Dwell
A ProductGurus product discovery case study. Bank-verified trust infrastructure for shared living that gives 1.2M Canadian newcomers a portable rental reputation Equifax and TransUnion can't see.
Discovery in progress, 2 of 9 interviews done; build waits on evidence. A bank-verified renter trust score for the 1.2M newcomers Canadian credit bureaus can't see. Two interviews already added a fourth product pillar and flagged the pricing model as unproven, so the build decision is deliberately on hold.
The problem
Equifax and TransUnion are blind to 1.2M people a year
1.2 million newcomers enter Canada every year with no Canadian credit history, which means no rental history, which means landlords reject them on sight regardless of how reliable they actually are. The result: 6-month housing searches and 25–30 applications to rent a single room.
- References are unverified; WhatsApp screenshots aren't evidence. No portable record of "what kind of tenant is this" exists anywhere.
- Genuinely reliable renters are turned away by a broken proxy signal (Canadian credit history) that has nothing to do with how they actually pay rent.
Two conversations that changed the product
She'd viewed 20 rooms over 6 months, "mostly dingy homes." That single detail exposed a gap the original 3-pillar design didn't cover: a verified renter has no way to know if a listing is worth their time either.
→ Added the Property Trust Score as a 4th pillar: landlords and listings get scored too.
A realtor renting via Facebook Marketplace pointed out the model's weak spot directly: "marketing is free… I don't know how you'd charge the individual owner." The small landlords the plan billed at $15/unlock are exactly the ones using free channels, and the real B2B gatekeepers are property management companies, not individual owners.
→ Monetization model flagged as unresolved before build; PMCs added as a target interview segment.
Personas
Four people, four different frictions
Maya · International student
No Canadian credit history. Rejected from 15 rooms before finding one. Needs any signal that separates her from 40 other applicants.
Dev · Tech worker newcomer
Has income, no Canadian credit trail. Lost his dream apartment twice to Canadian-born applicants.
Priya · Young professional
Domestic renter, two roommates, WhatsApp chaos over bills. Wants the Ledger and Agreement pillars first.
Marcus · Small landlord
Owns 2–3 units, self-manages. Spends 4–6 hours per vacancy screening and can't tell good tenants from bad until too late.
Backlog
User stories that shaped the roadmap
Requirements
The 90-day MVP, spec'd as acceptance criteria
My role
Running discovery and letting it actually change the plan
I ran the discovery interviews, and treated every one as a chance to break the existing plan rather than confirm it. Ashmita's answer added an entire pillar. The realtor's answer put the pricing model on hold rather than let it ship on an unvalidated assumption. I then designed the trust-score algorithm, anti-gaming mechanics, and database schema so the next 5 interviews have something concrete to react to.
What I designed
Four pillars, one trust graph
The Agreement
Digital house agreement with e-signature: enforceable, timestamped, shared with every housemate.
The Ledger
Shared expense splitting and task tracking with dispute resolution: the daily-use hook.
Renter Trust Score
A portable, bank-verified 300–850 behavioural reputation score, built from real rent and bill payment data.
Property Trust Score
The mirror score, born from Interview #1: landlords and listings scored on response rate, condition, and dispute history.
Under the hood
What actually moves the score
A velocity flag lowers confidence on a suspiciously perfect record: 100% completion with zero disputes reads as gaming, not virtue.
Competitive moat
The renter's advocate, not another blacklist
Openroom and FrontLobby already own the landlord-protection, negative-data side of this market. Their model requires renters to distrust them; no one hands their bank data to the platform built to report them. Dwell's Renter Trust Score only works if renters willingly connect their bank, which only happens if the product is renter-owned and never becomes a blacklist. That's a moat built from trust, not a feature list, and it's the one thing an incumbent can't copy by shipping a new module.
Outcome
A build decision that waits on evidence, on purpose
Dwell is 2 of 9 discovery interviews in, with a working score algorithm, database schema, and a 90-day MVP plan ready to execute, and, just as importantly, a monetization assumption correctly flagged as unresolved rather than shipped blind. The build/no-build decision waits for the remaining 7 interviews, on purpose.
Roadmap
Discovery → MVP → B2B → scale
7 remaining discovery interviews (4 renter, 3 landlord) plus a property-management-company interview, then the build/no-build call.
7-feature MVP: house creation, agreement, ledger, task tracking, thin-file score, Flinks upgrade, directory.
B2B landlord portal + Property Trust Score, then US expansion after 500 verified Canadian scores.
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