How we got started

When I had made it around the world, worked for a few years abroad and at home, learnt Spanish where it is supposed to be learnt (Madrid and Malaga), trained to become a chef, worked as a manager for a Swedish softball club and travelled some more, I got accepted to Med. school. That came as a surprise, especially to me. I was so sure that I would never get accepted that I had kind of given up that dream. This also meant that I had to start staying in Sweden for longer periods. I did however sneak away as often as I could. By the end of the second semester I knew that I had to find some other way to make money but to work night shifts at restaurants. I could barely stay awake during the days and my studies were suffering. My only asset was my apartment so I decided to advertise it via some agencies. It worked alright, but it still took so much time and energy going through the requests that mostly didn't generate any rental, endless phone calls with the agencies about anything and everything plus the fact that they took more than 30% of my income. I decided that this wasn't going to do it. Things were just too complicated. 

One night over quite a lot of wine, I spelled out everything that was wrong with the situation. What I would do better. What was missing and what was dumb. I went quite far and on the metro on my way back home, I wrote it all down. If none of the agencies would provide me with what I wanted then I was going to do this myself. Next morning I called up a friend and set up several meetings with programmers and signed all the registration forms to start up my own business. This was in October 2008. It should have taken 2 months to set everything up and build the website. It took almost 2 years. But when I launched www.absoluteapartment.com in July 2010, one month ahead of the medical conference, and the bookings started to accumulate I knew I had made the right choice. We were up and running. Actually we hit the ground running. And we haven't stopped yet!