops, or even just one-on-ones with team members, we always end up shooting around wild ideas. I’ve made sure to nurture a culture that is very open to everything, no idea or topic is taboo and we encourage crazy ideas. This creates a space where I can just share my wildest ideas and think aloud with the team and shape ideas into reality.
10. Where and how do you market/advertise your business for sales leads?
A. We don’t do boring at DigsConnect! We’ve run highly disruptive marketing campaigns that have solidified our brand among our user base of students. These campaigns include our money drop, when we dropped R10 000 in ten rand notes at UCT, attracting crowds in their thousands, live-streaming the entire event across several student influencer Instagram accounts and making national news; racing T-Rex’s across Wits University and UCT, hosting massive student parties at UCT and Wits, replacing all the toilet paper in Cape Town bars and restaurants with DigsConnect branded toilet paper that says “we’re not full of sh*t”, and putting up “Send Digs Pics” posters above urinals in student bars. These cheeky campaigns hit the nail on the head perfectly, and caught the attention of our target market (students and young professionals), leading to organic social media content being widely created and shared, making our brand highly recognisable in our key markets.
Our #Digsaur2020 marketing campaign was a series of social-media-based challenges for students across South Africa. It ran for three weeks in February 2020, and during that time we garnered 4.6 million impressions on social media. We trended in all 3 top spots on Twitter on 10 and 13 February and got more than 900 user-generated Instagram posts in 3 weeks. All these can be found by searching #digsaur2020 on Instagram and Twitter.
11. What is next for your business?
A. We’re about to wrap up our busy South African season, which has been unbelievably successful. After the last two incredibly tough years with COVID and the awful lockdowns, 2022 has come back so strong. I’ve learnt that South Africans have more heart than I ever knew before, an extraordinary fighting spirit, a deep power, a superb sense of humour and I’m so proud of being a South African company! Next up, we’ll be tackling the student accommodation market in Europe, and I’m actually headed to the UK and EU for the next couple of months to get operations going there. Global domination awaits!
12. What advice would you give to female entrepreneurs hoping to start their own business?
A. Don’t wait for permission. Just do it. I started DigsConnect with no business knowledge, and to this day I still consider myself a rogue entrepreneur. I don’t understand any of the jargon, but what I do understand is a value exchange. This is what it all comes down to – just create value in the world. That I think is what the core of business, and on a more fundamental level what the core of capitalism is about, and why it’s such a powerful force. Humans apply their abilities to generate value, and then we store, trade, speculate and swap value. Everything has value. But essentially that value must be created first, and that value genesis is from entrepreneurs.
Entrepreneurs are like the First Movers in our entire global chain of transactions. And that value genesis and trade is what took our species from somewhere in the middle of the food chain to base on Mars by 2025 (holding thumbs). This is why communism and socialism always fail – because those systems seek to create value by dividing what already exists, instead of incentivizing the creation of new value. So my advice is – be a value creator!
Biography:
My name is Alexandria Procter, I’m 28 years old, and I live in Cape Town, South Africa. As an undergrad student at The University of Cape Town, I was elected onto the Students Representative Council. In this role, the extent of the student housing crises in South Africa became apparent to me, and so I launched a website called DigsConnect.com, which was to become the largest student housing platform on the African continent just two years after launch. I dropped out of my postgrad, and I’m now the CEO, co-founder, and Head of Product at DigsConnect.com. My company lists more than a million beds across the globe, from Tokyo to Paris to New York City. DigsConnect.com raised a record-setting R12 million for our seed investment round in 2019, a year after launch. It’s the largest seed round raised by a female founder in South Africa to date.
I was appointed to the board of directors of the National Youth Development Agency by President Cyril Ramaphosa. I’m also a director for the Cape Innovation and Technology Initiative. At 28 years old, I’m the youngest director on both boards. I publish a newsletter called The Aviation Club, writing narrative nonfiction articles, and run a YouTube channel on tech startups. I’m a member of Mensa, and am pursuing my private pilot’s license. More than anything, I’m an enthusiastic optimist and a patriotic South African that believes strongly in the future of the African continent and the potential that humanity holds.
For more visit: www.digsconnect.com