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Kopa
p/kopaDiscounted and clean homes for those affected by COVID-19
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Shannon Fox

Kopa (previously PadPiper) - Find furnished apartments and housemates for 1+ months

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Kopa is the marketplace for furnished housing and compatible housemates. Kopa enables people to browse furnished rentals, find housemates with similar interests and lifestyles, choose beds, and split deposit and rent payments.

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Jack Forbes
Maker
Hello Hunters of Products, First of all, MAJOR thanks to @shanndfox for hunting us :) PadPiper helps students and recent grads find short-term housing for internships, while also providing landlords with a steady stream of verified student tenants. Listings are meant for the student situation, as they are short-term (3-12 months), furnished, and often times have been hosting students on internships for years. Landlords can benefit from a higher profit over annual leasing, without spending too much time finding suitable tenants. Here’s how it works: -- Landlords create an account through PadPiper, add a listing, and start attracting student interest at no cost -- Students can request to rent a space after confirming their school email address -- Message through PadPiper to accept booking requests and communicate with tenants We’re a group of engineering grads from the University of Waterloo (eh?). We are passionate about helping students find housing because we had plenty of house hunting headaches during internships. Can't wait to hear your thoughts, Jack P.S. Konami Code enthusiasts can have some fun on the home page
David Gold
@thenameisforbes @shanndfox Love the idea guys. Jumped through a lot of hoops trying to get into NYU housing late one summer; there's certainly a market here
Jack Forbes
Maker
@gavid_dold I've heard NY is brutal from a few people now! We will be targeting NY with our marketing efforts to landlords in the coming months :)
David Gold
@thenameisforbes Keep me in the loop. Happy to spread the love to my friends still doing summer internships/ in need of housing. Typically, students will look to NYU housing which will cost ~$1400-1600/month and consists of two twin beds in the same room. Not getting any bang for your buck.
Jack Forbes
Maker
@gavid_dold Well that sounds very familiar to the housing here in San Francisco, haha. Definitely a great place for PadPiper to try to help out!
Jack Forbes
Maker
@tpbtv Guilty as charged. #technolojesus
Shannon Fox
Hunter
Congrats on the launch, guys! @zlwaterfield @thenameisforbes This problem really resonates – I remember how tough it was to navigate a new city and negotiate shorter term leases with landlords while on a limited budget. That said, I have a few more questions and some feedback: Besides the short-term focus, what are your competitive advantages over other vetted rental platforms like Casalova? Are these listings only on PadPiper, or can students find them on other sites? I also noticed each listing has different lease terms. It might be helpful to pull out these terms on the preview thumbnail.
Jack Forbes
Maker
@shanndfox Very good questions! Our listings are curated to students, so even though sites like Casalova have shorter term leases, PadPiper listings are typically furnished, don't need to be toured beforehand, and have been hosting interns for years. We also provide a variety of features, specifically for students. Once signed in as a student, you can: - Easily check directions to your work, right on the listing results page - View the work locations of fellow students by checking out Connect, where you can find a community of students in the same city - Message fellow students working near you to find roommates While most listings are also on Craigslist, and some on Airbnb, students prefer to look on PadPiper, where the results are curated for them. Landlords like that we verify student emails, so they can trust that the messages they receive are legitimate. The same goes for students, since we verify listings and landlords if students say they have lived there before :) I appreciate the suggestion, too! Pulling out the lease terms into a preview is in our Asana tasks :D
Izzy Piyale-Sheard
Our students at Lighthouse Labs (a Toronto web/iOS bootcamp) might be an incredible use case for this! Our students are always looking for housing for 2-3 months. This would be a really awesome tool for them to easily take care of that without it being an extra hassle for us. Super excited to see this grow, and more than happy to promote. I just submitted a request to add Lighthouse Labs as a school, and as we've just been accredited as a Private Career College in the Government of Ontario (and also BC) could be a lot of fun!
Jack Forbes
Maker
@izzydoesizzy That's great to hear! Our team will be discussing lowering the minimum months to rent from 3 down to 1, and allowing landlords to specify a minimum that they would like. This way we would be able to support those 2 month stints. I will also talk to you directly about verifying Lighthouse Labs students :)
John Fowler
Loving the use of Konami Code on the site. Beautiful design! Love the product too!
Jack Forbes
Maker
@johnsteerfowler Thank you! I was undecided on mentioning Konami because obviously easter eggs are better when discovered naturally :) That being said there are still quite a few more...
Jerad Maplethorpe
Hey guys! I love the concept! A few questions though... Are you planning to expand to other cities? Any timeline on this? Seems like this could be applicable in almost any city. Also, do the housing arrangements line up with internship periods and schools' semesters? Excited to see where this goes!
Jack Forbes
Maker
@maplethorpej Very good questions! We absolutely are planning on expanding to other cities. Since our Beta launch last Fall, we have been able to double the number of listings on the site, and we have much farther to go. As one may assume, getting ahold of landlords is the hardest part. We are exploring new strategies to do this on a larger scale and are excited to more rapidly grow our listing count. Listings will line up differently with school semesters, depending on the length of the school terms, but the goal is to have housing options that support any school and internship schedule :)
ё
Having gone through Waterloo coop, I can attest to how annoying the housing hunt is. Craigslist, Padmapper, Kijiji, Google Maps + 749 other tabs open in search of that one place that actually accepts 4-month leases, isn't a 1.5 h commute away, and isn't sketchy. This seems to hit the nail right on the head. Wish this was around for my coop terms! One question: how are you planning on monetizing PadPiper?
Jack Forbes
Maker
@carrotsnotwar First of all, what a name. Secondly, that makes two of us because I just graduated and needed help with housing so very badly. Then again, that struggle led me to build this so maybe that worked out! To answer your question, we haven't been focusing on monetization yet, we've been trying to make sure we focus on building something students and landlords find easy to use and helpful. Currently, we do allow students to pay the "holding fee" (i.e. first month's rent and/or security deposit) through the site and we add a 0.5% fee to that. Future revenue models are in the works :D
Calvin Nhieu
This is awesome! As a Waterloo co-op student, I definitely get peace of mind browsing for leases from trusted and past landlords, instead of sending out a bunch of sketchy craigslist emails and getting back sketchier responses. You guys are solving a real pain point here - sending this to my friends coming to the bay area!
Jack Forbes
Maker
@calvinnhieu Thank you so much for the feedback and for sharing! Sharing that Canadian love.
Vamshi Vangapally
Love the logo :) House n Grad cap
Jack Forbes
Maker
@vamshi4001 Wow coming from a UI/UX Guy, I really appreciate that! It took many iterations to come to this logo but I am happy with it too :)
Lucas Connors
I wish this existed while I was in school, this would have been so helpful! Trying to find a place to live, especially for only 4 months can be really stressful while you're trying to focus on midterms. Does PadPiper have any plans to expand this so students can use this for their school terms, as well as their internships?
Jack Forbes
Maker
@lucasconnors I'm glad to hear the need is real! We were in the exact same boat :P That's a good question, we do plan on focusing on school term housing, not just internships. If finding housing as a student is difficult, we'd like to help with it, no matter the context.
Alexio Del Gobbo
This is perfect. The process flows so smoothly that I was able to find a room that suits my needs in about 5 minutes. The usual process of scanning through endless Facebook posts / Kijiji listings is annoying and tedious, so its awesome that I can avoid that whole mess. Also, landlord profiles are a great way for me to predict whether we will get along well, instead of going into a deal blind. Keep up the good work!
Jack Forbes
Maker
@gobbz Thanks Alexio! I really appreciate the positive review :)
Keyul
This is an one of the most needed thing. The launch time is perfect. Summer is coming. ☀️
Jack Forbes
Maker
@keyul Thanks! Summer can be especially difficult since it's more competitive too :O
Paul Burke
A much needed product! What sort of feedback are you getting from landlords?
Jack Forbes
Maker
@pburke24 Thanks Paul! I like the concept of RentHoop, by the way, I would love to collaborate in helping students. Feedback from landlords has been incredibly inspiring. It's great to meet with landlords that have been looking for this solution for years. My landlord, for example, has been leasing his Bay Area properties to University of Waterloo students for years and has had to rely on his prior tenants to help him attract new tenants. Now he is able to get reviews from prior tenants on PadPiper and attract much more interest organically :D
Bill
As a student looking for Summer housing right now, this site is a godsend! If only you were in more cities! RIT, like Waterloo, has a large co-op program - there are hundreds, if not thousands, of people here who could benefit from using this.
Jack Forbes
Maker
@billdybas Thank you for mentioning RIT, I didn't realize you have a co-op program! I always love to learn about new co-op schools in the US. I'm really excited for the potential that cooperative education has in the US, there has been so much news promoting it the last few years. I could not agree more that we need more listings! Obviously our marketing is entirely outbound right now, but I think after we hit 1,000 listings we should start to see inbound, followed by (hopefully) exciting growth :)
Kiron Sen
Hey guys! Are you going to expand outside of North America?
Jack Forbes
Maker
@kiron_sen Our focus is going to be on North America for the foreseeable future. If there is a strong demand for PadPiper elsewhere, we absolutely want to help as many students as we can!