Roof - Delightful home sharing for roommates and their landlords.

@jacqvon My cofounders and I built the first version of Roof as just a roommate tool. We were undergrads at the time, so it was our way of solving our and our friends' problems that come with sharing a home. Then, after a while we realized that the vision we had for roommates—that people should enjoy each other and treat each other like humans!—could also make renting easier and more pleasant. We think a lot of the annoying parts of renting could be avoided if there were a better tool for communicating and doing stuff together, especially one that doesn't feel like a chore to use. Something really cool: we also found that a huge number of landlords CARED ABOUT and were actively putting in work to improve the renting experience for their tenants—yet, there aren't any products designed to help landlords with this. So addressing this is a huge motive for us. In the last 6 months we expanded Roof to be valuable to EVERYBODY in the home sharing space—roommates, tenants, landlords. We've had a beautiful community develop around our roommate features in the last two years that has helped us make calls on designing the app. And our landlord app only became totally functional near the end of last year, but we've had loads of response already from our early adopters that has helped us especially with the more recent updates.

@jacqvon @thayesx Per the latest comment, how are you differentiating yourselves from Airbnb? (i.e. besides the loyalty points/credits for which Airbnb will be deploying on their platform later this year) Is your platform more for "traditional" renters who are looking for places to rent for a year or longer? What is your target "renter" market?

@agreenwaldhq Although it could be used to manage short term rentals, Roof is designed with ”traditional” long term rentals in mind. Also instead of focusing on discovering new places to stay, Roof makes living in and renting a place enjoyable once you’re already there. Another big difference is our roommate features that, as far as I know, are totally outside AirBnB’s scope. So, our market includes landlords with a small to medium sized group of properties (who are more likely to know or communicate with their tenants more personally), those tenants who rent from them, and also their roommates. In fact, we’ve designed Roof to work beautifully for you and your roommates even if you aren’t using it to rent.

@thayesx Totally understand. Just one more follow-up. So then how are you different from https://roomiapp.com/?

@agreenwaldhq Roomi seems to be a beautiful tool for helping people find roommates to live with. Roof is for those who already have roommates, to make sharing a home with them more lovely. Roof helps roommates with things like keeping a tab of shared expenses, splitting up and tracking household chores, sharing shopping lists for common home goods, or making shared message threads.

@daviswbaer Hahah we joke about this often. The truth is, we began working on Roof so long ago that we developed our brand color even before AirBnB rebranded. Our current logo is much younger, but the similarity did actually escape us for a while.

@thayesx Haha time to go after AirBnB for copyright infringement then, right??? :)

@daviswbaer Good idea, we’ll start looking for a legal intern to give that one to 😉

@3raxton Those crashes were actually fixed in a big update released about a month ago. Haven't had any reported since!

@sammyschuckert Thanks Sammy!!

@austriker27 love it! At least there's no time like the present to start using Roof now 😎

@golear We've actually had the expense splitting feature of our app compared to Splitwise before—though I haven't played around with that app in several months so I'm not sure how much it's changed recently. Would you mind sharing more on how Splitwise works better for you guys?