Entrepreneur journal: Lee Lin, co-founder, RentHop

TORONTO (Reuters.com) - Lee Lin had a full-time job, three rental properties and a problem: he had no time to find tenants to live in them. He tried advertising on free-listing websites like Craigslist, but found it too time consuming, so he created an alternative. The following is a personal 5-day journal written by RentHop.com co-founder Lee Lin exclusively for Reuters.com:

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Day 1: September 28, 2009

It's early Monday morning, meaning late Sunday night, and the next two weeks will be a nightmare of a roller coaster. I'm in my Manhattan apartment, coding away next to a mug of green tea with my co-founder (Lawrence Zhou) on speaker phone. He is still wrapping things up in Mountain View, California, where we spent the last three months participating in the Y Combinator program. I feel bad we're both up hacking this late, but tonight I'm in the zone. Besides, it's only 2 a.m. PT.

At some point I pass out, because I wake up to daylight creeping through the blinds, a minor headache, and the sound of my ringing cell phone. Even worse, I don't recognize the caller, which means I have to take it (it could be an investor or disgruntled user). "Hello, this is Lee, at RentHop!" My co-founder says I have this weird talent for sounding energized on the phone seconds after waking up. It's a reporter who I definitely did not want to blow off; amazingly, he even quips, "I'm glad you're awake! I can't always be sure with startup entrepreneurs."

The day gets a bit more strange. I call two landlords who still owe us a payment. No answers. I call a third to continue discussing how we'll import their feed onto RentHop. Voicemail?!?! These aren't mom and pops... major property managers with hundreds of apartments are letting their leasing office lines ring out? It's a holiday, says a friend over Google Talk. Really? I barely know the day of the week since plunging into startup life, let alone remember the holidays.

Day 2: September 29, 2009

I wake up after another late night bi-coastal coding session and realize I've got one hour before an important meeting... held at my place. I begin the mad cleaning frenzy, which means throwing everything from the living room into the closets and bedroom. This is a significant milestone; it's the first time I hosted a meeting in my apartment and called it the RentHop offices.

Later in the afternoon I'm hustling on the Upper East Side with my digital camera, some apartment master keys, and a perspective New York renter. I rarely do the showings myself these days, but it's good to stay honest and spend some time in the trenches. Today is more productive than usual; I come across a neat duplex near 90th and 3rd, which can double as our future office space and my co-founder's new pad! I'll be sure to DropBox the photos to him later tonight.

The most exciting part of the day for me isn't the crucial meeting, the client interaction, or the coding; it's the suspense from logging into our analytics reports the day after a new release. Today's numbers show our changes were good for the site, but not at the magnitude I was hoping we'd see. We decide the idea warrants further tweaking and investigation over the next few weeks. I send an email to our designer and ask for a few mockups that might better optimize our goals.

Day 3: September 30, 2009

Today I have a meeting in Boston; a 9 a.m. ET flight, meaning I get less than 4 hours of sleep once again. At 7 a.m. my co-founder gives me a wake-up call and wishes me good morning. I wish him good night. Sadly I snooze for another 30 minutes, smashing any hopes of a cheap commute via LIRR + AirTrain to JFK ($10.50). Instead I fork over $49.50 + tip for the cab ride, promising myself I'll make up for the splurge later in the day. At least my flight is free - thank you Jet Blue all- you-can-fly pass.

My meeting is not actually in Boston proper. It's a 30-minute drive outside Boston, and a normal business traveler might rent a car for the day for $100. We're a scrappy startup though, so Google Maps plots out the cheapest possible public transit itinerary. I buy a Charlie ticket from Logan airport ($2), take the Silver Line to South Station (for the non-Bostonians, that's the bus that pretends to be a subway), and then transfer to the Red Line to Kendall Square. What an incredible coincidence, the best possible route from Logan to my meeting takes me straight through a walking tour of my alma mater, just STEPS from my old dorm in fact. I take a tiny pit stop here and grab a slice of pizza from my all-time favorite parlor... same owner, just 6 years older. I also innocently tailgate my way into the computing cluster to quickly leech off a power outlet as I answer emails on my laptop.

The hour-long, $1.50 bus ride takes me away from campus but stops just a few miles shy of the meeting destination. Google Maps claims it is a short 30-minute walk, but I cheat and call a $12 cab to take me the rest of the way. I've more than made up for the JFK taxi ride.

Day 4: October 1, 2009

ACK! NYC Demo Day is just 6 days away and I've got to tell them some bad news. We just found out we're double-booked for the night, presenting at another event held on the same day, starting at the same time. To be fair to me, neither event was a sure thing until recently, but the mistake still falls entirely on us. I call the organizers of both events and beg for forgiveness, then beg for them to accommodate our schedule. Naturally they are freaking out and I don't blame them. They are already overworked and understaffed and definitely don't need some clown stressing them out with conflict issues. It looks like we aren't making friends among the NY startup community.

Today I finally catch up on a backlog of correspondence. I interview a senior real estate and property management veteran who we hope to bring on as an advisor-for-equity. I turn down a candidate that we had interviewed last week to fill our business development role... she was great, but just didn't have the right background (fortunately she had a competing offer which probably fits her better). I owe our contract designer feedback from the 6 user-interface mockups he sent earlier in the week. My co-founder fills me in on his meetings out West and we'll need to talk to the lawyers tomorrow.

Oh yes, the Demo Day rehearsal is tomorrow morning so my co-founder and I scramble to put together a new deck and pitch. We've previously only presented for a four-minute block including a live demo, so now we've got to morph it into a seven-minute show without an Internet connection. We're totally unprepared and I have to catch a flight back to The West Coast tomorrow. It's also 7:17 a.m. ET and the rehearsal starts in 3 hours. I'm so tempted to skip rehearsal and just wing it next week, but I'm already on precarious terms with the Demo Day organizers. And to think this was a shortened holiday week.

Day 5: October 5, 2009

I'm back in New York and I've turned in our one-pager and slide decks to both demo event organizers. I still haven't 100 percent resolved how we will execute our double feature, but in the very worst case, my co-founder and I can split up for the night, one of use presenting on 45th street and the other on 53rd street. The split up would not be ideal; I have so far never given a demo without the both of us there, and one of the well-known rules of 'demoing' is not to "talk and drive." That means don't try to fiddle with the computer demo while attempting to present to a big audience, because instead you will fumble the demo and talk into the laptop. To prepare for the possibility, we create an offline video of our demo, nearly two minutes long, and practice syncing our speech to the video. I'm surprised we didn't do this already, at least to have a backup during the presentation if our Internet connection or website suddenly died.

If my last few days seemed hectic at all, I want to point out that my partner in crime so far referred to as "my co-founder" has had it even worse. His name is Lawrence Zhou. If he were writing this journal, he'd mention the customer service calls and coding tasks he's been juggling during the day while also wrapping up loose ends in Mountain View. He's moving us out of the apartment and meeting investors one final time. He is flying to New York tomorrow and will be presenting less than 24 hours after landing (possibly twice in one hour). Even worse, he'll need to crash on my couch until we can find a free moment to search for his new pad… at least he'll have RentHop to make the apartment hunt easier.