We got tired of how renting works here.

FlatFlick began the way most of these things do — with a bad room. Between us we've moved enough times around Chandigarh and Mohali to know the routine: a dozen phone numbers off a classifieds site, a broker who wants a month's rent for a WhatsApp forward, photos that were taken two years and one repaint ago, and a flatmate you meet properly only after you've both paid the deposit.

We started FlatFlick to make that specific week of your life less awful, for the people who go through it most often: students and young professionals.

Renting in India isn't short of listings. It's short of reliable ones. The same room appears on four sites with three different rents. Photos are edited or borrowed. The deposit is never mentioned until you're standing in the room. And by the time you ask whether it's still available, it usually isn't.

The second half of the problem is the part nobody builds for: who you live with. Rent you can budget for. A flatmate who cooks at 2am when you have an 8am class is a different kind of cost.

We decided the app would only show properties someone from the team had actually stood inside. That's slower than scraping listings, and it's the reason the coverage grows city by city rather than all at once — but it means the photos have a date on them and the rent on the screen is the rent the owner quoted.

We also put flatmate matching in the same app rather than leaving it to Instagram stories and college groups, because for most of our users the two decisions happen in the same week.

A person moving to a new city should be able to open one app, see places that are genuinely available, talk to the owner directly, find someone compatible to share with, and be done in days rather than weeks. No brokerage, no guesswork, no surprise at the door.

A small product and operations team based in the Tricity. Some of us build the app; others spend their week visiting properties, photographing them and talking to owners. That second group is the reason the first group has anything worth shipping.

We're focused on Chandigarh, Mohali, Kharar, Zirakpur first, and we'd rather be genuinely good in four places than thin across forty. As coverage deepens we're expanding the rewards programme, adding more owner tools and improving how matches are ranked.

If you're a renter, an owner or someone who wants to work with us, the contact page is the fastest way to reach the team.