Advisory and product work for a platform helping people establish and verify trustworthiness for rental, lease, and financing arrangements.
The core idea
Trust between two people transacting money, a landlord and a tenant, a lender and a borrower, is usually established through a patchwork of credit checks, references, and gut feeling. This platform's premise is to make that trust portable: a verified profile that travels with a person across multiple financial relationships, backed by an API other platforms can consume to validate a user.
Scope of the advisory work
- Positioning and messaging: the original landing page leaned heavily on stock photography and didn't clearly answer whether the platform targets a given visitor or what the workflow looks like. The recommendation was fewer stock photos, more real product screenshots, short descriptive user flows, and FAQs addressing access and availability directly on the page.
- Trust signal design: exploring a supplemental trust metric alongside, not replacing, traditional credit scoring, to give the platform its own signal of integrity and authority rather than only inheriting someone else's.
- Audience framing: the platform leans toward newcomers to a financial system. Part of the advisory work was pushing on where that framing should extend to existing users too, and what "no longer a newcomer" actually means for the product.
- Expansion paths: beyond rental/lease listings, financing boards for other big-ticket assets (vehicles, boats), direct financing offers positioned closer to a credit union than a marketplace, and home improvement loans.
- Trust and safety surface: automated background checking, and being explicit on-site about where data is stored and how it's protected, since credibility is the entire value proposition.
Where an AI layer fits
An LLM-based guide for newcomers navigating the platform, helping people discover relevant listings, understand the verification process, and get unblocked without a support ticket, is one of the more promising unexplored pieces of this work.