Kopa is the world's first medium-term housing marketplace. Moving to a new place is difficult and lonely. Kopa enables interns, travel nurses, and others to browse furnished rentals, find housemates with similar interests and lifestyles, choose beds, and split deposit and rent payments.
2012-2015
Co-op housing struggle
During my first co-op in the Bay Area, I couldn’t find housing and ultimately lived with a family friend. For my next co-op, my landlord kept our entire security deposit for a scratch on the floor and even after winning a lawsuit, we never saw the money. The struggle continued for my following four co-ops.
October 2016
PadPiper is born
On my birthday, no less. I decided to tackle the problem of co-op housing for my Capstone project at UWaterloo. After a year of serious coding and presenting the project at the Engineering Symposium, we launched the site. One month of hustling later, we had 50 San Francisco listings and 100 renters signed up.
February 2017
Dream team unites
Zach Waterfield, Courtney Sabo, and I joined forces to build PadPiper in our spare time. Zach was finishing his final year at UWaterloo while Courtney worked as a designer at the San Francisco design firm where we met. Courtney handled the design, Jack handled the frontend, and Zach handled the backend.
July 2018
We go full-time
After promising initial traction, including processing $100,000 in rent, we decided to turn the side hustle into a full-time hustle. Zach graduated UWaterloo, traveled for one month, then came to San Francisco. Courtney and I quit our full-time jobs.
March 2019
Y Combinator
After rejection from YC S18, we were accepted into the WeFunder XX incubator. After getting over our YC rejection, we decided to apply again. Second time around, we were accepted into the YC W19 batch.
March 2020
Covid
We saw the highest revenue thus far during the first half of March, 2020. During the latter half of March 2020, we refunded all of that revenue. PadPiper (now Kopa) was comically at the intersection of the three worst hit markets globally; travel, hospitality, and real estate.
March 2021
Back to real jobs
One year of throwing spaghetti at a wall to see what stuck confirmed the reality that our renter demographic simply was not moving still. We took full-time jobs to keep Kopa alive. A year of struggling to keep our baby alive took its toll on the founding team. We decided we needed a break and wouldn't be coming back to Kopa full-time.