It’s a Wednesday night, EBF is dying down and you’ve been making moves on your crush all night. You wanna move things into your room, so you text your roommate.

“Hey, can I have the room for a bit?”

“Lol sure man, I’ll be in the computer cluster,” he replies.

It’s a little awkward, but it’s not the end of the world. It happens.

Freshmen Ion Esfandiari and Lukas Haas know what getting that text is like. They met on the first Friday of fall quarter, and the next day, Esfandiari was sexiled. And it kept happening, to both, so they had an idea.

Esfandiari, who hails from France, and Haas, from Switzerland, understand that personal relationships are a big part of college. Both are in long-term, long-distance relationships and know that sometimes, students want some privacy.

In the beginning, Esfandiari and his roommate had a system in which his roommate would draw a cross on the board outside their room. But his roommate sometimes forgot to erase it afterwards, or to draw it in the first place. Other times, Esfandiari, tired after a long cram session in Green, would forget to check the board before he entered the room. Such oversights, as you can imagine, can result in many awkward encounters.

Some students write on a whiteboard; others resort to the infamous sock (or scrunchy, or tie) on the doorknob system. These visual shorthands, however, tend to be unreliable or unwelcomingly conspicuous.

This leaves students with a convenient option: texting. Esfandiari conceded that this common system isn’t bad. But he and Haas have developed a better alternative. Shortly after meeting, the two of them started working on Roommating, an app that aims to make sexiling more fun, convenient and discreet.

Up until recently, only a small group of Esfandiari’s and Haas’ friends had access to a beta version of the app. But after receiving approval from the App Store, they released the app at a launch party on Feb. 16.

To start, only students with a Stanford email will be allowed to create an account. Students from other universities, upon attempting to sign up, will be directed to a page (styled in the colors of their school) where they can see how many people in their school have attempted to sign up, as well as information about bringing the app there. They have plans to expand to Cal, Harvard, Yale, Penn and UCLA in the next few months, with more campuses to come.

Students at other universities can sign up to become “University Ambassadors,” who the founders say will help promote the app and collect feedback from students at their respective colleges. In addition to receiving Roommating swag, ambassadors will have the opportunity to collaborate closely with Esfandiari and Haas, and maybe even to receive financial compensation as the project matures.

After creating an account, you have the option to request to join an existing room or to create a new one. For the latter, you can select from any residence on campus, including row houses, and enter your room. Once you are paired with your roommate, you are good to go.

So say you’re heading back from EBF — then what? You open the app, click on the lock icon, then select a fixed time, which spans from ten minutes to two hours. Your roommate is then notified and can react with a fire, angry face, sad face, or heart emoji. Esfandiari explained that if, for whatever reason, the sexiler “doesn’t like how it’s going,” they can click a “Rescue Me Button” to alert their roommate. With the iPhone’s 3D touch technology, you can “lock” your room and activate the rescue feature with only one touch, circumventing any texts, calls or other systems you and your roommate might employ.

Haas highlighted his commitment to users’ privacy, ensuring that all information is encrypted so that no other users or developers know which rooms are “locked” and by whom.

While Esfandiari and Haas are both involved in every aspect of the app, they have primarily delegated front-end development to Esfandiari, with Haas assuming most back-end responsibilities. Both taught themselves basic programming before college and have continued to develop their skills formally at Stanford. Roommating is Esfandiari’s third entrepreneurial project, following Yapper and Carad, which he founded in high school.

Both have committed “probably hundreds of hours” to developing the app and marketing it, and they work on it for at least a few hours each day. While Haas focuses on the “tech,” Esfandiari has concerned himself with creating a clean, user-friendly interface. They have already begun interviewing candidates to spearhead marketing, which so far has fallen primarily on Haas’ shoulders.

In fall quarter, Esfandiari and Haas were both enrolled in MS&E 178: The Spirit of Entrepreneurship, taught by Professor Ravi Belani. Esfandiari and Haas attributed the inspiration for their approach to developing Roommating to the ideation, user testing, and rapid prototyping processes they learned about in the class, as well as to Eric Ries’ lean startup methodology.

For now, Rommating is “unmonetized” and has no corporate structure. Esfandiari and Haas’ immediate priority is to acquire users and shape the app to users’ needs and desires, though they anticipate that Roommating will grow into an app that goes beyond sexiling. They foresee a one-stop-shop for “everything campus-related” — such as targeted event promotion and student communication channels. Yet both reiterated that the future of the app will be determined by the feedback they receive from users. In fact, they have encouraged their beta testers to share even their most minute criticisms and ask that new users do the same. Once they have picked up more traction, they plan to enter competitions such as BASES’ $100K Startup Challenge and seek funding and mentorship from incubators.

So the next time things are heating up and you feel disgruntled or frustrated with the awkwardness of sexiling, remember—there’s an app for that.

 

Contact Lucas Hornsby at lhornsby ‘at’ stanford.edu.