Fruumi

Fruumi’s vision is to take the pain out of flat sharing by building a community driven, end-to-end platform, which connects roommates and empowers owners of shared accommodation. It started that journey by asking Spork to build a pre-seed MVP which focuses on the room mates as much as the rooms and properties themselves.

Spork was delighted to help them out.

The Fruumi proposition is for each property to have a community of house mates. Structurally, the on-boarding process is complex. There are several users types, all of which linked to a property listing in slightly different ways. However, the user experience had to hide all that complexity.

Another important feature was to prevent estate agents from using the platform, and this is inherently designed into the system.

We built a Node.js app that sat between React in the front end and Firebase in the backend. This setup allowed us to build room listings, user profiles, on boarding (with social logins), content management, real time messaging and an admin area.

Transactional emails are sent using SendGrid, and location data is manipulated by Postcodes.io and the Transport for London API. A blog is pulled into the site using the WordPress content API.

Applications like this are exactly what Firebase was built for and we’re really excited to build upon this product as fruumi gains investment to scale its business.