The sound of the word Knok (without pronouncing the K) derives from knocking – knocking on a friendly someone’s door. The holiday home exchange community Knok is open to anyone, but families are their key customer group. It’s because families have less money to spend on holidays and some are looking for alternative forms of holiday accommodation. The idea behind it is simple: share what you have at a time you don’t need it. Financially speaking, there are two ways of doing so: renting out what you have at a time you don’t need it – like Airbnb members do. Or truly sharing it. The latter applies to Knok. Families can either actually swap homes with another family at the same time. Or while away, they share their home in return for credits they can later use on Knok to stay some place else.

Unlike on Couchsurfing.org, members on Knok pay a yearly membership fee. But a) the fee is less than what one night in most commercial holiday apartments would cost – regardless of how many days or weeks members are actually staying. And b) members can use the Knok search as often as they want. Let’s say for two holiday trips per year, 3 weeks total, roughly 100 € for accommodation is little to nothing. And the yearly fee includes an insurance that covers up to 150,000 € in damages with a deductible of 1,000 €.

Serial entrepreneurship

Knok was founded in 2011 by CEO Juanjo Rodriguez, COO Laura Martinez and CTO Marc Rollan. It is Juanjo’s third company. The first was founded around the turn of the millenium and was an online platform for finding experts and getting answers from them. Then the internet bubble burst. The second company was a successful advertising agency called Duplex in Barcelona. Marc was part of that team already and the professional partnership between him and Juanjo well tested. Laura and Juanjo are married by the way. (And by the way once more, they are not the only entrepreneur couple we run into in Barcelona.) It’s partnership well tested on another level. Juanjo tells us how it works: sitting away from one another in the office and being responsible for different aspects of operations. Aside from that, most entrepreneurs think about their business 24/7. Wanted or not, life partners of entrepreneurs are involved anyway.

Family office investment

Common resources for high risk financing are business angels, crowd investing and, on a larger scale, venture capital firms. But talking to business angels, Knok found they had too little to offer. On the other hand, venture capital was thinking in way bigger and faster dimensions. Knok need something in the middle. After about a half year they found a family office willing to invest half a million euros in them. For those not familiar with the term: family offices are a professionally managed investment funds owned by wealthy families.

Investing, expanding

Operational costs are low and Knok could break even, Juanjo tells us. But they invest in marketing to enter and grow in new markets worldwide to accelerate its 10% per month growth rate. As of 2014, Knok says they have around 30,000 members. The peer-to-peer approach is getting more and more popular and Knok offers a kind of couchsurfing for families. That’s zeitgeist turned into a digital and scalable business model. And what’s more, a business model that saves resources by using living space when it’s not needed. That saves many a holiday house from being built.

[November 2014, picture credit © knok.com]