Roost

The problem

The design industry was built for people who own things. Big budgets, permission to drill, the assumption you’ll still be there in five years. Renters don’t get any of that. What they get is Pinterest boards they never act on, Instagram rooms that make their apartment feel like a failure by comparison, and design advice that starts with “tear out the carpet.”

The gap isn’t information. Renters know what they want. The gap is between I want this and I did something about it. Almost nobody builds there. Inspiration products optimize for saving and following. Progress products are gatekept by budget, expertise, or the implicit message that your space isn’t worth serious design attention.

What was missing wasn’t a better mood board. It was a place where the act of showing up counted as a win.

Who it’s for

First-apartment renters figuring out what home means on a $200 budget. Long-term renters who tried once, got overwhelmed, and stopped. People who’ve spent years calling themselves “not creative” because every design platform they found was speaking to someone else.

Not flippers. Not stagers. Not people who know what “ogee” means. The ones the design world forgot to talk to.

That user came into focus through extended ethnography in renter-design communities on Reddit. The signal was consistent: people wanted permission and small wins, not better taste. Better taste was a barrier. Peer validation was a door.

How it helps

The core insight is that the product is emotional reward, not interior design advice.

Inspiration without action doesn’t feel like inspiration. It feels like failure. Aspiration gaps reinforce the story a lot of renters already tell themselves: that design is for other people, with more money, more taste, more square footage.

So the product works backwards from emotional outcome. Posting your space is the win, not the start of a critique session. Small, lease-safe improvements get surfaced before dramatic transformations. The architecture routes around expert judgment because expert judgment stalls people who already doubt themselves.

Peer review replaces critique. Emerging designers participate as contributors, not authorities. The monetization path (tip revenue and platform fees) aligns platform incentives with community momentum rather than against it. Revenue grows when members succeed, not when they scroll longer.

Every screen has one design question: does this make the person feel a small win? Not “does this surface the best content?” Not “does this show the most aspirational room?” Those are secondary. The win comes first.

What we built

A community platform where you post your space and get rental-safe suggestions from peers and emerging designers. Real-time comment infrastructure with AI moderation using Google Perspective, a multi-step project flow that breaks big intentions into doable moves, and a design system that’s accessible by default.

Stack: React, Vite, TypeScript, Supabase, shadcn/ui. End-to-end and accessibility testing baked in from the start. Design tokens aligned to Figma components so visual updates propagate cleanly. The marketing site lives separately at roost.design, also Astro-based.

We cut a rating system mid-build because something that looked encouraging in concept started feeling like judgment in practice. We cut a review-and-approve flow that was supposed to improve suggestion quality but added friction at exactly the wrong moment. Both decisions were correct. Neither was obvious until we made them.

Cofounded with Josie Moss. She leads UX and brand; I lead product and engineering decisions. The collaboration is real, and it shows in the product’s coherence. The product got better when the collaboration got better.

What I learned

Building for emotion is fundamentally different from building for utility. Utility products ask “does this solve the problem?” Emotional products ask “does this make the person feel something useful?” Those are not the same question and they don’t share a design process.

The hardest decisions were subtractive. What I didn’t expect: how much easier it is to talk yourself into keeping a feature than removing one. The sunk-cost pull is strong. Josie’s design instinct helped here. She notices when something in the emotional experience is off before it’s visible in any data.

The other lesson is slower. Cofounding is a practice, not a structure. We got better at disagreeing in the open and making decisions faster than we did in month one. Organizational health and product health track together. That’s not a coincidence.

The research insight that I carry forward: when users say “I’m not creative,” they’re telling you about their relationship to the feedback they expect, not their actual capability. Remove the expected negative feedback and a lot of that identity claim softens. That’s a design-and-psychology problem, not an inspiration problem. You can’t fix it by adding better content.

Status

Active, building through 2025 and beyond. Pre-revenue. Early user traction, GTM in progress. We’re building the product we want to use, for an audience we know exists. The community is forming.