Young Enterprise Alumni Launch Co-Living Platform WeConnect

WeConnect co-founders Gilles Heinesch, Clémentine Offner, Christian Gutenkauf and Ivo Silva (Photo © WeConnect)

They started their first business at 18. Now the trio behind FrëschKëscht is on the hunt for seniors interested in hosting students.

The lead-up to the launch of inter-generational co-living project WeConnect has been challenging for its founders and not only for the usual reasons associated with founding a company.

Clémentine Offner, who is in the middle of a psychology bachelor’s at the University of Luxembourg, has spent the last months in Paris as part of her Erasmus exchange and all three founders have study deadlines and exams. Fortunately, they are well-versed in juggling studies with entrepreneurship because, since the age of 18, it is all they have ever known.

As part of the team at the Lycée Robert Schuman which created FrëschKëscht, a basket of hand-selected, locally produced goods, they won the Young Entrepreneur mini enterprise programme in 2019-2020.

Following that success, Offner and Ivo Silva represented Luxembourg at the Euroskills hackathon in 2021 where they developed an intergenerational co-living platform that would tackle isolation among the elderly while combating the lack of affordable accommodation for university students.

The project won the Young Enterprise Project in 2022 and won the FedEx Access Award when the team took it to the Gen-E entrepreneurship event in Tallinn, Estonia the following summer.

An urgent need for student accommodation

The startup responds to an urgent need for student accommodation in Luxembourg.

“The University told us they are convinced that every year they lose students because students can’t find accommodation,” said Silva.

“Students that don’t have accommodation will arrive hoping that they will get something at the university. They go to a hostel or hotel but then they might have to return to their country because they are left with no money,” added Offner. 

From 4 May to the start of the new academic year, WeConnect will onboard hosts and guests and start the matchmaking process. After extensive consultation with the stakeholders and witnessing the wave of solidarity for displaced people in Luxembourg in recent years, the team believes there is growing acceptance of shared living solutions.

Illustration photo of intergenerational co-living project WeConnect (Photo: WeConnect)

At the same time, they plan to promote this idea further with an emphasis on co-learning, by developing a WeConnect community. “Because while cohabitation is our main activity, in the future we will also organise events and host intergenerational meals for customers,” said Silva, adding: “We can learn a lot from one another.” 

Rewriting the business plan

The learning curve to launching WeConnect’s social impact company has been sharp and Silva reckons that the business plan has changed at least three times in the last year. Among the challenges were how to build trust and reassure stakeholders, as well as legal and compliance considerations. For instance, an early iteration proposing that students would carry out household tasks in return for a small rent reduction quickly became tricky from a labour law perspective. 

Various ministries, the University of Luxembourg Incubator and mentor and fourth co-founder Christian Gutenkauf, helped shape the startup into a sustainable business.

“Something we learned in the last years of this entrepreneurial journey is that the more feedback you get, the better your business,” said Offner. 

Silva said that the only thing that WeConnect didn’t change was the why: “We really want to help people who feel lonely and help students obtain affordable housing.”

WeConnect aims to facilitate around 20 co-living situations for the September 2023 term. Its ultimate goal is that in five years’ time, no student at the University of Luxembourg has a housing problem.

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