Helping a proptech marketplace reach new heights.

Overview

Hybr is a student letting and property rental marketplace based in the UK. Founded by Hannah Chappatte while she was studying at Bristol, the company secured record-breaking seed funding in 2023 and has been scaling across cities such as Bristol (their home turf), London, and Manchester.

I joined the team as Head of Growth at a critical juncture in the company’s journey. With the goal of achieving product-market fit, Hybr needed to grow its market share in key local markets to approach its next funding round with confidence.

Working at the intersection of product, marketing, and sales, my role was to establish the growth team and strategy and execute at pace. I oversaw all marketing channels, including their Webflow marketing website, PPC campaigns, organic SEO growth, and events.

Key Results

Thanks to the combined efforts of the leadership and growth teams, we achieved the following milestones:

• 10X growth in Google impressions
• 4X growth in users
• 3X growth in revenue

Working with Hybr was an absolute blast—a whirlwind of learning, pivoting, and executing new strategies. Now, let’s dive into the details.

The Opportunity

Hybr presented significant opportunities for improvement across the brand and its marketing operations. The existing UX for both the marketing and product sites was poor, and there were no real marketing communications or operational frameworks in place. Additionally, their marketing stack did not utilise the latest AI advancements, putting them at risk of falling behind.

Fortunately, the company already had strong traffic and a well-recognised brand. This provided a solid foundation to build upon, and that’s where I came in.

The Strategy

For any marketplace, understanding users on both sides is crucial. It was vital to craft a user-centred strategy that put their needs at the forefront. This began with defining exactly who Hybr’s users were.

Using my expertise in UX research, we analysed past data, conducted user interviews, and distributed surveys to create detailed user profiles for each core archetype.

Defining Our Users

Borrowing from Alan Cooper’s process of creating UX profiles, we defined specific personas for landlords and students. This clarity allowed us to remain laser-focused, as no startup succeeds by trying to "please everyone."

Core User Segments:

• Students: Bristol university students in their first or second year.
• Landlords: Smaller, private landlords with 5–20 properties.

Students and landlords are vastly different audiences, so each required a tailored approach. This meant developing two separate strategies for the marketplace’s funnel, each with unique touchpoints.

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User Persona Strategies

Students

Knowing that students are highly active online, we prioritised digital channels to raise awareness and drive conversions. The chosen channels included:

• SEO & Organic Search
• Paid Search
• Social Media
• Email Marketing
• Product Marketing
• Partnerships

Optimising the student journey across these touchpoints created a consistent tone and messaging, improving our chances of conversion.

Landlords

Landlord profiling revealed an older demographic with different online behaviour. Less social, more sceptical, and less communicative, landlords presented a unique challenge. The core channels for landlords were:

• SEO & Organic Search
• Paid Search
• Business Development & Cold Outreach
• Email Marketing

With fewer channels available, we focused on maximising the potential of each.

Defining Our Funnel

Based on the user profiles, we structured the funnel as follows:

Awareness/Acquisition: SEO/content, events, press, paid social, partnerships.
Activation: Paid search, external marketplaces, product marketing, UI/UX, customer engagement.
Revenue: Product marketing, customer success, funnel operations.
Retention: Customer engagement.
Referral: Customer engagement, product marketing.

We successfully achieved a target CAC of £6–8, delivering a 20:1 let conversion ratio—a rate the product team could easily manage with our support.

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Key Initiatives

Building a New Website

To address the low-hanging fruit, we focused first on the marketing website. Collaborating with Stephen McShannock, we designed a new site and improved its SEO performance. While Stephen handled the design, I worked on metadata, content structure, and overall optimisation.

Webflow CMS Improvements
The Webflow CMS was restructured to be more scalable and user-friendly. By using reference fields, we established data relations, allowing for more advanced filtering on the front end and delivering highly relevant content.

Web UX/UI Results
The result was a bold, engaging new design coupled with best-in-class SEO optimisation, which led to an immediate and sustained increase in traffic.

SEO Optimisation

The metadata on the existing site required a complete overhaul. We:

• Optimised page titles and descriptions with relevant keywords.
• Added OpenGraph metadata and images to make content more shareable.
• Structured H tags to ensure proper hierarchy, with only one H1 per page.
• Added alt-text to images to boost accessibility and SEO.

AI-Driven Content Creation
We introduced ByWord to the marketing stack, enabling us to automate content creation for blogs targeting key keywords. ByWord’s integration with Webflow allowed for seamless content publishing, dramatically increasing the scale and efficiency of our output.

SEO Results
These efforts resulted in a 10X increase in Google impressions within 12 months.

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Multi-variant testing PPC campaigns

As the product was built as a web app, it was not optimised for web SEO. It did not have any actual pages and did not have server side rendering enabled, so crawlers could not read the content.

This meant that organic traffic to the product was very poor or non-existent at times. It was agreed to fix this issue with the new product roll out and growth in the meantime would use some paid channels to fill in the gaps that organic could not.

Working with Mayank Pokharna, a marketing expert from India with HUGE knowledge of the co-living and proptech markets (if you need marketing help and you are in the proptech industry, he is your guy!) We developed a programmatic approach to ad testing.

We created a series of ad groups with variables:

• City
• University
• Property Type
• Bedrooms

This could like like this:

• {roomNum) bed {propType} to rent in {city} = 5 bed flat to rent in Bristol

We tested these ads at scale using thousands of variables and identified what was working and what was not, moving spend to double down on successful ads.

This resulted in a 500% increase in enquiries into the funnel at an average cost per acquisition of £3-6.

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Creating social media strategy

There was a tonne of opportunity to improve the quality and cadence of social media from the Hybr brand. Hiring social media marketing expert and founder of The Content Club, Heather-Jade Stanley, we go to work on creating strategies for landlords and students across various channels.

Focusing on Linkedin for landlords, HJ made highly engaging content while focusing on some core content groups

• Work life at Hybr
• Property market news and updates
• Property market culture

As a result we grew engagement on linked in to XX and increased our following by XX%.

On the student side I managed HJ to execute a more complex strategy across TikTok and Instagram. Testing meme content, student life, relatable content and student calendar content (results day etc).

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This resulted in a 640% increase in video views and a 900% increase in profile views on instagram and some significant growth on TikTok followers

Conclusion

While I headed up the growth engine at Hybr, I achieved a tonne of growth for a great brand with a great vision. Increasing users by over 1500% and taking the company through it's highest growth period in the 4 years since its founding. Q1 and Q3 of 2024 were MASSIVE with huge results from some key channels.

I had a great team around me and it was a pleasure to work to help students find more suitable property while studying at university. the company is going from strength to strength and I cannot wait to see what the future holds for them.