I closed the room-listing site and kept the test

You post a room on a Tuesday and by Thursday you have forty almost identical messages: "Hi, is it still available?". About none of them do you know what matters, when they are up and about, whether they wash up, how often they have people over. So you pick whoever wrote first, or whoever seemed nice in a twenty-minute viewing, and then you live with that decision for a year.

Roomealo comes from a line we had written down long before we had anything: you choose a flat in an afternoon, you live with the people for a year. I build it with a partner, and it shows, in a good way: there's someone to stop you when you fall for a screen.

The first version

The first version was, I admit, another listing site. Rooms with their rent, their neighbourhood and their photos, profiles of people looking, a chat and a waitlist per city. The only different thing was that we sorted by compatibility instead of price.

And there I ran into the usual marketplace problem. I needed people looking and people offering, in the same city and at the same time, and without one the other has nothing to do. That's what the waitlist was for, to open city by city, starting where most people signed up. Meanwhile, the profiles on the site carried a "Sample data" label.

On top of that it was already in five languages, with city pages and guides for the viewing. It was building the whole house before knowing whether anyone wanted to come in, and it's a pattern I recognise in more than one project.

Why I closed it

Finding a room is pretty much solved. There are huge listing sites, with thousands of ads, maps and alerts, and competing there means competing on number of listings, which is exactly what a small project doesn't have at the start. An empty listing site is no use to anyone.

Thinking about how people really choose, I saw that the hard moment comes after the ad, when you already have the forty messages and have to decide. No listing site covers that moment, because for them the job ends when the message arrives. So I kept the one piece that was actually adding something, the test, and took everything else out.

How it works now

Roomealo no longer lists rooms. Your ad stays wherever you have it, on Idealista, on Badi or in a WhatsApp group, and Roomealo is what comes after:

• You, and whoever lives with you, take the living-together test: 24 flatshare situations, about four minutes.
• You get a link and paste it into your reply to everyone who messages you.
• Each candidate takes the same test and you see them ranked by how well they fit the whole household, with the reasons.

Nobody sees anyone’s answers, only the comparison. And it's free.

The test

What is inside the test is the part that hasn't changed. They aren't abstract questions, they are situations. I don't ask whether you're tidy, because everybody says yes. I put this in front of you: "The dishes have been in the sink since yesterday. They aren't yours." And you tell me what you do.

Out of that come eight dimensions and a profile, which was the part I enjoyed writing most. Quiet Nest, "home is for resting". Discreet Owl, "you live at night, and quietly". Balancer, "neither library nor afterparty". Fluid, "we will see as we go".

The part I care about most

A fit percentage isn't much use, an 86% tells you nothing. So every candidate comes with three things: where you fit, what to watch for, and what you should talk about before signing. That last one is a concrete question to ask at the viewing: "How often is it fine for someone to stay over?"

I like it because it doesn't hide the friction. It doesn't try to convince you that you'll be best friends, it hands you the awkward conversation before it becomes a problem.

And a couple of decisions nobody sees. Noise and cleanliness weigh more than the rest, because that's what people really argue about. And if three people already live in the flat, each candidate is compared with all three and the worst fit is what counts, not the average, because a flat doesn't break on the average.

What I took out

• The rooms. They are already on the listing sites, there's no need to have them here too.
• The chat. Everyone has already written to you somewhere, so you reply there.
• The waitlist. Something that works with the ad you already have works in any city from day one, and the two-sided problem almost goes away.

Taking things out was harder than building them. But every one of those pieces was there to hold up the listing site, and the listing site wasn't what was missing.

What I'm taking from it, so far

• That the good question isn't "are you tidy?" but "what do you do with these dishes?". Asking about situations instead of opinions works as well in a test as it does in an interview.
• That sometimes the product is hidden inside the product. The test was one more piece of the listing site and it ended up being the only thing that was needed.
• That if a marketplace needs both sides at once, it's worth looking for a way not to need them. You skip the hardest part before you start.

The interesting part comes now: seeing what the first homes do with the ranking, whether it helps them decide, whether the question is useful at the viewing and what they miss.