Otto · Giving homes memory, history and intelligence.

Home information is scattered across reports, inboxes, photo libraries, and binders that are easy to lose and hard to trust. When something needs attention, homeowners have to reconstruct context from memory instead of from a single record. Inspectors, contractors, and insurers each keep their own version of the same house, and none of them stay in sync. The result is delayed decisions, duplicated work, and a home that never quite becomes knowable.

Our careers, health, finances, and even our cars have persistent digital records. Our homes do not. Information about a home remains scattered across inspection reports, invoices, warranties, photographs, email threads, and individual memory. I founded Otto to give every home a living digital profile: a structured record of what it is, what has happened to it, and what should happen next.

I performed over two dozen user interviews with homeowners, friends, family members and past clients. The audio was aggregated in notebook lm and the patterns were striking. The majority of the homeowners I spoke to felt as though their home and it's management was a significant source stress and anxiety in their lives. Many said that despite it being so valuable, but monetarily and emotionally, their homes information was completely disorganized and resided in paper form, in emails, text messages, random spreadsheets and in their memories.

A home may have one address, but it is rarely a single-user object.

Partners make decisions together. Family members share responsibilities. Tenants report problems. Realtors assemble closing documents. Inspectors identify deficiencies. Contractors contribute estimates, photos, invoices, and maintenance history. Over the life of a home, many people participate in understanding, maintaining, and improving it.

Those relationships already exist, but they are usually implicit. The context surrounding a home is scattered across email threads, text messages, cloud folders, paper records, and individual memory. One person may know when the roof was replaced, another may have the warranty, and a contractor may be the only person who understands what was repaired.

I began to think of this as the home’s implicit social graph: a network of people connected not because they follow one another, but because they share some relationship to the same property.

Otto makes that graph explicit by placing the home, not the individual user, at the centre of the product.

People join a home through defined relationships and roles. Documents, findings, tasks, plans, conversations, and completed work remain connected to the property, while permissions determine who can view, contribute to, or manage each part of the record.

The first version of Otto prioritizes owners and co-owners, but I designed the underlying model to support the broader network that naturally forms around a property.

This changed Otto from a personal home-maintenance dashboard into something more durable: a shared system of record through which the people responsible for a home can coordinate decisions, contribute knowledge, and preserve its history over time.