We’ve all had the experience where we wish we had that one object we need right now. Maybe it’s a vacuum cleaner to clean up the mess on the floor, maybe it’s a set of tools to fix a squeaky dresser drawer, or perhaps a pasta maker for that one time you wanted to make fresh pasta for a special dinner.
In the Harry Potter stories, the characters discovered a magical room that provided whatever they needed at that moment - the Room of Requirement. Now, a startup called Tulu is bringing that same magical experience to life in apartment buildings around the world through a combination of smart rooms and a mobile app developed using Velo.
Tulu is already working with properties in major cities - starting in Tel Aviv and New York - to setup rooms where tenants can access a number of different items and quickly and easily rent them using an app on their phone.
The rooms include items across seven different categories:
Cleaning - including items like Dyson vacuum cleaners
DYI and Maintenance - tools for quick repairs or other projects
Play or Entertain - items you can use at your next party
Cooking - kitchen tools for your next special meal
Ride - scooters, skateboards, and more
Go - for your next adventure like camping or kayaking
All of the items are located on shelves with sensors that detect where they are. With the app, it’s as simple as quickly scanning an item, and you’re ready to go. Prices are set according to the type of item and the amount of time you use it.
Tulu CMO, Yael Shemer, addressed the motivation of the Tulu team in building the service. “There are two main shifts that are affecting city life as a young person. The first one is apartments are getting smaller and the second is that people are moving much more often from place to place,” she said.
“So our categories try to serve all aspects of our users’ lives. This can help our users free up space in their lives, both physically and financially for the things that matter to them, and have money to invest in their present and future plans instead of splurging on stuff they don’t use all the time.”
For Tulu, Velo represented an easy to use and rapid solution for developing their MVP (Minimal Viable Product). However, as the startup began testing the product it had built, the team realized they could continue to use Velo to bring the app to production.
Binyamin Meron, the lead developer of the app, described the development process and the advantages Velo provided.
“We used Velo and GoNative [now Median.co] to build our MVP and to test the solution with the first room we developed. We were able to build a web service and place it within an “envelope” that packages it for mobile devices.” Meron described that it took only three months to design and build the Tulu app with Velo. “I’ve developed other applications, and it usually takes a minimum of nine months to build a project like this,” he said.
Beyond the speed and simplicity of development that Velo enabled, Meron pointed to several additional advantages of the Wix platform. “One of the big advantages of Wix - in addition to the speed of Go-to-Market and the affordability of developing with fewer resources and work hours - are all the other tools and services that it provides that you normally need to develop on your own. For example, user management and login, email marketing, and others. And of course we are accessing other services via APIs. We were able to focus on the core of the product without distraction.”
Tulu is still in early stages and is rolling out its initial set of rooms in several properties. At this stage, Shemer highlighted the importance of rapidly iterating the product and providing a dynamic solution for users. She pointed out that Velo has been helpful in the process of evolving the product.
“One of the keys to our initial success, beside the way we execute, is choosing to build our infrastructure on a tool that is dynamic, which allowed us to be customer oriented,” she said. “As we looked at how users were interacting with the product, we were able to iterate and iterate, and quickly update the app. And Velo was an important tool that helped us do that.”
