Splitting expenses among roommates is a hairy endeavor.

Paper towels, dish detergent, toilet paper, hand soap, trash bags. Oh, and rent.

João Ritter and Tyler Hayes — then upperclassmen at the UNC-Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University, respectively — sought a simple way to pay both their landlord and one another for shared household expenses.

Their idea evolved into an application with a user base of 7,500 people: Roof.io.

Driven by a positive experience with a Carrboro landlord, Ritter used his programming background in concert with the landlord himself, Nathan Mills, a managing director at Mills Properties, to design Roof alongside Hayes.

“He builds really good homes,” Ritter said of Mills. “He renovates well, and really cares about working with tenants on repairs and making payments.”

Mills had been seeking software to help his group manage rental properties, says Ritter, and he found existing options lacked the character inherent in the interactions between landlords and tenants. The applications focused primarily on the landlord’s line items, helping track revenues and expenses.

Ritter and Hayes correctly theorized that landlords and tenants wanted more out of the interchange.

Following his graduation in 2016, student-turned-CEO Ritter worked full-time on Roof, building out its platform and including communication features for roommates to share expenses and report maintenance items for landlords to tackle.

Each maintenance item has a dedicated conversation thread within Roof, allowing users (landlords and tenants) to track a situation’s progress through online dialogue: A leaky faucet will lead to tenants sharing pictures and a description for the landlord to understand the extent of the problem, who can then provide status updates for the tenant to view throughout the problem’s resolution period. Pictures and documentation of receipts and invoices allow for accountability throughout the exchange.

Built out, Roof had been born.

“I graduated,” Ritter said, “stayed in Chapel Hill — lived with my parents for a year and taught a class at the journalism school to make some money. But basically I was all-in on Roof for a year.”

The team had grown to four people, all designers and engineers — each a co-founder at Roof.

“We reached an inflection point,” Ritter said. “We were running out of money. We said, ‘We’re growing this company and we enjoy what we do. Do we want to try to fundraise our way through this?’”

Without experience in pitching to venture capital investors, Ritter says the efforts to raise capital didn’t amount to much.

“I moved out to San Francisco and took a full-time job,” said Ritter, who now works for YouTube. “And I began growing Roof on the side. It’s a lot of fun to work on this on nights and weekends.”

Word of mouth

There is no sarcasm in Ritter’s voice as he says that last sentence. To him, it doesn’t feel like work.

By day, he and other co-founders work to earn capital that is plugged directly back into their nights-and-weekends work at Roof — the aim is to market the firm for maximal growth. Working a double-shift creates synergies for all companies involved, Ritter said.

“I learn a lot working at Roof that I can bring to the table at YouTube,” he said. “I work on the same stack at both places; so, I’m iterating on knowledge on both sides of the coin. Obviously you earn a perspective on growth and scale at YouTube that inevitably becomes part of my craft at Roof.”

Growth is catalyzed as users discover the app through word of mouth or ads across different social media networks, said Hayes.

“We’ve got a lot of users who use it only as roommates,” he says, “and they’ll find it on the app store searching ‘roommate app.’ We run some Instagram and Facebook ads to get landlords on board; we’ve run podcast ads. Landlords also hear about us through their own networks, so we try to encourage it spreading through word of mouth.”

The pricing model is simple: Roof is free for roommates to share expenses, and landlords are charged a $2 fee per tenant based off each rental transaction. So, if four tenants live at a property under Roof’s management, their landlord will be charged $8 total for each rental payment made by the tenants.

Hayes explains that the landlord can choose to pass this cost off to the tenants in the form of increased rent, or choose to absorb the cost themselves.

“Our emphasis is always going to be on customer service,” said Ritter, “and making sure every single person on Roof is extremely happy. We think about everything we add as this piece of the puzzle that we’re building out towards the future.”

Roof’s focus now is not on “over-business-ifiying” the brand, according to Ritter. But business is undeniably in the back of the young startup’s mind.

“We’re building some really cool features that I think will be of value to users of all sizes,” Ritter says, hinting at apartment operators. “We’d like to get a few of those bigger players on board right now.”

The change is coming in the near term, the founders say.

“It won’t necessarily be something that the customer sees,” says Ritter.

Hayes explains that the changes are “under-the-hood,” and will provide for immense scalability within Roof’s platform.

For now, Roof is without a formal office.

The startup has employees around the United States: From the initial Carrboro spark to university students running sales campaigns in Pennsylvania and nighttime engineers in kitchens and living rooms across San Francisco and Portland.

“We’re on Google Hangouts for meetings,” says Ritter. “We’re on the way to figuring it all out.”