RentLetter
Software for rental realtors in Ontario and BC — the paperwork end of leasing, made routine.
- Why I built it
- I knew I wanted to build something in real estate before I knew what it was. What exists now is the fourth version — it changed three times, and every change came from a conversation rather than a hunch. I sat with people working in the field, listened to the parts of their week they complained about, and rebuilt toward whatever actually made their day shorter. The product I set out to make and the product realtors are using now have almost nothing in common, and that is the point.
- Who it’s for
- Rental realtors in Ontario and BC, and by extension the landlords and ordinary tenants on the other side of every application. That mix set the design constraint: a realtor will tolerate a tool, but a tenant filling out an application will abandon anything that asks them to learn something. So it had to be obvious on first contact, on a phone, to someone who has never seen it before and does not care that it exists.
- How it went
- Free and pre-revenue, deliberately. Right now the goal is onboarding, not billing. New realtors come on every week, feedback comes back every week, and the early users have stayed — they are still using it, which at this stage is the only metric I trust.
- What blocked it
- Nothing technical, and no wall. The open question is market entry: which slice of the market to go at first, and what the right way in actually is. That is a positioning problem, and I would rather solve it with more conversations than with a guess.
- Where it stands
- Active, and the thing I spend most of my time on. Optimistic — so far, so good.