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MELLRO
Owners kept properties empty out of fear. We rebuilt the guarantee, and cut repossession to about a week, against the year-plus an eviction takes.
Role
Lead Product Designer
Lead Product Manager
Team
+1 Product designer
5+ Developers
Period
11/2020 to 10/2024
About the company
Mellro built a three-sided rental marketplace connecting owners, tenants, and brokers in Brazil. A payment-guarantee structure cut repossession from over a year to about a week and opened renting to people the old guarantees excluded. Venture-backed.
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Tags
I joined Mellro as Lead Product Designer, leading product and design, and I was there before there was a team. What started as a founder's idea became a three-sided rental marketplace with R$140M+ in contracts under guarantee, and I structured the product that made it possible: the features, the flows, and how the company thought about building.
Logo I designed for the project.
The problem
Renting in Brazil was stuck, and everyone in the chain paid for it.
The blocker underneath everything: the law
A standard eviction under Brazil's Tenancy Law took 12 to 18 months, sometimes longer. So owners kept properties empty rather than risk a tenant who might stop paying.
We saw it constantly: whenever we onboarded a client with an existing rental portfolio, the same story came up, owners who left properties empty on purpose, preferring no rent to a risky tenant. The whole market was built defensively around that single fear.
The three sides of the market each felt it differently:
Owners:
Months of vacancy, or the risk of a year-long eviction, so many just left properties empty.
Tenants:
Excluded by guarantees, a guarantor who owned property, or three to six months of deposit upfront, which pushed qualified families into the informal market with no contract.
Brokers:
Juggling listings, contracts, and guarantees across five to seven systems that didn't talk, and taking the blame when something broke.
How I got to the product
The founder's original idea was a Tinder-style match between brokers and tenants: swipe, connect, done. I ran field-validated discovery to test it, interviewing brokers, owners, and tenants, going to industry events, and following real deals end to end. Matching wasn't the problem. Everything after was: guarantees, contracts, payments, risk.
The deeper pattern took longer to see. Many brokers avoided rentals entirely, not just because the tools were bad, but because managing a rental portfolio was hard and thankless, and a chunk of that difficulty lived in how the relationship between broker, owner, and tenant worked in the eyes of the law. The founder had the legal hypothesis. My contribution was understanding why it mattered so much, that the legal complexity was a root cause of both broker avoidance and owner fear, and then leading the product work that turned it into something the three sides could actually use.
What I built
I led product and design, with a designer working alongside and reporting to me. Three moves mattered most, one for each side of the market.
The legal reframing (owners)
Instead of operating as a rental guarantee under the Tenancy Law, we structured the product as a payment guarantee under different legislation. Under that regime we could take on the default risk ourselves, pay the owner whether or not the tenant paid, and drop guarantors and large deposits.
Repossession:
~1 week vs 12-18 months
Under a different regime than a Tenancy Law eviction, we could assume default risk with a sustainable model, pay the owner whether or not the tenant did, and drop guarantors and large deposits for tenants.
Contract management flow study
Earnings report
Modern risk analysis (tenants)
Traditional guarantees excluded anyone without a guarantor or three months of deposit. We replaced them with analysis that weighed broader signals, credit history, income stability, income-to-rent ratio, and informal income. That last one mattered most: it approved renters that guarantors and deposits would have turned away, with a transparent reason when the answer was no.
Full assumption, zero fee (brokers)
Brokers paid nothing; our revenue came from the guarantees, so they kept 100% of their commissions. We absorbed the work that used to fall on them and made rentals miserable to manage: payment guarantee to the owner, collection, legal support, standardized contracts.
Property management screen designed for real estate agents.
Underneath it, I designed a universal registration: a single source of truth where a property is entered once and replicates to listing portals, payment splits, commission config, inspections, and digital contracts. Brokers used to re-enter the same property across five to seven systems.
REGISTRATION:
~2 hours to ~15 minutes
Independent brokers suddenly ran at enterprise efficiency.
The property creation process in the system was structured in phases. The simplified registration allowed agents to activate our guarantee in just a few steps, while additional features were immediately accessible from the thank-you screen.
The user can enter listing information and automatically publish it to major real estate platforms, configure payment splits, invite administrators, conduct property inspections, and send contracts, making it the one-stop shop every real estate agent needs.
What I got wrong
The first version was built around a chat screen. We wanted the conversation to happen inside the tool on purpose, since an in-app record gave us stronger legal footing if a contract was disputed. Users didn't cooperate. They moved to WhatsApp, the way everyone in Brazil eventually does. We gave up the legal advantage we'd designed for and rebuilt the navigation around how people actually behaved. The lesson stuck: a real business reason to want a behavior doesn't make users adopt it. Now I design for how people already act, and find another way to get what the business needs.
Through our admin interfaces, every team in the company, from Sales to Legal, can consult, interact with, and modify system data and parameters. This automates the majority of processes and empowers teams to solve issues independently, without relying on Development, Support, or Product teams.
Results
Independent brokers who had spent fifteen years only in sales built rental portfolios for the first time. Families with stable but informal income rented formally, with a contract and legal protection. And owners who used to leave properties empty had a reason to put them back on the market. We didn't erase inequality. We removed a few of the barriers that kept it running.
The market noticed. Traditional agencies started coming to us not as rivals but to simplify their own operations, and the company raised R$6.5M along the way. The press nicknamed us "the XP for real estate brokers," after the brokerage that made investing accessible to ordinary Brazilians. Flattering, and closer to the point than the label we'd given ourselves. When I moved on, I trained the product team that succeeded me.
R$140M+
R$140M+ in rental contracts under guarantee
~90%
Applicant approval rate
~2h to ~15min
Property registration
R$65M
Credit line for receivables
What I learned
Systemic problems don't yield to one layer of solution. If we had only built a cleaner interface, we would have failed, because what kept this market small wasn't a bad screen, it was the accumulated legal, financial, and operational complexity that made rentals not worth a broker's time and made owners afraid to rent at all. What unlocked it was seeing that the real barrier was structural, then making a legal reframing, an automated operation, and a financial model work as one system. I was the one who turned that understanding into a working product, most of the time as the only product person in the room, and that is the part I'm proudest of: not the idea, but the building.
