Apply HN: RoomEase – Ease and organise flat sharing

4 points by kostas_f 10 years ago | 5 comments

Problem : Until now flatmates end up using different apps for communication, shopping lists, task organisation, social planning, house finances, reminders and house service delivery. That's too many apps!

Solution : We are building a product that consists of two parts: [A] a platform for flatmate collaboration, organisation and socialising that [B] integrates with an online marketplace of tasks and services towards that goal.

Features : [A] Users can organise everyday house duties and shopping, communicate with their flatmates (in-app messaging), plan house gatherings (socialising), manage house expenses and billing [B] In addition, we will integrate a marketplace that allows users to ask people (neighbours, professionals) to provide their services for house duties or other tasks and an admin platform, where landlords can manage issues raised in each house. In the future we are planning to embed an intelligent house assistant that will be accessed through a conversational UI.

Demo : In the following link you can see a small demo of our (not complete yet) mvp (1.43) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDub9dNanlc

We would be really happy to hear what people are thinking of RoomEase, and answer any questions!

brudgers 10 years ago |

Based on the list of features, it's not clear who the core users will be. How will the competing interests of flat mates, service providers, neighbors, and land lords be reflected in the information flow?

For example, there are categories of information that land lords and neighbors might find attractive to know about flat mates but that flat mates are not keen on sharing. Likewise, local vendors may wish to message flat mates in ways that flat mates find annoying or that land lords find at odds with their interests.

Good luck.

kostas_f 10 years ago | |

Thanks for your question. That gives me the chance to clear thing up. It's going to be a long answer, but seems that my initial description caused some misunderstanding.

We are building a platform that targets people who are living in a shared property. So tenants will be our core users. Once signing up, a user will either create a new group or join an existing one (invitation only - users won’t be able to discover other groups). The group represents the house and inside that group only the tenants can interact, chat, do social planning, etc. It is a private place, where all the interaction between the users will remain private and they can’t be reached by people outside the group. That’s the core part of our app.

Now the second part is the marketplace of tasks and services, where people that have some skills or can offer some services and want to get paid for that, can list themselves. You can think of it as something similar to TaskRabbit.

Why are we building that? Because while interacting with their flatmates, people may notice that need some help on house duties or other tasks. For example you may want a professional cleaner to take care of the house cleaning, or you may realise that you don’t have time to do the shopping and want to find someone locally that can buy what’s on your shopping list. In that case, you go to the marketplace and ‘book' a person that will accomplish your task.

Finally the landlord will also not have any access to tenants’ activity. However we want to make it easy for flatmates not only to communicate with him, but also to raise any issues occurred in the house, such as damages, so that the landlord can take care (or even him can go the marketplace and search for a handyman that will do the fixes). We haven’t done any work on the landlord’s side, yet. These are just some ideas.

So that’s all! Please let me know if you have any further questions.

brudgers 10 years ago | | |

Thanks. That makes sense.

buss 10 years ago |

I think your problem doesn't actually exist. I've had roommates for years and have always been fine with direct in-person communication, texting, or post-it notes. How many people have you pitched this to that validated your assumption? Is there a different market you can target?

kostas_f 10 years ago | |

Appreciate your feedback. Having shared for several years a house with other people (some of them friends, others people that I was meeting for the first time), we faced problems which were not related to communication only (that can easily be solved with a chat app and sticky notes).Here are a few examples:

- Forget/delay to pay the bills

- Couldn’t arrange to do the house cleaning in a time convenient for everyone due to different schedules. In the end half the people would skip that task.

- When I was sharing a house with people that I was meeting for the first time, there was a need to socialise and plan to do some stuff together. We found out that using an app for social planning was very helpful and we could also get some ideas on what to do.

- Often I would get back late from work, when the supermarket was closed, so I needed someone to do the shopping for me. To solve this problem I was sending screenshots of my shopping list to the house group on whatsapp and I would ask my flatmates whether they could buy me that stuff.

And these are just a few. From my experience when you are out of the house most of the day it is difficult to solve these problems only with a chat app and sticky notes. Often we would use a different app for each problem. So me and my partner decided to build RoomEase.

Before we start developing this app, we pitched it to potential users. So far we have feedback from around 100 potential users and ~90% was very positive (some of them are friends, so we didn’t expect negative feedback on those cases). This gave us enough confidence to move on.

Regarding your last question, you probably mean different target audience. The market we are targeting is the market of house tasks and services, which is a validated one. Once we get our web app online, if we don’t see much growth on the number of users, we will reconsider the idea and who our core users are.

I understand that the demo is probably not very representative of what I am mentioning on the examples, but it is just an mvp. Again appreciate your feedback, it is good to know what people are thinking of this app.