Age: 26
Occupation: D.Phil student in philosophy and co-founder of www.liveout.co.uk

Richard Price is a co-founder of LiveOut and a prize fellow of All Souls College, where he is doing a D.Phil in philosophy.

Profile of LiveOut and Future Ambitions:

LiveOut is the first online student property database in Oxford. Our aim is to make the process of finding a student house much quicker and easier. Features of the site include:

• 90% of Oxford ’s estate agents list with us
• 600 properties in our database
• Photos and Google maps of the properties
• 100% free for students to use
• Flatmate-finding forum for students to find flatmates

Other members of the team include Stephen Hartley, Dave Nash, Alasdair Bell and Paul Doerwald.

Our plan is to roll out LiveOut in student cities across the country.

Problems he’s had and how he’s overcome them:

The first issue was building the team. Here OE and the synergy database were key. I met Steve on the committee of OE, and met Dave and Paul through synergy.

Once we had the team the next step was to talk to estate agents in Oxford to see what they thought of the idea. Fortunately they were all enthusiastic and also gave us ideas for the site.

We definitely had a time problem. The rush for student property begins in January, and the site wasn’t ready until mid-December, so we had to cut back on some of the features that we wanted on the site just to launch in time.

Major successes:

• Launching the site and getting 600 properties in our database.
• Receiving 200,000 hits in the first month.
• Becoming profitable in the second month.