why loro exists
Loro started twice.
The first time was a project I built called Huizel — alerts for rooms and flats across the Netherlands. I spent months inside WhatsApp groups and Facebook threads, talking with hundreds of people searching for a home, and I kept seeing the same thing: people trying to figure out who they’d be living with from a blurry group chat. Scams, strangers, zero signal. One thought kept coming back to me: it’s strange to find the person you’ll share a home with on WhatsApp.
The second time was personal. I arrived in the Netherlands three years ago, from Madrid, searching from abroad. My applications were ignored. Places were gone minutes after appearing. In the end I paid someone a month’s rent to find me a flat — and a flatmate I’d met exactly once, on a video call.
The first months were fine. They usually are. But I became a morning person, and he lived at night. When I went to bed, the kitchen came alive. When I woke at eight, my morning routine was his noise. Nothing worth a fight — just small things, filling up a quiet bar of tiredness, on both sides.
Neither of us was wrong. We were just wrong for each other. And no platform had ever asked either of us a single question about how we actually live.
That’s the gap I’m building loro to close.
— manuel, founder & ceo
