
Assuredly – Live with People You Trust - llcoolray
http://www.assuredly.us/
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Herpyderp666
How the hell did we end up with a world where companies run background checks
on rooomates? Fuck this. I'm out.

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idlewords
OK, but this is going on your permanent record.

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dsr_
This strikes me as odd: is it cultural?

In my experience, people choose to live with friends. If they can't do that,
they ask their friends for recommendations. And if they can't do that, they
try very hard to live alone, in a closet if necessary, until they can make
some friends.

The ways somebody can be a good or bad apartment-mate go much further than
anything that I imagine can be discovered by a third party making a few phone
calls according to a script. Can Assuredly knock out the most egregiously
unpleasant people? Probably.

But it couldn't tell you that while I paid my rent on time and made no loud
noises, I would be essentially absent from the apartment I shared one year
because I all-but-moved-in with my girlfriend. And I didn't renew the lease
because I did move in with her the next year. Was I a bad apartment-mate? That
depends on what you wanted from me. I'm certain that I wasn't what was wanted
in that case.

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coldtea
> _In my experience, people choose to live with friends. If they can 't do
> that, they ask their friends for recommendations. And if they can't do that,
> they try very hard to live alone, in a closet if necessary, until they can
> make some friends._

Not sure were you're getting that. People live with unknown (before) roomates
etc all the time.

I know it for a fact all over Europe, especially for younger people and
Europe, but from the media, interviews, biographies and such I know it happens
in the US too, to share the rent, etc.

Heck, weren't even a couple episodes of Friends were they were trying to find
a new roomate?

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fit2rule
I think its a particularly American affliction: to know ones roommates in
advance. Perhaps its an artifact from the formative years, where the shock of
living with a stranger is learned for the first time, and subsequent entrance
into society is predicated with a desire to not have "a roommate experience
which sucked".

In Europe, the roommate experience just sucks - from the get-go - because
nobody wants a roommate, really. Americans, unwilling to fess up to this fact,
seem to have created machinations designed to facilitate this ease.

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masukomi
I'm In Boston and most folks I know who live with roommates found them through
posts online. People who knew their roommates before living with them are
definitely the exception, not the norm.

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jevgeni
How did the "hacking" world go from "Let's organize and make accessible all of
the world's information." to "Let's make a couple of phone calls to people you
don't know" ?

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coldtea
Didn't it start from ""Let's make a couple of phone calls to people you don't
know" (and/or "people you know")?

Back when it was still called "phreaking".

"Let's organize and make accessible all of the world's information" sounds
like Xanadu's, Google's or a librarian's goal, not the "hacking worlds" in
general...

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jevgeni
Good point. :)

I've meant "hacking" in the (yet again) bastardized sense - the tech start-up
scene.

It just seems to me that the scale, or the grand vision of new tech start ups
has been incredibly mundane lately. I often imagine myself listening to a
pitch presentation that goes something like this:

Hi, everybody, I'm Clarc McSugarHill <me: vaguely paying attention> and we are
going to disrupt the market <me: interested, but annoyed by the buzz word> of
buying fedoras online. <me: angry and asleep>

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joeyspn
Nice project, but after sharing flat for 15 years with people from all over
the world I've learned that the flatmate that doesn't click with you, can
perfectly click with another roomie. So I doubt the tool will be accurate,
it's highly relative.

Personally I'd prefer a site for meeting potential flatmates that are
techie/startuppers? In the valley chances are that 70% of potential flatmates
are somewhat involved in the industry, but here in EU is much difficult. For
instance I'd like to move to London or Berlin for some months but finding
techies for sharing a flat is not easy...

Does anyone know of a tool/website for this?

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oneJob
Boooo. No fun. Do what I did. End up living with the other two people who
ended up in front of a door you've never walked through in Alphabet City, NYC
in response to a Craigslist advert. Did one of those two people stop paying
rent without letting us know, and did we have to find out three months later
by way of threat of eviction from management? Yes. But, he went by the name
"Cash" and the guy who eventually replaced him was insanely good people. And,
I got that story.

Besides, "Cash" did have his references checked by the management company. And
we all three signed separate leases along with co-signers (I didn't need one,
but the management company insisted per policy, and I really wanted to rent
this place). It all came down to communication. Not reference checks.

And,,, "Trust". I think there is a misunderstanding shown in the use of that
word in this context.

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supercoder
Assuming there is an actual need here, the biggest problem with this business
is there's probably going to be very little repeat business.

Customer acquisition costs vs lifetime value will kill em.

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cableshaft
That's the same reason why it's so hard for online dating apps to get VC
funding. If it's actually effective at finding long-term matches for people,
then it will have to keep churning through new customers.

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nickthemagicman
Is this site for people who don't want to make a phone call?

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weego
Could they legally gather any information about you from an employer? It feels
like a massive legal liability waiting to happen.

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Assuredly
Hey HN, this is the Assuredly team. Thanks for all of the feedback, this was
exciting to wake up to this morning.

We’re certainly not trying to be creepy or move us all toward a bleak
authoritarian future.

Reference checks, though time-consuming, are already performed by many leasers
looking to fill a room. Our goal is to simplify the process to the point where
it becomes feasible for anyone wishing to learn more than what can be
uncovered in 15 minutes over coffee. All checks that we perform are done
strictly with the permission of the applicant; we’re not doing any sneaking
around.

Many of us have had bad roommate situations unfold after seemingly smooth
interviews - from financial disagreements to apartments nearly burning down.
We’d like to help you avoid those situations.

We’re in the experimentation phase. The first round of checks are being
performed this week and we hope to learn more about the underlying needs and
what we can do to help.

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normloman
Was your last landlord a jerk hellbent on ruining your life? Good luck being
anyone's roommate. - The Future

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ZenoArrow
How are you expecting your staff will understand the priorities of your
clients as well as the clients themselves? In other words, how do you know
what questions to ask, and whether they're important to the client?

If this process requires extra guidance from the client up front, isn't it
just easier to just make the phone calls yourself (like nickthemagicman
suggested)?

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hellbanner
I'll quote myself from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10195090](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10195090)
"Yet another industry with an already solved problem"

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holdenc
As someone with a life-long obsession with bathroom neatness (I've been driven
to violence by roommates who don't respect my toilet paper roll orientation
rules) it's comforting to know I can find a sane person to live with.

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mironathetin
Sheldons should live alone!

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pluma
Disrespecting toilet paper roll orientation conventions can be a form of
micro-aggression.

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yaps8
Does the person have to (legally) accept that you ask questions about them ?

I know I would not feel comfortable about someone asking questions about me to
my previous roommates and I wouldn't give information about them to a third
party.

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parennoob
I hope so, and I would probably rule out any future roommates who ask me to do
this _in addition_ to checks that landlords already run.

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magic_beans
On what planet is there a market for this? I can't even imagine this EVER
working in roommate-centric New York City.

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fit2rule
We are taking steps, one at a time, towards total authoritarianism.

And site, or 'product', this is one of the steps along the way.

The day we stop trusting random strangers is the day we allow ourselves to
become a small part of an authoritarian zeitgeist.

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parennoob
In the US anyway, landlords already run reference and credit checks.

So now, in addition to the intrusive questions with gobs of personal data that
the landlords give us, we will have to give more data to this service and have
future roommates run credit checks on each other? No thanks.

This creep of "services" into what should be a part of normal social
interactions and analysis is slightly worrying; to say nothing of the
commercialization of personal relations ("You read the reviews before buying a
toaster on Amazon, why wouldn't you want to learn more about the person you're
about to share a bathroom with?"). And I say this despite having had a 'bad
roommate' situation last year which this service would have probably prevented
(in fact, in that case, the landlord's checks did flag the guy, but we let him
live with us anyway).

