Bringing Bathroom App to Portland: A Partnership with PHLUSH
Bringing Bathroom App to Portland: A Partnership with PHLUSH
By: Gurbaz Dhillon, Co-creator of Bathroom App
In just a few weeks, Bathroom App will be live in Portland!
As a new player in this space, we wanted to share a bit about who we are, why we care about toilets, and how we’re thinking about The Bathroom Company.
Who are we?
Aridam and Gurbaz in the 5th grade (left) and today (right)
Aridam and I (Gurbaz) have unintentionally followed the same path in life. We met in fifth grade in Surrey, BC, and have been best friends ever since. Without ever planning it, we ended up going to the same high school, studied Mechanical Engineering, moved to San Francisco, and became Product Managers in tech. Now, we’re building The Bathroom Company together.
Why do we care about toilets?
In 2021, I was planning my move down to SF and stayed with Aridam for the week. During this time, we struggled to find bathrooms while we were out and started sharing our (traumatic) bathroom stories. Not just ours, but also our close family members that suffer from various health conditions that require access to bathrooms at short notice, like Ulcerative Colitis.
Naturally, we started to brainstorm a few solutions:
- Put a bunch of bathrooms on the back of a truck and let people request one like they’d order an Uber.
- Create smart public bathrooms and license them out to cities.
- Incentivize businesses to offer their bathrooms as a service to the public, while we handle cleaning and maintenance.
It started out as a bit of a joke, but it planted a seed in our heads. And as we researched and spoke to more people, it became increasingly clear that this is a huge problem in the US that most people have accepted as the norm. Everyone seems to agree this is a problem, so why do we accept it?
It felt like a worthwhile problem to try to tackle. We started by creating a toilet finder called Bathroom App.
When we first launched Bathroom App, we interviewed SF locals and they loved the idea!
Bathroom App
Why? Simply because sometimes there’s a bathroom around the corner in a place you’d never guess, like a church or a police station.
And although there are many toilet finders that exist today, they are missing a few key features Bathroom App supports:
- Crowdsourcing: Anyone can add or edit bathroom locations. We manually review each submission to make sure the data is accurate.
- Detailed Info: Each bathroom can have access details, hours, photos, ratings, amenities and more.
- Modern Design: We’ve put a lot of effort into the user experience, making the app easy and pleasant to use, and we’re always looking for ways to improve.
A short demo of Bathroom App. You can search by address or your location to find restrooms nearby. There are photos, ratings, access and amenity details, and more that help you make your decision about which bathroom to go to.
What sets us apart is our data collection approach, which prioritizes reliability and availability. Rather than blindly pulling data from OpenStreetMap, we take a hands-on, city-by-city approach, launching only when we have enough reliable data to make the app truly useful. We have built an open system: our partner cities and organizations can also add their own data to launch in their neighborhoods. In San Francisco, we started by walking the streets, manually documenting bathrooms, gathering public resources, and scraping online data.
Please join us in mapping Portland's public restrooms throughout the month of April
Click HERE for zoom links and more information!
Now, we’re bringing that same effort to Portland with the help of PHLUSH! We’ve gathered all the online data we can, and for the first three weeks of April, we’ll be hitting the streets for a toilet scavenger hunt. By the end, we hope to create a valuable resource for everyone.
But this isn’t just about building an app; we want to build a community around bathroom accessibility. An app alone won’t solve the problem fully, but it’s the first step toward our bigger vision for The Bathroom Company.
The Bathroom Company
Our vision is simple: clean bathroom access for everyone.
Right now, we’re focused on growing Bathroom App and tackling a key question—how can we build a fair system to make existing bathrooms more accessible? Could businesses that open their restrooms to the public be rewarded? Instead of governments spending millions on a single-stall toilet, could that money be used more effectively to leverage the infrastructure that already exists?
Looking ahead, we also want to explore:
- What are the best practices for good public restroom design? How can we make restrooms that are clean, inclusive, resilient, and cost-effective?
- How do we shift our culture to treat bathrooms with more respect?
- Can we break the norm of neglected public restrooms and create ones that are delightful to use? What if one was always less than 10 minutes away?
Big questions, of course! But this is just the beginning, and we’re excited to figure it out!