Four countries, two strangers, one contract

Someone moving abroad for four months has nowhere to go: short-stay platforms price per night and long-term rentals ask for a local guarantor and a twelve-month lease. So they end up in Facebook groups, sending money to a stranger.

The risk runs both ways. The renter can lose a deposit; the host can hand their keys to someone they can’t pursue across a border.

The brief I inherited described listings. Listings were the easy part. The hard part was the moment two strangers commit, so verification, contracts, held payments and visible fees stopped being five features and became one problem, approached five times.

Search, filters, cards and the map behave like the platforms people already know: in a product about safety, novelty reads as risk. What changes is the unit: stays are searched by months, and every price is monthly with bills included.

Paying is where a renter’s fear peaks. The payment step shows exactly where the money goes: held by the platform, released to the host only after the renter arrives and confirms, with a full refund if the room isn’t as listed.

BuscoRoomies took 10% of the rent from the host every month. A host who discovers that after publishing has been handled; one who sees it while choosing a price is making a decision. So the fee lives inside the listing flow, next to a live preview of what renters will see.

Once listed, the dashboard is built around the decisions a host actually makes: who to accept, when someone moves in, when money arrives.

No consumer product had a pattern for this, so this is where most of the design work went. The contract shows French and Spanish side by side, highlights the terms that matter (dates, rent, deposit) and shows who has signed. France and Argentina don’t agree on what a lease is; the product had to be correct in both.

I joined as the only person on the tech team. When a CTO and developers arrived, I went from deciding to negotiating. The first dashboard led with earnings and ratings. Neither existed as data. I rebuilt it around what the platform did know.

Both sides worked end to end: renters searched, booked and paid; hosts listed, accepted and got paid; contracts were signed on the platform. The first users arrived days before I left and I had no analytics, so I won’t estimate numbers I don’t have.

The research was handed to me. I worked from the founder’s experience, five colleagues testing the flows, and two journeys I mapped myself, the one place I could see where each side was waiting on the other. Now I push to meet real users much earlier than feels comfortable.