In our research, I found that off-campus student housing often fails not because of price alone, but because of inconsistency, poor quality, and operational friction. Students frequently face outdated units, unreliable landlords, hidden setup costs, and stressful move-in logistics, especially those new to the area or relocating internationally.

From the student perspective, the housing process is fragmented and time-consuming, pulling focus away from academics and campus life. From the parent perspective, the lack of transparency, safety assurances, and professional management creates anxiety around trust and reliability. At the same time, many small landlords struggle with tenant turnover, maintenance burden, and inconsistent rental income.

From a product standpoint, I saw this as a multi-sided problem. Improving student housing required designing not just better apartments, but a cohesive system that aligned student convenience, parental trust, and landlord stability into a single, standardized experience.

For farmers, participation involves unfamiliar terminology, long timelines, and uncertainty around how regenerative practices translate into verified value. For corporate sustainability teams, the challenge lies in evaluating credit credibility, managing reputational risk, and justifying purchasing decisions internally.

From a product perspective, this created a core challenge: trust could not be solved through messaging or surface-level transparency alone. The system itself needed to make complex processes legible, align incentives across stakeholders, and support confident decision-making without requiring users to become domain experts.

To validate the problem and solution, I contributed to extensive user and market research across students, parents, and landlords. We conducted 90+ interviews and 70+ survey responses, focusing on housing quality, willingness to pay for convenience, safety concerns, and operational pain points.

Student interviews revealed a strong willingness to pay a premium for fully furnished, move-in-ready apartments that eliminate setup work, utility coordination, and maintenance uncertainty. International and out-of-state students surfaced particularly acute pain around remote housing searches, scams, and unreliable listings.

Parents emerged as key decision-makers, prioritizing safety, transparency, and professional management. Research showed that parents were willing to pay more for housing that reduced risk and stress while supporting academic success. On the supply side, landlord interviews highlighted openness to master lease models that offer guaranteed rent, reduced operational burden, and property value improvements.

These insights shaped Keystone’s value proposition and pricing strategy, validating that convenience, trust, and reliability, not just square footage,were the core drivers of demand.

Farmer interviews revealed hesitation driven less by lack of interest and more by uncertainty, unclear expectations, delayed value realization, and limited visibility into how on-farm practices translate into verified outcomes. These insights highlighted the need for clearer feedback loops and transparent representations of progress over time.

Corporate stakeholders emphasized credibility and traceability. Sustainability teams struggled to evaluate credit quality, compare projects, and communicate legitimacy internally. Trust was closely tied to visibility into data sources, methodologies, and verification processes rather than aggregated metrics alone.

Rather than validating preconceived solutions, these insights actively reshaped the product definition. The research reframed the marketplace from a simple exchange of credits into a decision-support system where clarity, interpretability, and trust were the core requirements.

Research findings informed Aetherion’s product strategy at a system level. The platform was designed as an information system first, rather than a transactional marketplace, prioritizing transparency, traceability, and clear information flows across stakeholders.

For farmers, this meant designing participation around clarity and feedback rather than complexity. Product assumptions emphasized onboarding simplicity, progress visibility, and clear explanations of how regenerative practices contribute to verified outcomes over time.

For corporate users, the strategy focused on surfacing verification logic and traceability rather than abstracting it away. Product decisions centered on structuring and presenting data so that credit quality could be evaluated, compared, and justified internally with confidence.

Early interface explorations in Figma and a high-level interactive prototype built in Lovable were used as thinking tools to pressure-test assumptions about information hierarchy, trust, and user understanding across both sides of the marketplace. These artifacts were not final designs, but mechanisms for reasoning through complex interactions and aligning product strategy with user needs.