An Overview Of Made Renovation As A Marketplace For Home Renovation Services

8 Nov 2022 · 3 min

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3:03

In this video, the speaker provides a comprehensive overview of Made (also referred to as Maid) Renovation’s business model. The company positions itself as a vertically focused marketplace that exclusively handles bathroom remodels, deliberately avoiding other home‑improvement categories such as kitchens or fences. Drawing on lessons from the software‑services platform Gigster, the founder argues that a niche‑focused, multi‑sided marketplace can succeed in the complex, multi‑month process of bathroom renovation, which typically involves up to eight distinct participants (designer, architect, permit specialist, general contractor, project manager, support staff, etc.). Made Renovation combines an advanced e‑commerce catalog—thousands of SKUs for toilets, vanities, tiles, fixtures, organized into pre‑built templates—with a series of linked marketplaces for each professional role. Customers purchase materials through the e‑commerce layer and then engage the appropriate marketplace actors in a sequential workflow. A dedicated support layer (akin to Airbnb or Uber support) ensures issues are resolved throughout the project. The speaker likens the overall structure to planning a wedding, where multiple vendors and services must be coordinated, illustrating how a multi‑sided marketplace can orchestrate a home‑renovation experience. Key take‑aways: (1) vertical specialization on bathrooms to dominate a niche; (2) replication of Gigster’s multi‑sided marketplace concept for physical services; (3) integration of a robust product catalog with professional marketplaces; (4) sequential actor engagement and a support infrastructure; and (5) the wedding‑planning analogy that clarifies the complexity and coordination required.

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be helpful if you can give us an overview of Maid Renovation and kind of where you're at today. Yeah, for sure. Maid is— so to zoom out, what are we delivering? We're delivering a home renovation and it's vertical. So we only do bathrooms. We don't do kitchens. We don't do your skylight. We're not going to move a wall. We're not going to build a fence. We're very vertically focused. That was a lesson from Gigster again, to focus on a niche and really to own and dominate that niche. So all we use bathrooms, but a bathroom renovation is a— it's a complex multi-month process that involves multiple actors. So it's not the case where like one person can just remodel your whole bathroom. Like you're going to see a lot of different people get involved— designer, architect, maybe a permit specialist or expediter. You have obviously the general contractor themselves, maybe a project manager. maybe a support person in case something goes wrong. So you've got up to 7 or 8 different people that could be involved in a renovation. So you might be seeing where this goes, similar to how Gigster was this multi-sided marketplace where we had designers, product managers, and engineers collaborating to build end projects for customers, we very much were just doing Gigster for home renovation because my thesis was that the Gigster model actually could work. It's a complex, multi-sided marketplace, and I thought it could work for home renovation, even if it didn't work super well for software services. So what we are, you know, as a marketplace, as a company, is you think of us as an e-commerce solution for, you know, renovation products and materials. So, you know, we sell toilets, vanities, tile, faucets, shower fixtures, everything you need for a bathroom. We have thousands of SKUs in our catalog organized into templates. So think of us as an advanced kind of e-commerce solution for home renovation products. And attached to that e-commerce solution, kind of like imagine the udders of a cow or something, attached to those are these marketplaces. So we've got designer, architect, the permit expediter, the builder. And there's a support layer that streamlines the whole experience. Support, you know, Airbnb has support, Uber has support. It's hard to get away from that. So that's kind of always going to be there. But the marketplaces, we very much take ourselves out of the picture. We let the customer work in sequence with those different marketplace actors, and they buy the materials through our e-commerce experience. An analogy somebody mentioned to me is the idea of, like, it's kind of like weddings in a way. Where with a wedding you need the cake and you need the cake and the venue and invitations, and there's all these different things you need just to get a wedding put together. Well, it's, and there are people that have tried to build these multi-sided marketplaces for weddings. Well, it's similar to that, but for a home renovation.