Yeah. It is.
Let’s address the elephant in the share house.
You’ve googled “find a flatmate,” stumbled across flatmate.com, and thought — wait, is this still a thing? Maybe you squinted at the URL. Maybe you checked the copyright date. Maybe you genuinely wondered if you’d accidentally loaded a website from the era of dial-up and frosted tips.
Fair enough.
flatmate.com has been around since 1998. Not a typo. 1998. While people were still figuring out whether you needed a science degree to use email, flatmate.com was already out here connecting Australians who needed someone to split the rent with. Google was literally a PhD thesis at the time. And flatmate.com was just… doing its thing.
For over 25 years there has always been a site. Always visitors. Always people signing up, posting listings, messaging strangers about whether they’re “relaxed but clean” and whether they’re “cool with the occasional visitor.” The thing never died. It just waited. Patiently. Like a good flatmate who does their dishes and doesn’t touch your stuff in the fridge.
Some people would call that stubbornness. We call it knowing what you’re on about.
The Longest Start-up in History
Most startups are told to move fast and break things. flatmate.com looked at that, nodded, and chose a different pace entirely. Twenty five years. Bootstrapped. Independent. No pivot to crypto. No “we’re sunsetting the platform” email. No rebrand to something with a lowercase z at the end.
Just a genuinely useful idea held together by the belief that Australians will always need somewhere to live and they will often need a person to live with.
That’s not a weakness. That’s the whole point.
The Renaissance Bit
So what’s actually happening now.
John Stericker and Jayen Ashar have been at work. Building, testing, rethinking what a share accommodation platform should actually do when rents are cooked and finding the right flatmate can feel like a part time job you didn’t apply for.
New features are coming. Features that, if we’re being straight about it, don’t exist anywhere else in this space. Not on the big aggregators. Not on the overseas platforms that showed up and decided Australia was just a bigger version of somewhere else.
What features exactly? You’ll see.
John’s excited. Genuinely. Jayen, we’re assuming you’re excited too, because the alternative is that you’ve been grinding away on this purely out of obligation and nobody wants that energy in a share house let alone a startup.
Why Now
Because the timing has finally caught up with the idea.
The rental market is not relaxed right now. Vacancy rates are brutal. More people than ever are living in share accommodation not as a fallback but as an actual choice, a lifestyle, a way to stay in the suburb they want to be in without spending their entire income on it.
flatmate.com was built for exactly this. It was just a bit early. For about 25 years.
Some ideas are ahead of their time. This one was right all along. The world just took a while to arrive.
Still here. Watch this space.
flatmate.com. Since 1998.
