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product

Cribb

Student housing, finally done right

Co-Founder, Frontend Lead & Product Direction
2026
Co-founded with OJ

Impact

100
Cribb Score
Quality and trust score for every listing
3
View Modes
Board, grid, and map browsing
5+
Student Flows
Listings, sublets, roommates, marketplace, and community

Overview

Cribb is a student-focused housing platform built for University of Guelph students. It brings verified listings, Cribb Scores, sublets, roommate matching, AI-powered listing comparison, viewing bookings, messaging, student marketplace, and community content into one connected housing workspace.

Tech Stack

Next.jsReactTypeScriptTailwind CSSFramer MotionMapbox GL JSZustandFastAPISQLAlchemyPostgreSQLWebSocketsCloudinaryResendAnthropic Claude

Challenges

  • 1Building a housing product that solves trust, comparison, and discovery problems specific to student rentals
  • 2Designing separate but connected experiences for students, landlords, writers, and admins
  • 3Making dense housing data feel easy to scan across board, grid, map, and detail views
  • 4Combining real-time messaging, booking, AI comparison, and marketplace workflows without fragmenting the UX

Solutions

  • Created the Cribb Score to summarize price, location, amenities, and tenant trust signals on every listing
  • Built student-first browsing with saved listings, AI Compare, campus proximity filters, and standardized amenity data
  • Designed dedicated flows for sublets, roommate matching, The Bubble, marketplace listings, and landlord dashboards
  • Integrated Mapbox, WebSockets, Resend, Cloudinary, and Claude to support mapping, messaging, email, media, and AI comparison

Key Learnings

01

Designing marketplace trust systems around real user risk

02

Structuring multi-role product flows without losing focus on the primary student experience

03

Balancing brand, product strategy, and frontend architecture in a live platform

04

Turning a broad product surface into clear workflows students can actually use

David Amaefula | Software Engineer