🏠 Kindred: How to Build a 9-Figure Home-Swapping App

The best consumer founders know the game. 35K+ of them read Consumer Startups every week.

Stay ahead. Get the playbook behind today's breakout startups.

Read time: 6 mins 16 seconds

Two fellow Opendoor alum, Justine Palefsky and Tasneem Amina, just raised $125M+ for their home-swapping app called Kindred. 

Since the initial public launch in 2022, Kindred has grown to over 300K homes across 150+ cities on its platform, covering North America and Europe.

Justine shared with me their story building Kindred and the growth playbook they used to hack early growth, the flywheels that unlocked liquidity, and many counterintuitive lessons they learned along the way.

The whole story started with a Google sheet.

A word from our partner

Last week, I ran a quick customer research study for Pikes AI using Listen Labs to understand the biggest pain points and whitespace in creative AI. It took me 2 minutes to spin up a study. The insights I got back were what you’d expect from a research consultant, without the 3-week timeline and five-figure invoice.

Their AI researcher finds participants from a network of 30M+ people, runs in-depth video interviews with real follow-ups, and packages everything into reports with key themes and highlight reels. Test product concepts, figure out why users churn, validate which messaging actually lands, whatever you need.

Microsoft, Sweetgreen, and Anthropic are already on it. 1M+ interviews done. $100M+ raised from Sequoia and Ribbit. Check it out!

After graduating from Brown, Justine joined Bain, and later, went to Opendoor and Homebound. In early 2021, during the pandemic, she started thinking more about what she wanted to work on.

One challenge that Justine had been wrestling with for a few years was the desire to travel more, in a way that's affordable, accessible and human.

She was working remotely while living in San Francisco and got friends scattered around the world. She wanted to visit her friends but booking a hotel while paying rent in SF feels exorbitant while crashing at a friend's place can feel awkward and complicated if it's more than a couple of days. 

She took the problem to her mentor and the CEO of Opendoor, Eric Wu who loved the problem space and connected Justine with another Opendoor alum Tas.

Justine and Tas hit it off instantly and had a few months of confounder dating. They locked themselves in a cabin in Calistoga to brainstorm ideas and talk about values.

The inspiration for a solution came from an unlikely place: a Google Sheet being passed around among Bain alumni. 

It was a simple, trust- and community-based system for home swapping. It wasn’t just about saving money. It was the connection and the recommendations from your friends when you were staying in their home.

Justine and Tas saw the potential.

What if you could productize this? What if you could build a platform that scaled this trust to a global community?

That question became the foundation for Kindred.

They had a barebone MVP with a landing page that made it look like a legit home swap matchmaking service, a Typeform application for new members, and an Airtable backend where Justine and Tas kept track of everyone's homes, locations, and travel preferences. Justine and Tas acted as manual concierges, texting and emailing members to matchmake trips.

The application process was gated. You couldn’t browse homes until you were accepted. The thinking wasn’t around creating exclusivity but a more practical idea of not wanting people to feel discouraged from applying when they saw the limited inventory. 

This constraint created something unexpected: a sense of exclusivity and FOMO that drove word-of-mouth.

As they grew, they hit a fundamental problem: direct, reciprocal swaps ("I stay in your house while you stay in mine at the same time") had a painfully low match rate. The odds that someone in Maui wants to visit your city on the exact same dates you want to visit Maui are slim.

The solution was a credit system. 

Instead of requiring a direct swap, Kindred moved to a "give a night to get a night" model. If you're going to be away, you let someone stay at your place and earn credits. Then you use those credits to stay somewhere else, whenever you want. This abstracted away the matching problem and dramatically increased liquidity on the platform.

Another huge unlock on the product side was the shift from a traditional search bar to a “wishlist” feature. 

The typical travel booking journey looks like this: you decide you want to go somewhere, you figure out the city and dates, and then you go to a booking platform and search. 

For Kindred, if a user came in with a specific city and specific dates, the chances of finding a match were too low. Kindred needed to intercept users before they had their heart set on a specific destination.

To address this challenge, they built a wishlist feature. Along with the search bar, users could add general travel desires like, “I want to go to New York for a week this spring.” Kindred could then proactively match them as homes became available, or even inspire trips they hadn’t considered.

This shift from a reactive search flow to a proactive recommendation flow was another game-changer for improving match rates.

Unsurprisingly, the first 100 members were friends or friends of friends. They tapped into every community they were already part of, from Bain alumni groups, their schools, their Opendoor network. 

To encourage and incentivize early signups, they provided additional perks. They offered free house cleaning, free photography of members' homes, special pricing, and "founding member" status. 

To turn early members into evangelists, they treated them as a part of the team, brought them along into the building process and even let a couple of early members write angel checks into the company.

Another key early growth lever was strategic supply.

Some of Kindred’s first investors happened to own incredible homes. One of them, Eric Wu, had a stunning place in San Francisco and offered it up for Kindred to use as a strategic supply.

Justine turned those homes into catalysts.

She would map out chains of potential trips. If she could convince one key member to travel, that unlocked their home for someone else. That second member’s home would then free up for a third. One confirmed stay could trigger five or six more. The challenge was always the first domino.

Investor homes solved that. Instead of asking someone to “try a home swap,” they could offer something almost impossible to refuse: a five bedroom house with a roof deck in San Francisco. Once that first person said yes, the rest of the chain often fell into place.

Then came the tipping point.

Around 6,000 to 7,000 members, something shifted. The marketplace no longer needed to be jumpstarted by hand and the platform began to feel self-sustaining.

Once the foundation was in place, Kindred's growth was driven by two distinct flywheels that compounded on each other.

Kindred tried a lot of referral strategies. Many of them didn't work. Timing was the main culprit.

Home swapping was so new and unfamiliar that most people were nervous about it. They weren't going to put their reputation on the line by recommending something they hadn't experienced.

The breakthrough came from understanding the psychology of the user journey. There's a magical moment of transformation that happens when a member completes their first trip.

That post-trip moment is the peak referring moment. The member has just had an incredible experience, they're excited, they want to tell everyone. 

Kindred built their entire referral engine around this insight: get someone on their first trip as fast as possible, then prompt them to refer right after.

To incentivize referral, Kindred provides members two credits for every successful referral and the referred person gets five credits to start.

Travel is inherently visual and social. People love sharing their travel experiences on Instagram and TikTok. Kindred leaned into this hard. 

Early on, they created a private Instagram account exclusively for accepted members. 

This served two purposes. First, it reinforced the sense of community and trust, and it gave Kindred a direct line to their members' social handles. Second, when a member was on a trip and posted a photo of their amazing Kindred home, the team would slide into their DMs: "Hey, do you mind if we reshare this? This is so helpful for our young company."

Once Kindred started resharing user-generated content, other members saw it and were inspired to tag Kindred on their own trips. Today, Kindred gets 7-15 organic tags every single day from members on trips.

Social also plays a significant role in driving match rates for existing members by reaching them early in their travel planning process. People open Instagram and TikTok when they’re daydreaming about travel, before they’ve picked a city or dates.

By being present on those platforms with beautiful UGC, Kindred could capture demand at the earliest possible stage, when match rates are highest because the user is still flexible.

Most consumer companies don't go international until the growth stage. They focus on their core market first. Kindred didn't have that luxury. 

As a travel company, the platform wouldn't work if you could only swap homes within the US. They needed international destinations early.

BUT.. How do you expand internationally when you're still a small startup without a full international finance department or legal team?

They started with demand data. Members could add cities to a wishlist even if those cities weren’t live. The signal was obvious most of the time. For example, everyone wanted Paris.

However, demand alone wasn’t enough. They looked for reciprocal demand. It only made sense to launch a city if people there also wanted to visit Kindred’s existing hubs. That’s how they protected liquidity from day one.

On top of that, there were logistical considerations: 24/7 customer support staffing, time zones, languages, and regulatory requirements.

Launching a new market looked a lot like the first 100 members all over again. Kindred sent community managers to spend time in new markets, hosting events, building relationships, and offering a white-glove experience. The goal was to replicate the same feeling that Justine and Tas created in the early days—you're joining early because you met someone on the team and you're excited about it.

To seed supply faster, they ran targeted cross market referral drives. For example: asking New York members to refer friends in London, with extra incentives attached. Existing networks became their expansion engine.

For such a simple concept as home swapping, there’s a lot of complexity that comes with managing a marketplace like this.

One challenge is the management of the Kindred economy, which has its own currency. Members earn and spend credits, and Kindred has to manage that economy like the Fed manages the dollar. The team has to ensure a healthy circulation of credits to ensure liquidity. 

If members accumulate too many credits, they're less incentivized to host. Why open your home if you already have plenty of credits?

Less hosting → less supply → fewer trips → less value → deflationary spiral 

The platform has to carefully monitor credit inflation and deflation to keep the system in balance. 

Despite the challenges, what excites me most is that it’s enabled a “third option” in travel, a new category alongside hotels and vacation rentals.

According to Justine, the vision is bigger than just travel. Kindred is becoming a community-driven movement. Members are hosting dozens of meetups every month, all over the world. You can show up in Lisbon on a home swap by yourself, having never been there before, and have a built-in community waiting for you. 

In a world where AI is automating more and more of our daily interactions, Justine sees a growing consumer appetite for products that feel human and soulful. People are lonely. People are disconnected. The luxury of the future is having friends all over the world who you can meet up with for coffee.

—

See you next Tuesday!

Leo

Follow me on X and LinkedIn

📥️ Want to advertise in Consumer Startups? Learn more.