Every year, thousands of students across Pakistan relocate to new cities for university. Along with the excitement of a new campus and a new chapter comes one of the most stressful and unstructured parts of student life: finding a place to live. For most students, the process still relies on word of mouth, unreliable Facebook groups, and property listings that are outdated, unverified, or simply misleading. There is no dedicated platform built around the specific needs of Pakistani students. Stayza exists to change that.
Student housing in Pakistan operates almost entirely outside formal systems. Landlords list properties informally, students negotiate blind, and there is little transparency around pricing, safety, or proximity to campus. International platforms do not account for local context, and general property listing sites are not designed with a student's priorities in mind: affordability, distance from university, roommate compatibility, and trust.
This gap is not a small inconvenience. It shapes where students choose to study, how much stress they carry into their first semester, and how vulnerable they are to scams or unsafe living conditions. Solving it requires more than a listings website. It requires a platform built specifically around the student experience.
Stayza started as an idea I could not stop thinking about while studying Computer Science at SEECS, NUST. Rather than treating it as a side project, I approached it as a real product from day one: identifying the core user problem, designing a platform architecture that could scale, and building the technical foundation myself.
Working solo meant owning every layer of the product. I designed and implemented the frontend using React and TypeScript, building out more than sixteen components to support search, filtering, and listing discovery in a way that feels intuitive rather than overwhelming. On the backend, I used Supabase to manage authentication and data, which meant solving real engineering challenges around Row Level Security policies, OAuth integration, and role based access control to keep user data secure while supporting multiple account types.
One of the more demanding parts of the build was the analytics layer. A platform like Stayza needs to understand user behavior, listing performance, and search patterns to improve over time, but that data has to be handled carefully. I built a secure analytics engine with RLS policies designed from the ground up to protect user privacy while still surfacing the insights needed to guide product decisions.
Building Stayza alongside a full course load has meant learning to work in tight, focused sprints. Concepts from coursework in object oriented programming, database systems, and software design have directly shaped decisions in the product, from how the data model is structured to how components are organized for maintainability. At the same time, the demands of running a startup, debugging authentication flows late at night, refining UI based on user feedback, and planning feature roadmaps have taught lessons no classroom could replicate.
As Stayza matured, it became clear that building a sustainable platform meant building a team, not just a product. I recently developed a full set of onboarding and operational documentation to support a growing intern program across business development and quality assurance. Structuring this program required thinking carefully about communication, accountability, and how to maintain quality while delegating responsibility, skills that are just as important as writing code.
This phase also meant looking outward. I studied existing platforms in the space to understand where Stayza could differentiate itself, and began preparing applications for competitions like the Punjab Youth Innovation and Incubation Competition, seeking both validation and resources to accelerate growth.
Stayza is still early, but the direction is clear. The goal is not just to list properties, but to build trust into every part of the student housing search: verified listings, transparent pricing, and a platform that treats student housing as the significant life decision it actually is.
Building a startup as a first year student comes with real constraints on time, resources, and experience. But it has also forced a kind of discipline and resourcefulness that I believe will shape how I approach every project going forward, in Stayza and beyond.
Stayza is a reminder that meaningful problems do not wait for the right time to be solved. Sometimes the best way to understand a problem deeply enough to fix it is to have lived through it yourself.