Two friends who met in the dorms at Cal Poly have created an app to help students navigate a critical and often daunting college challenge: finding a roommate.
Sophom*ores Chris Katwan, a business administration major, and Myles Biggs, a mechanical engineering major, hatched the roommate-finder idea after they met in the Tenaya residence hall last year.
Called Bunky, the app aims to provide a more tailored experience for students looking to search out potential roommate matches than what popular social media platforms currently offer.
It operates like a dating app with profiles, likes, hobbies, photos and other information. Users choose who they want to match with and learn whether they got a match back.
Katwan said that one problem with using sites like Instagram for roommate-finding is they don’t have “hyper-personalized profiles” that allow incoming students to match with a roommate with similar interests or living preferences.
“We’re trying to kind of make your profile like a natural icebreaker,” he said.
Many universities have Instagram pages and Facebook groups — like Cal Poly SLO Roommate Finder or Cal Poly SLO (CPSLO) Housing Rentals, Sublets & Roommates — where incoming freshmen can post bios with photos and direct message each other.
But Biggs said that they don’t allow students to differentiate enough from each other. He said many students struggle with messaging potential roommates, and when people don’t reply, it’s often unclear whether they are simply uninterested or have already found a match.
How Cal Poly students are rolling out Bunky app
Initially, Katwan and Biggs tailored the app solely toward incoming college freshmen, and in January, they launched a beta test at Arizona State University.
“We really wanted to start very small,” Biggs said, noting they wanted to ensure the app was working properly and “to help refine” their business model before expanding to more students.
Biggs said they’ve now expanded to over 300 schools.
As of May, Biggs said the biggest user bases are at University of Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado State, San Diego State, UC Santa Barbara and Cal Poly.
Katwan said the school with the most Bunky users is University of Arizona with around 930 incoming freshmen using the app to find potential roommates.
The entrepreneurs say they are generating revenue from the app, all of which goes back in to expanding their business. They declined to share specific financial numbers and whether it’s profitable.
In the future, the two hope to expand to anyone — not just students — who needs roommates, along with property management companies looking to fill multi-person rental units.
What users think about roommate-finding app
Early Bunky users said the app has been helpful in connecting them with potential roommates.
Incoming San Diego State University freshman Calla Burden said one thing the app offers that Instagram pages don’t is a “whole load of information about the people that you’re looking at” all in one place. Burden said it was “really easy” to see people’s information and message them.
Another Bunky user, Julia Chin — an incoming freshman at UC Santa Barbara — said she had no luck connecting with prospective roommates by DM’ing people Instagram.
“I would talk to them for a while and then the conversation just ended up being that they weren’t looking for a roommate, which was really difficult,” Chin said.
Chin tried out the app and said “it was really easy to use.”
She ultimately found a roommate with Bunky, one who is a fellow intended dance major and shared other similar interests to Chin.
Though Bunky is free, Chin opted to upgrade to Bunky Pro, the subscription version of the app, which costs $14.99 per month.
That allowed her to see who has liked her profile, gain unlimited profile swipes and view profiles already seen (profile rewind), among other features.
Burden, the incoming freshman at San Diego State, said another perk of the app is finding potential friends, even if they don’t end up being roommates.
“It definitely helped me meet people going to the school even though I might not be rooming with them,” Burden said.
The app includes prompts to allow people to get to know each other in a more casual way, similar to a dating app. Some of the prompts include: “My parents would kill me if ...” or “My biggest pet peeve is ...” or “Walking into our dorm will feel like. ...”
The app is free to download and use, both in the Apple App Store and Google Play.
