PGLynk
Run your PG. Trust every tenant.
An all-in-one platform for PG owners in India — with a shared trust-score network that flags unreliable tenants before you rent.
Every PG task, plus a trust layer.
PGLynk handles the day-to-day of running a paying-guest hostel, and adds what the market lacks: a shared, verified record of tenant reliability.
Founder · Product & UX Designer · Build
Figma · AI-assisted build
Live at pglynk.com — India-first, early
All-in-one operations
Rooms, tenants, rent, expenses and repairs in one place.
Tenant Trust Score network
A shared, verified record of rent-paying history.
Built for India
Five languages, UPI and PhonePe, WhatsApp reminders.
Run on notebooks, rented on blind trust.
Two gaps hurt PG owners: messy day-to-day admin, and no way to know if a new tenant will actually pay.
The daily mess
- Rent & expenses tracked on paper.
- No clear profit / loss picture.
- Chasing dues by hand.
The trust gap
- Defaulters hop between PGs unnoticed.
- No shared payment history.
- Owners rent in the dark.
Give owners a shared memory.
Every rent payment a tenant makes in PGLynk builds a verified history. Roll that up and you get a Trust Score — a simple read on how reliable someone is, before you rent to them.
- Verified rent history
- A shared Trust Score
- Rent with confidence
Where this started.
I had a domain advantage — a co-founder running PGs on the ground — so I could design from real operations, not assumptions.
Ground truth
A co-founder running PGs meant the admin pain was lived, not assumed.
Owner conversations
The same fear kept coming up: will this new tenant actually pay?
The market gap
Every tool tracks rooms and rent. None share tenant reliability.
Two sides of the same deal.
The owner runs the place; the good tenant wants a fair shot. The trust network has to serve both.
The PG Owner
Runs 1–3 hostels · Not a techie · Primary
Goal
Run the place without chaos, and stop taking in tenants who won’t pay.
Frustration
Rent and expenses live on paper and WhatsApp; no way to vet a new tenant.
The Reliable Tenant
Moves cities for work · Secondary
Goal
Get a room quickly and be judged on a real payment history.
Frustration
Every new PG treats them as a stranger, with nothing to vouch for them.
One home, clear branches.
I sorted 30-plus functions into groups that match how an owner thinks — those clusters became the sitemap: a single dashboard hub with shallow, predictable branches.
Set Up
- Properties
- Tenants
- Rooms & beds
Money
- Payments
- Reminders
- Cash Book
Care
- Complaints
- Alerts
Trust
- Trust Score
- Network alerts
Account
- Profile
- Languages
- Support
The owner’s core loop.
From taking a tenant on to the rent decision each month — and every payment feeds the shared score.
- Add tenant
- Check Trust Score
- Rent due
- Overdue? → WhatsApp reminder
- Paid? → Logged & scored
Boxes before beauty.
I blocked out the main screens in low-fidelity first, so the structure was right before any styling.
Key calls, and why.
Three choices that came straight from how Indian PG owners actually work.
Simple, in five languages
Instead of an English-only dashboard. Real owners aren’t all English-first or tech-savvy — the product meets them there.
WhatsApp & UPI reminders
Instead of in-app-only notifications. That’s where rent actually moves in India, so the nudge lives where the money does.
Trust Score on the tenant row
Instead of a separate analytics module. Put the signal exactly where the decision happens — next to the name.
The whole PG at a glance.
The dashboard is the owner’s cockpit — properties, occupancy, dues and revenue up top, active tenants and room occupancy below.
Rooms and beds, mapped out.
Owners can run several PGs from one account. Each property card shows rooms, beds, who’s in and what’s free, with live occupancy.
- Multiple PGs in one account.
- Rooms, beds, occupied, vacant.
- Live occupancy per property.
Every tenant, scored.
This is where the trust idea becomes real inside the product. Every tenant carries a Trust Score right next to their name, alongside their room, rent and dues.
Rent tracked, receipts logged.
Every rent payment is recorded with its mode and an auto-generated receipt — so paid, pending and overdue are never in doubt.
- Paid, pending, overdue at a glance.
- UPI and cash, both captured.
- Auto receipt IDs for every payment.
Nudge rent over WhatsApp.
Reminders are built for how India actually pays. The owner’s UPI or PhonePe is auto-added to a ready WhatsApp message, previewed live before it sends.
- UPI / PhonePe auto-appended.
- Live WhatsApp message preview.
- Overdue tracking built in.
Daily income, expenses, profit.
A simple ledger for the whole PG — money in, money out, and a running profit-and-loss. Rent collected through the app flows in automatically.
- Running balance and monthly P&L.
- Money in / money out entries.
- Rent auto-logged from payments.
Log repairs, sync the cost.
Maintenance tickets track PG repairs from open to resolved — and the cost auto-syncs to the Cash Book so nothing gets missed.
- Track repairs, open to resolved.
- Log plumber / electrician costs.
- Costs auto-sync to the Cash Book.
The trust layer, working for you.
When another owner views a tenant you’ve flagged for unpaid dues, you get notified. Reputation follows the tenant across PGs — a defaulter can’t just move on quietly.
In their language, on their rails.
Five Indian languages, UPI and WhatsApp built in, and real human support — the details that make owners trust it, not add-ons bolted on afterward.
- 5 languages, switchable in-app.
- UPI · PhonePe · WhatsApp.
- Phone & WhatsApp support.
What early use changed.
Informal testing with real owners and my co-founder — I watched where they hesitated and fixed those spots.
Observed
A non-technical owner hesitated at finance words like “reconcile.”
Changed: Relabelled it in plain language — “Money in,” “Money out.”
Observed
Owners looked for a tenant’s reliability on the tenant row, not in a menu.
Changed: Moved the Trust Score onto the tenant list, beside the name.
Observed
Generic rent reminders felt easy to ignore.
Changed: Auto-filled the owner’s UPI and added a live WhatsApp preview.
One dark, warm system.
Near-black with a single orange accent and consistent components — designed in Figma and shipped live with AI-assisted tools.
Lexend
Friendly, highly legible — chosen for owners doing admin on the go.
Live, India-first, end to end.
PGLynk is live and demo-ready, with early owner outreach underway. I’m honest that we’re still landing the first customers — my co-founder runs India-side operations and outreach; I own product and design.
Live
shipped at pglynk.com
2 cities
owner outreach in Bengaluru & Hyderabad
1
designer-builder, end to end
1 · Designed for non-technical owners
Simple, multilingual, forgiving — not built for people who already think like a techie.
2 · The trust network was the real bet
Not a feature — a product-strategy call that only pays off with more owners on board.
3 · I took it from idea to live product
Designed and shipped it myself, with AI-assisted tools, while my co-founder runs the ground game.