MyRoomie started as my own problem

Most founder stories get told backwards. You find the market, you validate the problem, you build the thing. Mine went the other way: I had the problem, badly, and only later found out how many other people had it too.

The wall #

I had been in Krakow. Coming back to Athens meant finding somewhere to live, and what I found was a market that had quietly become impossible. Rents had climbed past what a salary here supports. The obvious answer — share a flat — turned out to be its own problem.

The listings were a mess of classifieds and Facebook groups. Nothing was verified. Nobody was who they said they were, or at least you had no way of knowing. You met a stranger in a flat and made a decision about the next year of your life in forty minutes.

That is not a housing shortage. That is a trust problem sitting on top of a housing shortage, and the second one is the one software can actually touch.

What I built instead #

MyRoomie started narrow: match people who would actually live well together, and verify that both of them exist.

That sounds small. It is not. Compatibility is not one question, it is fifty — sleep schedule, noise tolerance, guests, cleaning, pets, smoking, how you handle a disagreement about the electricity bill. Most of the friction in a flatshare is not about the flat.

Verification is the other half. A listing that has been checked and a person who has been checked are worth more than a hundred that have not, and that is the part the classifieds could never do because it costs money and attention.

What it turned into #

It did not stay a matching app. Once you are the layer people trust for housing, the questions keep arriving: can you handle the lease, can you handle relocation paperwork, can you manage the property, can you do this for a company moving twelve people.

So it became a housing platform rather than a marketplace — flatshare matching, managed properties, corporate housing, relocation support, verification running underneath all of it. Athens first, then wider. Cyprus is the current focus.

The part I keep coming back to #

The problem was mine. That matters more than it sounds, because it means I never had to guess what the frustrating part was. I had felt it, recently, with my own deposit on the line.

Every product decision since has been checked against that: would this have helped me, that month, in that situation? It is a narrow test and it has been right far more often than any market analysis I have run.