Dwelly was built by Harris, who was 10 years old at the time, after watching his family fumble through managing their Texas lake house on their phones. The app he built is the one his family needed but couldn't find anywhere else. This is what that actually looked like.

Every time we get a notification that someone new signed up for Dwelly, we stop whatever we're doing and celebrate.

Harris does a little cheer. I get a little emotional, not going to lie. Doug immediately wants to know everything about their property. Which state. What kind of house. How many families.

We never take it for granted. Somebody out there has a shared vacation home that was stressing them out, and they found us, and they thought this might help. That never gets old.

Here's why.

The lake house situation

We have a lake house in Texas. It's one of our favorite places on earth.

When we got it, everyone wanted to get organized. My sister-in-law, who is the most organized person in any room she walks into, created a Google Sheet. It had everything. Contacts for the neighbors, pest control, the internet company. All the things you need to know when you're managing a property with other people.

The problem was using it. We were always on our phones, away from a laptop, trying to pull up information at exactly the wrong moment. Squinting at a spreadsheet that wasn't built for a four-inch screen. Scrolling sideways. Losing the row you needed. Giving up and just texting somebody to ask.

We were all individually trying to figure out how to be organized in our own ways. The effort was there. The tool wasn't.

What Harris noticed

Harris noticed the fumbling.

One day, not as a big announcement, just kind of in passing, he mentioned that he could probably build us an app for this. He was using a platform called Base44 and thought it could work.

I told him to go ahead and put some money behind it. What he came back with was an amazing first draft. Something we could actually use on our phones. Something that made sense for how we were actually living with the property.

He was 10.

What he built

He built the thing we needed. A shared app for the people who use a vacation home together. A shared calendar where everyone can see who has the house and when. Expense tracking everyone can see. A place for the contacts and access codes and property details that doesn't require scrolling sideways through a spreadsheet on your phone.

He built it because the right thing didn't exist yet. The tools out there were either too complicated, built for short-term rentals, or just a general project management tool with a vacation home use case badly bolted on.

So he built a simple one. From scratch. At 10.

What happened after

We started using it for our lake house. It worked. The fumbling stopped. People could find what they needed without texting someone to ask.

Then a mutual friend found out about it and asked if Harris could build their family one too. They wanted to pay him for it.

That was the moment. Not a business plan, not a pitch deck. Just a friend saying "we have the same problem, can we have one." That's when we knew this wasn't just a thing Harris built for us. It was a thing a lot of families needed.

So we decided to bring it to market properly. Harris had built the first version in Base44, but scaling it into something real required more. We rebuilt it using Claude Code, which let us take what Harris had proven out and turn it into an actual product.

And then someone signed up who we didn't know. A family somewhere with a shared property and a group text and a Google Sheet nobody could quite figure out on their phone. They signed up, they set it up, and they kept using it.

The cheer Harris did that day. The way Doug immediately pulled up the map to see where they were. That's the moment that told us we were onto something real.

Why it still matters to us the same way

We are not a big company. We are a family who had a shared property problem and a kid who quietly offered to fix it.

Every person who signs up for Dwelly is someone who has what we had. A property they love, people they love sharing it with, and a Google Sheet that nobody can quite get to work on their phone. We know exactly what that feels like. We built this because we lived it.

We hope it helps the way it helped us.

Fourteen-day free trial at dwellyco.com. $9/month for one property. $19/month for up to three.

We built it for us. We're glad it works for you too.