The former litigator turned proptech founder is building white-labelled software that lets UK buyers and sellers complete the legal groundwork for a property sale in a single app.
Proptech founder Hannah Nicholson thinks selling a home in the UK should feel as simple as listing one on Airbnb. Today, the process still runs on paper forms, fragmented systems and legal jargon. Her company, Snappily, has raised more than £1.5 million to change that.
From Law Firm to Proptech Founder
Nicholson read law at university and trained in large law firms, where she worked as a litigator. She says she always wanted to run her own business, but her law degree channelled her toward the profession. Even so, she credits that training with making her a better founder.
Business ran in the family too. Her father was a doctor who later moved into medical technology, and she believes that probably inspired her to carve her own path.
Just before founding the company, she completed the Block Dojo accelerator, which trained the future proptech founder to pitch to investors. The programme included four days of investor lunches and a final event on stage in front of hundreds of people. Actors even coached participants on how to deliver their pitches.
How the Snappily App Works
Snappily is a consumer app that estate agents use to collect information and documents before a property goes live on portals such as Rightmove and Zoopla. Agents invite sellers and buyers to complete these due diligence tasks digitally. The app is white-labelled, so it carries the agent’s logo.
Agents use a separate web app to track progress. The platform also pulls documents such as title deeds through APIs from government sources. Nicholson describes the consumer app as the B2B2C side of the business and the agent web app as the B2B side.
The model is deliberate. Reaching consumers directly, she says, takes far more marketing cash. Estate agents, on the other hand, already hold the relationship and the trust.
Home buying in the UK remains a human process. As a result, keeping the agent’s logo on screen reassures consumers who may not know who Snappily is.
Building Distribution Through Alto
Much of the company’s distribution comes through Alto, Zoopla’s estate agency CRM. According to Nicholson, around 60 per cent of the UK’s 22,000 agents use it. The integration pulls seller details from Alto into Snappily automatically. This cuts the manual re-entry that leads to typos in names and mismatches with title deeds.
Snappily also works with franchise networks such as Hunters, where a head office manages compliance for many independently run branches. In addition, it serves small high street agents, who make up the majority of the market. Most agents, she notes, have not built apps of their own.
The Zoopla relationship began through a mentor and consultant whose own similar company Zoopla had acquired. Nicholson calls it chance, but adds that “you create your own luck.”
From Move Genius to Snappily
Nicholson originally named the business Move Genius and created its colours and first website herself. Over time, she felt the name sounded archaic. Quite a few firms in her sector model themselves on corporate law firms, she says, whereas she wanted Snappily to feel consumer friendly.
A branding expert spent six months on the rebrand, which included close study of her own personality and tastes. The result was a new name, a nod to “happily ever after,” and a hot pink identity.
The company forewarned customers about the change. However, she notes that name changes often meet resistance.
Raising Capital as a Proptech Founder
Snappily’s backers include Octopus Ventures, alongside angel investors and family offices. Nicholson remains the majority shareholder.
She believes property appeals to investors because it is tangible. Most people have bought or sold a home, and she points out that moving is often ranked among the most stressful events in life.
Early fundraising, she says, was fun. However, it is time-consuming, and she would now rather be more involved in the day-to-day business. She also notes that the money goes very quickly.
As a proptech founder with investors ranging from £5,000 to £1 million, she shares a board deck and a short update every quarter. She has also met many of her backers in person in London.
She thinks women may undersell themselves when pitching, particularly to investment committees made up of men, which she says is often the case.
A Proptech Founder in a Crowded Market
The challenge now is competition. Nicholson says there are many more competitors in the market since new regulations came into force. Big CRM providers are also trying to do what Snappily does.
Her response is to listen closely to customers and move quickly. For example, the team logs feedback from sales demos in Savio, which connects to HubSpot, and counts how often each feature comes up.
At a recent session, the team reordered its next three planned features. It had concluded that one no longer aligned with where the brand is now.
Technology is part of the answer too. The latest release uses AI to draft property descriptions from the data consumers provide. The team trained it carefully to sound human and to match each agency’s tone. Snappily also uses AI to match the spelling of names on title deeds and for basic data analysis.
Staying Close to the Product
Staying close to the product is its own test for a proptech founder without a technical background. Nicholson attends nearly all of the daily developer stand-ups. Before the company hired a head of product a year ago, she worked on wireframes with the designer herself.
In the early days, she also built the company website and learned Figma for wireframing. Today, her team is split between London and Cape Town, where she now spends most of her time.
The team includes a sales director, a head of product, a sales manager, customer success and support staff, and developers. They meet in person every quarter to work through product ideas.
Tech development, she says, is the area where she feels she has less control. After her son was born in March, she stepped back from the day-to-day. For about six weeks, the team kept the business running without hearing from her.
Meanwhile, the company has just launched a payment feature integrated with Stripe. It lets consumers pay through the app for compliance costs that many agents already pass on, such as title deeds and ID and AML checks. Nicholson sees it as a step into direct-to-consumer revenue alongside the agent model.
For this proptech founder, success means estate agents across the country knowing the name without being pitched. The company already receives inbound sales through its website and Alto. Longer term, Nicholson hopes Snappily becomes the Airbnb of buying and selling homes.