How Allia Mohamed built Openigloo from tenant interviews—and became its face

Allia Mohamed didn’t start Openigloo from a traditional product road map.

Before there was a company, Mohamed was standing outside apartment buildings in New York City, asking tenants coming in and out a simple question: What was it actually like to live there?

Those informal conversations became the foundation for a platform built to help renters evaluate buildings and landlords using crowdsourced reviews and public data. Today, the platform has supported almost 3 million renters across New York City in their apartment hunt since its launch in 2020, according to Mohamed.

But as the company grew, Mohamed says her role shifted in ways she didn’t anticipate. She found herself moving between building the product, stepping back into direct conversations with users, and becoming the public face of a trust-based platform in a market where housing decisions carry high stakes.

“I’m a very firm believer that having stable housing is so important for society as a whole, and it permeates into so many pillars of our lives,” said Mohamed.

In a conversation with Founder Brew, Mohamed looks closely at the challenges of scaling a system built on lived experience, and what she had to relearn about listening to users.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

At what point did those conversations outside apartment buildings shift from helping you with your own search to something bigger—a pattern you could build a product around?

I had my fair share of horrible landlords in New York City. I remember one winter when the heat went out and I was sleeping in my parka, and I was paying way too much rent and couldn’t get a call back from my landlord.

When I was apartment hunting for my next place…I really wanted to make sure the building was well taken care of. So I started standing outside buildings I was considering, waiting for people walking in and out, asking, “Do you live here? What’s the story? How’s the landlord? Should I move in?” I got really valuable information from doing that. People would say, “It looks really nice, but it floods every time it rains,” or “the hot water only lasts five minutes,” or “the landlord increases rents 15% every year.”

This was really the lightbulb moment for me: Could I build a platform to crowdsource these reviews from renters, couple it with city data, and give renters an opportunity to do their own background check on a building and landlord before making a decision in the same way landlords are allowed to do their various background checks?

You’re active on social media. Was building a public presence part of your strategy for Openigloo, and how has it influenced how renters discover the platform?

I’m going to give credit to my co-founder and chief marketing officer, Lidor Bar David, who was looking at our marketing budget and looking at all the different organic growth strategies.

It’s really expensive to do influencer marketing, which is a huge channel for a lot of consumer companies. When we started to map that out—how much it would cost to pay someone to talk about Openigloo on a story or a TikTok video—we thought: Could we just do this ourselves? Could we become our own in-house influencer? He said, “It has to be you.”

I resisted for a while. It was an accidental marketing strategy, where I just started making videos and got more comfortable over time. Now we’ve amassed around 200,000 followers across our social channels. It’s been a great way not only to acquire new users, but really to continue to communicate the brand and product updates and educate our audience on New York City real estate.

It started because we wanted to stop paying influencers. It was getting too expensive—that’s the real answer.

What mistake did you make early that changed how you operate?

As you reach certain milestones as a founder and as a company, you kind of forget what the basics are.

In the early days of building Openigloo, I was talking to users all the time. Every person who signed up got my Calendly link and could book time with me. I would spend days doing user interviews. I really loved those conversations. I learned so much.

Then I realized a few months ago I hadn’t done a user interview in a while. I haven’t spoken to a user in so long because I’ve been pulled into so many different directions as we’ve grown as a team…really making those reflections of: I need to go back to basics and what made us so successful at the beginning when we were building, which is really just listening to your community, your users, your stakeholders.

What belief about startups have you completely changed your mind about?

It’s hard to admit this, but it is way, way harder than what you think it’s going to be. I feel like I was prepared because I had spoken to so many founders, and I had worked on the investing side, and I experienced it firsthand. But until you are in the seat, you really can’t build that empathy. I go back to the quote from Marc Andreessen about how he said he didn’t want to be a startup founder again, because it’s like chewing glass every single day and swallowing your own blood as you’re doing it, and some days definitely feel like that.

The lucky thing about building a platform like Openigloo is the constant validation that we get from our users. I think that’s the unique thing about building a consumer platform—just the constant stream of feedback and really seeing day to day the lives that you’re impacting and changing. That’s the silver lining, but it is way harder than I ever expected.