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.