Compideal

The housing crisis isn't a secret, and it would've been easy to stay on the surface. But after research, mapping the socio-cultural tensions at play, and a commercial-opportunity heatmap, a few key insights stood out:

• The average age of someone looking for a shared flat in 2024 is 33.
• Although a large share of people share out of necessity, nearly 20% of the market lives in shared flats by choice.

What does this tell us?

• That there's a share of the population that falls outside the traditional profile of a flatmate.
• That this group, being more established and holding different values, can have money to spend on paying for a professional service.

We also found similar, more informal solutions in other high-pressure markets, like London, Berlin or New York.

The product dilemma came down to the format of the service and where to put the priorities.

The choice was between putting resources into building an automated matching app or into improving the manual matching.

After co-creation workshops, we kept manual matching, to keep refining it and get to the best possible service.

The available resources went into commercial and advertising efforts, to get a critical mass of new users who could validate our A/B tests on pricing, journey, and so on.

Compideal already had a strong brand, and on the creative side we only had to add a few brushstrokes to align the visual and written identity with the older users we were targeting at the time.

The bigger work, though, was on the narrative side. Because with Compideal, sharing is something you choose, and something that enriches your life.

(That cost us the chance to churn out viral-worthy Instagram posts about flatmate horror stories, but you can't undersell the service you're actually selling.)