Many homeowners struggle to find contractors who will provide quality work without gouging them on price. They burn hours of time contacting pros and hosting onsite scoping visits, just to get prices and availability—with little insight on quality. Lead generation platforms like Angi and Thumbtack only solve a narrow slice of the problem - finding pros - without helping to price, schedule, or guarantee work quality.
For contractors, it’s hard to manage lead generation and sales, while spending most of the day in the field, doing work. To grow their business, contractors often buy expensive leads from Angi, HomeAdvisor, Thumbtack and more, but convert those leads poorly because of their unreliable communication. Because of the high stakes, they spend nights and weekends following up to sales calls. Great for the lead generation platforms, but bad for both service pros and homeowners.
Chris bought his first home and experienced this first-hand. Quotes to paint the outside of the house ranged from $7K to $25K and getting painters to show up for quotes took hours across dozens of phone calls and text messages. Digging into the problem, we found complex operations and a fragmented, old-school market. I had worked at Opendoor and Chris at UberEats for years, so we were no strangers to operational complexity. We decided to build the solution.
With just a little bit of information from homeowners, we give them upfront, honest prices for water heater installations (and soon other home services). They can schedule online if they’d like to move forward. Nearly all service pros we talk with insist on scheduling an on-site visit before providing prices. Our clients can avoid this time-consuming step and almost always get better prices.
On the backend, we’ve built a system that takes those inputs and prices jobs fairly, based on criteria we’ve gotten from our network of service professionals. We match the jobs with the plumbers who we know are available to do them. Importantly, we enforce strict quality standards by remotely auditing before/after photos of the installation, aligning contractors to our quality principles before their first job with us, and verifying that every plumber in our network is licensed and insured.
I’m sure every homeowner in this community has had their own experiences with home services. We’ve love to hear about them - the good and the bad - and get feedback on our initial approach.
The issue is however not just about price or cost. It is mostly about finding reliable, knowledge and honest contractors which for some reason is not that easy.
The great contractors are usually very busy already. They don't have a "need to generate leads" problem. The best way to find them is word of mouth. If someone can figure out a way to collect this information (for example we have people asking on nextdoor and facebook local groups), it will be a gold mine.
It is a two sided market for lemons. The contractors are mostly contacted by lemon customers. Mostly lemon contractors are likely to respond.
What makes homeowners lemon customers besides price sensitivity and non-repeating projects is inexperience.
Construction scheduling is in NP. Professionals subjectively incorporate that into their expectations with experience and the experience is often at the institutional level. Weather delays, materials shortages, slow owner decision making, things hidden behind drywall, bad soil underground, etc etc. The second ’etc’ because any of these things on someone else’s job affects your job.
Nobody who has been around the rodeo actually believes it will be done in time for Christmas. Maybe Memorial Day if you are lucky. But Labor Day just to be safer.
I've seen different variations on the "connect you with a contractor" business model, and to me they don't work because good contractors are not a commodity. There is definitely a class of contractor that will go for this, but they are always the worst ones because if they were better they would be loaded up with work without having to pay in to a service that takes a cut from them.
For very routine jobs, this kind of service is provable fine. Like ordering McDonald's from uber eats. And this appears to be what they are initially targeting.
Brokering this kind of work is much tougher, with far more variables for quality/success and more room for subjectivity along with some lag time between the work and ability to fully measure quality. I suspect the founders here will find that the very reasons it's a problem for customers are the reasons it will be a problem for them. There is no shortage of bad contractors willing to charge for their work, and the good ones don't need to share their cut to get work.
So, they've absolutely identified a significant homeowner challenge, but their solution seems a bit naive. As another example, auditing photos for quality is unreliable and doesn't scale with project complexity. Yet, if you start to go further in auditing (e.g. on-site auditors) or otherwise guaranteeing and allocating work, then you've essentially re-invented subcontracting (perhaps even more akin to employment). I think they are also vastly underestimating their exposure in guaranteeing this type of work, especially for a small firm. Just arbitrating disputes alone can be a massive resource drain, and that doesn't include the actual remedy (and who pays for that remedy?).
And, of course, the Home Depots and Lowe's of the world already do something similar, with variable results. Hard to see where the real value-added differentiator is here, outside of the lack of brick and mortar.
I do hope they have an epiphany on their journey that leads them to a solution.
The only way to get any kind of basic quality assurance is either to do it yourself, or to find a referral to a reputable pro via word of mouth, often having to wait months for their next available slot.
Thumbtack is a dumpster fire.
We’re betting that more contractors can achieve those same standards in our structure, and we can deliver better availability and consistent trust to homeowners.
(asking because as a bit of trivia, there's an SF handyman named Reasonably Honest Mike who's both hilarious and effective. http://reasonablemike.com/about.html)
Same with Craigslist before that.
I would say that the same sort of problem will occur with all these services, unless you can bring new functionality to the problem where you can guarantee the level and quality and speed of service.
See also “tragedy of the commons”.
I think this is a very viable business model that can provide tremendous value to consumers. If you guys want to chat, shoot me a DM — I’d be happy to share my experience.
p.s. there’s no way to DM on hacker news, unless you leave some details on your profile.
The sister company was named Homebell, but I don’t think they’re in business anymore.
I used in live in Berlin too, and yes, figuring these things out without knowing German is probably very difficult. Honestly, I think your best bet is probably to ask a German-speaking friend for help.
Or to put it another way, what evidence do you have that the market is inefficient?
Or to put it another another way, how will you overcome the fundamental economic rational actor motivation? Qualified tradespeople will prioritize: repeat customers such as real estate companies and landlords; large jobs over small; and high paying work over guaranteed affordable prices.
The best tradespeople are busy serving good clients. The best clients are busy keeping good tradespeople busy. There are business relationships.
The home repair market is a market for lemons on both sides. Inexperienced amateur clients and contractors who can’t stay busy.
Ok. I am sure there might be a longer play. I am curious about that. The “don’t you wish home repair was free” pitch not so much.
I thought a good idea would be home owner insurance that provides vetted contractors. So vertical integration.
Currently home warranties are bad because they provide the worst, cheapest repairs possible; slowly; and reject many things. I would like to have a real home warranty, but tried three companies and they were not good. My favorite was they just couldn’t repair my hvac and said I had to keep paying $75 to send out different repairmen to try to fix it.
NFI what happened to it, but I recall hearing of a Lowe's "official" effort to try to assemble something like this; they theoretically have the resources to find and keep good relationships with local stables of contractors; but in practice.. no, that's not gonna happen, its gonna be a boondoggle.
But where's your "have a beer with these guys" level of trust in someone's crew? You're proxying that to the homeowners, so I'm curious what you plan to do there, especially as it grows past personal relationship scales.
Lowe's does this. It's not a boondoggle. Works out well in many cases because they can sell for example windows and the install at once.
Scaling will be a lot of complex work but we've built systems like that in the past at UberEats, where Chris was one of the first GMs, and at Opendoor (largest homebuyer in the US).
(Tip for people looking at those: rural zipcodes are great canaries for fake data, "we've done work at $Neighbor's house" is a good brag, except when the house burned down 5 years ago and wasnt the one in the picture)
I thought so too, until a HVAC outfit ghosted me one too many times. All I had was a screwdriver and multimeter in hand. I was able to figure out that the power transformer was taking in 110v but putting out 0v into the board. So I googled the part number, picked it up at Home Depot and just un-mounted it and swapped the new one in attaching the wires in the same way. Easy peasy! It really was a lot easier than I thought. Just remember to take pictures of the wiring before.
I can do a water heater in copper in a little over an hour and a half on-site. I might spend more time figuring out which water heater will fit and be best for me and going to pick it up than I will soldering or moving the heaters around.
My wife did bathroom remodeling for a bit last year; she got some incredibly stupid examples of that from both customers and contractors, stuff you'd expect in a kindergarten. One of her contractors sent messages to others in the business in two counties about her employing a black man and how it would lower the standards of the trade to work with her.
Both my wife and her employee had known these people (the local contractors) for years from serving them at a hardware store, but going from retail clerk to independent business in their area made it an entirely different thing.
"enforce strict quality standards" - This sounds good but there are also local municipal codes that work has to adhere to, sometimes where a repair job has to bring something up to current code standards as part of the work. How will your service ensure contractors are doing this?
Regarding the quality part, say someone passes the quality test before/after photos, etc. and "fixes" someones deck but it later collapses because of faulty work (using improper screws that can't handle load) and someone is severely injured or worse. Are you legally structured where the liability remains with contractors?
The contractor takes on the liability, just like any other job. As part of our quality standards, all work needs to be up to code. We ingest the local code standards and include those in our quality controls. The controls are pretty rigorous, down to the specific materials used in jobs, including tracking the purchase, pickup, and usage of those materials.
Side note: I would also pay for a "Landlord as a Service". I want to treat a company like my landlord, even though I own my house. "Hi Bill, my roof is leaking" and they say "Someone will be there next week" and then send me a bill.
Our pitch is rather than charge for leads, we directly give our pros jobs, and deal with all customer acquisition, customer service and payment. That means they can spend 0% of their time on sales & job scoping, and only need to accept the jobs when they can fit them into their schedule. So far it seems to be resonating, but it's early.
My understanding is that the reason prices are so unpredictable is because the work is so unpredictable: if you're guaranteeing a fixed cost on a job that then balloons in complexity, then the costs you incur are going to wipe out your margin on dozens of other jobs... but because you're growing in revenue you'll be able to keep raising capital to keep subsidising these exploding costs until at some point it becomes impossible to continue.
You speak about a system that can take inputs and price a job fairly, which sounds great in theory, but if "a system that can price jobs fairly" becomes your white whale, and you're forever subsidising bad jobs, what do you think about the impact on the independent service providers when the music stops?
I think this is a great idea and has a lot of potential to deliver value for consumers and contractors, so this comment isn't a challenge against the idea, rather I'm curious about how you're thinking about your responsibility to the service providers that have hitched their wagon to yours if things don't go to plan.
For example front and center is a fixed price tankless heater, which is great. However if the customer has serious plumbing issues which have caused the existing (tank) water heater to fail (for the example corroded pipes), if you replace just the water heater without fixing the underlying issues it could cause the new tankless heater to fail by introducing sediment, etc. into the system.
In the software world this would be akin to asking a contractor to add a new feature to your site without seeing the existing codebase. Seems difficult.
Are y'all just amortizing the cost of these things across all customers or what?
We haven't met service professionals who have the capability to do that directly, but doing so delivers a much, much better homeowner experience.
1) Scheduling required filling in the same qualification form multiple times, and texting/calling with a rather disorganized office. The better reputed the service company, the bigger mess their schedule is. You're solving this.
2) I didn't have a quote until the people came out to visit. You're solving this.
3) Once the service pros gave quotes, I had to share them with my landlord, have them approve the work, have the service pro complete it, confirm that the issue was fixed, and have the landlord complete payment. Coordinating parties was a major PITA, I hope you solve this in the future.
4) When the service pro diagnosed the issue and gave me a quote, I didn't know whether the diagnosis was truthful, and the quote was reasonable. After the fix, the symptom went away for a bit, and then came back, and the service person tried other fixes. This back and forth was a major pain. I don't know how you'll fix this, maybe a warranty on your service, or an annual insurance plan/maintenance subscription instead? Similar to Forward's model for healthcare - don't make money when you have to fix problems, make money when I don't have problems.
5) Thumbtack had a fixed price service, but it was too large a premium over the more ad hoc services. I hope you keep prices reasonable when you start swallowing more unexpectedly large scoped problems.
I'd be down to trade emails to chat live too, if you're open to it - myhomebreeze at gmail
The reason why I never book on TaskRabbit or Thumbtack anymore is because there's legitimately an 80% chance that they don't show up. There's no penalty for not showing up or expressing higher availability and just choosing from it.
This means that every repair or home service that I consider is a simple question. Is this worth rebooking multiple times or will I just bite the bullet and try to do it myself.
I would be willing to pay around 1.5 - 2X more than I book for if I had some guarantee - financial or otherwise, that they would show up. Just the ability to construct a simple equation in my head - "is this repair worth $X" in my head without trying to manage the cost of a no-show would be huge and would have me checking the cost of much more small repairs.
Wishing you all the best for this to succeed, but from my perspective you should be trying to free up contractors to focus on work as much as you are trying to connect home owners with them. Contractors are certainly limited supply and high demand.
Good luck guys it’s a good market to be in
David DavidS@HomeLux.ai
* "Tradie" is Australian slang for someone who's gone to trade school and is now qualified as a plumber, carpenter, electrician, etc.
Things like: - Variable space + material price and quality - Contractors that subcontract out - People lying about their qualifications - Working multiple jobs at once - Breaking things in your house, discovering other problems, follow ups with broken stuff and I could go on.
We bought an absolute lemon of a house and have had everything fixed and while I would love a fixed price service, I just don’t see how it’s possible without at the very least a professional assessing the project virtually ahead of time.
I would love to be wrong and I would pay hundreds per month just for a dedicated solution with fixed rate pricing. I hope you succeed.
Also in my experience, contractors loathe technology. They work by phone calls and texts at the most.
