Why we started The Room Ring
By Lia Wayman · Community · August 2, 2023
In August 2014, I moved from Manhattan back to Boston for a new job. My New York roommates needed someone to take my room. They couldn't find anyone in their network. The only real option was Craigslist — stressful, anonymous, uncomfortable.
That's the simple version. Here's the longer one.
What it actually felt like
My roommates were great. I'd lived with them for two years. We had a real apartment in Chelsea with a working kitchen and a couch we'd argued about. I knew finding someone to take my place was going to be hard, but I didn't realize how hard until we started looking.
We posted on Craigslist. We posted on Facebook. We asked everyone we knew. Two weeks went by. People who responded were either weird, far away, or already gone. The ones who came to visit were strangers we knew nothing about, evaluating our home in a way that felt invasive and one-sided. My roommates were stressed; I was stressed at a distance; nobody was sleeping.
Eventually they filled the room. It worked out, mostly. But the process had been so bad that I called Josie a few weeks later, half-joking: someone should make a better way to do this.
What we noticed
Once we started paying attention, we saw the same story everywhere. A friend in San Francisco was about to take a job in DC and didn't know anyone there — she was going to Craigslist a room. Another friend was leaving a long-term relationship in Brooklyn and needed a roommate fast — she ended up moving in with a complete stranger from a Facebook group because her timeline didn't allow anything else.
The pattern was: the people most likely to be good roommates are the ones already connected to your world. Someone who went to your school. Someone who works in your industry. Someone a mutual friend can vouch for. But there was no platform that surfaced those connections. So everyone defaulted to strangers, and stranger luck.
The wedge
That's the wedge The Room Ring was built around: your network already does the vetting. If we could just show you the people in your extended social circle who happen to be looking for the same thing you're looking for, the entire process changes. You'd start every conversation with context. You'd have a mutual friend to ask about anyone who seemed promising. You wouldn't be Craigslist-ing — you'd be using your real life.
Eighteen months of building later, we launched in October 2015. New York and San Francisco first, because that's where we lived. Boston and LA the next year. Chicago after that. We're still adding cities, still adding features, still grinding on the same problem.
What's changed and what hasn't
The product is more polished than it was in 2015. We have better filters. The messenger doesn't crash. The partner perks marketplace is way bigger. We've helped tens of thousands of renters skip the Craigslist roulette.
The mission hasn't changed. Where you live and who you live with matters. The search shouldn't feel like rolling dice. That's the only reason we built this, and it's the only thing we're working on.
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