Afito
Afito was Zillow for college students. We aggregated rental listings and used geolocation radiuses around each school to show students housing that was actually near their campus. The incumbents ran dated sites with stale listings and bad UX, so we built a modern one with Next.js.
It worked. We reached about 90,000 listings across the country, and Afito was the first product I built that crossed one million users. Students found us on Google, contacted landlords through us, and loved it.
The lesson
The business failed on the landlord side. We gave landlords listings for free, then asked them to pay. Free is an anchor. A price increase feels normal, but free-to-paid feels like a betrayal, even when the price is less than a coffee. We had built the product before we understood the pricing psychology.
We wound it down with no bad blood between co-founders. We helped a lot of students, took the idea as far as it could go, and moved on. Afito was also my first work with real estate data, which mattered more than I knew at the time: it is half the reason Parcl was a perfect match.