Building a social network with a house-sharing app

University of Melbourne alumni and current students have collaborated on a new smartphone app for iOS and Android that helps make share-housing a success.

Fairshare, cofounded by Jules Malseed-Harris and Oliver May, is an app that enables people living together to organise household tasks, split shared expenses and easily communicate with one another. 

CEO and Cofounder Jules Malseed-Harris, a Melbourne alumnus and former Commerce tutor at the University, said the app is like a private social network for the home.

“It helps you organise and manage the communal tasks of cooking, cleaning and shopping,” he says.

Fairshare users are able to earn points for doing various tasks around the house and record different house expenses.

“The app keeps track of bookkeeping and house finances surrounding rent, bills and shopping. It has a house feed which that information flows to and allows people to maintain a communication device just with their housemates.”

The team is able to track the success of their app based on the number of downloads and the number of people who use it every day. 

Bachelor of Science student Alex McLeod balances his studies while working in the role of Chief Technology Officer at Fairshare. 

“For me, all the technical skills required to create the app were learnt in my studies here,” Mr McLeod says.

“If there was one thing I would want to convey, it’s that people should definitely consider studying software engineering, computing or anything like that, because the opportunities are huge.

“It’s a great industry to be in, and there’s a massive shortage of people doing it.”

Fairshare is a synergy of like-minded, highly-skilled individuals across various disciplines, from computer science to economics and communication. 

Although launched in February this year, the idea for Fairshare came about over a period of several years.

While studying a Combined Honours in Economics and Management degree in 2004, Mr Malseed-Harris moved into a house with fellow Melbourne students. 

After a few years of living together, they found household chores difficult to manage. They decided to try to make a system that would solve share-housing issues and help make tasks such as cleaning or making dinner enjoyable activities.

“We tinkered with a points based system for tasks, doing it on a paper based arrangement between 2006 to 2013,” Mr Malseed-Harris says.

In April last year, Mr Malseed-Harris attended an event called Startup Weekend at the York Butter Factory. Startup Weekend is a global event in which entrepreneurs get together and attend workshops to pitch ideas and start up their own companies. 

“It was a 54 hour event where we all got together, formed teams and coded up a new idea”, he says. 

“We’ve been working on the Fairshare app since then with a big team of about a dozen of us in total, with five of us full-time.

“As some people have observed, there’s a lot of basic first year microeconomics ideas within the app, in terms of incentive structures and transparency. It’s ultimately about aligning those individual incentives with the overall household, which is something I studied and taught here in Melbourne.”

 www.getfairshare.com