RooMate Is Expanding to Thessaloniki (And What It Took to Get Here)

It started with one problem, in one city

RooMate exists because finding a safe room, as a woman, in a new city, is harder than it should be. Not impossible. Just harder. You're scrolling listings you can't picture yourself living in. You're meeting strangers with no way to know if the room is what the photos promised, or if the person renting it out is who they say they are. You're doing all of this alone, usually while also starting a new job, a new life, sometimes a new country.

I built RooMate in Athens first because that's where I saw the problem clearest. Women landladies who wanted to rent to women they could trust. Women renters who wanted the same thing in return. A platform that does the matching, the verification, and the trust-building so neither side has to gamble on a stranger.

123 women signed up. Founding members got in early, before we had proof it would work, because the problem was real enough that they didn't need proof. They needed the option to exist.

Why Thessaloniki, and why now

The honest answer isn't a growth strategy, it's that women kept asking.

Message after message, on Instagram, in comments, in DMs: "Are you in Thessaloniki?" "Is this available here?" "Why isn't this in my city yet?" Real women, genuinely excited about the idea, who wanted exactly what RooMate offers, and just happened to be in the wrong postcode.

Thessaloniki is Greece's second-largest city, full of students, young professionals, and women relocating for work, many of them without a local network to lean on for a safe recommendation. It's exactly the population RooMate was built for. They told me so themselves, before I even asked.

The core loop worked in Athens. Verification worked. Matching worked. Once something works without me standing over it, and once the exact people it's meant for are asking for it by name, that's the signal to point it at the next place, not to keep polishing the first one indefinitely.

What expansion actually looked like from the inside

It looked less like a launch party and more like four drafts of one graphic. I'll be honest about that, because "we are now in Thessaloniki" sounds like a clean announcement and it wasn't a clean process to get there. The image went through a sunset version, a daylight version, a version with a broken text-wrap, and finally one that said what I needed it to say without anything overlapping a boat mast.

That's not a footnote. That's the actual work of building something. Nobody sees the fourth draft. They just see "RooMate is in Thessaloniki now," and it looks instant. It wasn't instant. It was iteration, the same way the platform itself was: build, break, fix, ship, watch what real people do with it, adjust.

What this means if you're in Thessaloniki right now

If you're one of the women who messaged me asking when this was coming, it's here.

If you're a woman moving to Thessaloniki, for university, for work, for a fresh start, you can now find a flatshare or a room with another woman landlady through RooMate, the same way Athens women have been doing for months. Verified profiles. Consent-based introductions, meaning both sides say yes before any details are shared. Women-first, always.

If you're a woman landlady in Thessaloniki with a room to rent, this is your invitation to be one of the first. Founding members in Athens got real advantages for signing up early. The same is true here, right at the start of this city's chapter.

Find your place: theroomateapp.com

This is one city down from one, and one city closer to the bigger thing RooMate is trying to build: a place where women don't have to choose between "safe" and "affordable," or between "verified" and "available in time."

More cities are coming. This is just the second domino.

Just start. 🤍 Sotiria

Dr Sotiria Moschopoulou is a Greek dentist, Airbnb Superhostess and landlady based in London, and the founder of RooMate, a trust-based roommate matching platform for women in Athens. RooMate operates as a single-sex service under Schedule 3, Part 7 of the Equality Act 2010.

Photo taken by Leandros Papakarmezis at Unsplash