Rentals run
on trust.

My name is Liesa. I've been navigating the rental and sublet market for years — in New York and in other countries — and I've experienced just about every version of how it can go wrong.

I've put out ads looking for a place to stay and gotten replies offering "roommates with benefits." I've found listings for apartments that didn't exist once I showed up. I've joined groups and communities where good posts absolutely existed — but finding them again, getting any kind of overview, knowing which ones were still available — it was a mess. And none of it came with any way to actually verify whether the person on the other end was someone you could trust.

That last part is the thing that stayed with me. Every platform I tried had listings. None of them had trust.

The times it actually worked — the times I found a good place, or a good tenant — it was never through a platform. It was through a person. Someone I knew would mention that a friend was leaving their apartment for three months. Someone in a trusted group would vouch for the person posting. There was a name attached. A connection. A reason to believe this was real.

In New York especially, that trust is not optional. When you sublet your apartment and something goes wrong, getting someone out is a legal process that can take months. The city's tenant protections — which are a good thing — also mean that a bad fit isn't just uncomfortable. It's a serious problem. You need to know who you're letting in.

And yet the tools we have for finding that person — Craigslist, SpareRoom, Facebook groups, random subreddits — none of them are built around that question at all.

I wanted to build a community where that introduction is the default — not the exception. Where everyone inside — host or guest — has been vouched for by someone already in the circle. Where every person can see exactly how they're connected to anyone else, and can reach out to the person who vouched for them if they have questions.

Not a marketplace. A community. The kind where you can actually talk to people, where names mean something, where nobody is a stranger from the internet.

CribCircle is deliberately small right now. It grows one introduction at a time, because that's the only way the trust stays real. I'm not trying to build the next StreetEasy. I'm trying to build the thing that exists when you're lucky enough to know the right people — and make it accessible to more than just the lucky ones.

If you've ever found a great place because someone you trusted made an intro, you already understand what this is. I just want more people to have that.

— Liesa, Founder