Designing a market for homes that aren't listed
Half the property market never appears anywhere: owners who would sell to the right buyer, and buyers already qualified to make the offer. I designed Homework to match the two quietly, so a homeowner can see real interest in their home without ever listing it publicly.
- Role
- Founding designer through Do AI: strategy, brand, product design, implementation and analytics
- Project Type
- 0 to 1 marketplace
- Status
- Active commercial product
- Product Strategy
- Brand and Identity
- Product Design
- Implementation
- Experiment Design
Creating value before the marketplace existed
The property market gives homeowners a binary choice: list publicly or remain invisible. Buyers see only the small fraction already for sale, while owners who might move for the right offer have no controlled way to participate.
Homework set out to create that middle ground. The immediate product challenge was the cold start: why would either side join while the other was still missing?
We began with buyers because AI-powered property analysis could provide value independently of marketplace supply. Public records could be brought together and explained for any address, giving someone a reason to use Homework before that property’s owner had joined.
Claiming a home could not mean listing it
The homeowner proposition depended on control. Taking ownership of a property page needed to feel like a small, reversible step—not the start of a public sales process.
I made that distinction structural. A property moves through separate states, and its owner can stop at any one of them indefinitely.
Claiming, verifying and being open to offers are separate decisions. Private draft mode lets someone prepare a complete property profile without appearing publicly or signalling an intention to sell.
My role from blank page to working product
As founding designer through Do AI, I led product design and brand, contributed to product strategy, worked in the codebase alongside the engineering team, and established the analytics and experimentation framework.
That meant working across the marketplace model, information architecture, property states, buyer and homeowner flows, interface design and implementation—while deciding what the product needed to prove next.
Homework is an active commercial product. I share the detailed experiments, commercial results and current product decisions in a private walkthrough.