Meet House Bee (drum roll), a site that manages shared household situations such as bills, chores, IOUs, events, allowance, contacts etc.
I, like many other people in 1998, lived with roommates when I first arrived to San Francisco. At one point, I lived with three guys who all worked from home, were fairly messy and late with their bills. Paying bills on time or coordinating anything became increasingly painful, so we installed an open source ticketing solution to make requests, track debt and pay bills. It totally worked.
On a phone call with a friend one day, I told him about this idea and we both came up with a plan for a site that would manage shared tasks and interpersonal debt. We needed a domain just to get the project started, so I registered housebee.com (btw, if anyone wants this, they can have it - one less domain for me to keep track of). We worked on this project for a little while and discovered that collaborating over the net (he’s in Atlanta) wasn’t working out. Neither of us wanted to move and we both weren’t certain we wanted to leave the jobs we had, so we shelved it.
My friend later launched the project as Tabjab and another competitor launched at the same time called BillMonk
So, how is this still an idea hand off? Well, nobody’s done the task management part! Paying bills is great and all, but seriously, who’s going to take out the garbage? Who’s having a party? When is the TV free?
I also came up with a family version of this idea that eventually morphed into the houses forming a social graph. Households could share resources, plan street/apartment/dorm bbqs, announce yard sales, give away things. Freecylce and Craigslist are cool, but I think it would be awesome to know who on your street had babysitting services, who was giving away free loot and who would rent/loan their lawn mowers.
I loathe ads, but highly targeted ads might work here. Things like coupons?
Anyhow, whew. Out. This is like therapy. Thanks Cianna.
One Comment
I love this idea! It’s perfect, of course for roommates, but oh so many families could also use it! It has a direct TIC (Tenants In Common) application and can also be useful to condo organizations. The extension to neighborhoods is a cool extension of this idea as well — something that very much touches me as someone who moves in and out of neighborhoods and who only sometimes gets to know my neighbors. I’ve even been in large apartment buildings where it would be useful to have a way of knowing, say, who has a vacuum or a truck and is willing to share. My current neighborhood plans bbqs through paper fliers & knocking on doors, but it’s hard for me to help with planning because I’m really only home & available during hours that most people are asleep or at work.
This is also the kind of thing that fits into our future where it’s not only isolated geeks who do things online. Remember in the not-so-distant past when shopping online, online banking and emails were strictly the purview of geeks? In the not-so-distant future, I can see trouble ticket systems as fairly common life hacks.
Good IdeaHO!
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