The founder of Made Renovation came from gaming and marketplaces before pivoting to consumer products. He chose housing as the least crowded category among education, healthcare, transportation, and food, then built a renovation-as-equity model inspired by Opendoor and Lambda School. The team launched in six weeks: interviewed 50 contractors, ran a pricing study, recruited 5-10 contractors, built the product, and started Facebook ads.
What was the founding story of Maid Renovation? Yeah.
Well, so I mentioned that my background was games and I really enjoyed that and it worked well, built a business I was able to sell to Zynga, had a great run at Zynga. Then I built these marketplace businesses. Well, I built Gigster and I invested in a few marketplace businesses and saw the challenges that went into those and also just working B2B. I found that my true passion wasn't really delivering a B2B product as much as it was delivering a product B2C and getting to kind of work closely with my customers. So I wanted to get back to those roots and do something in consumer that was important to me. So I got a small team together. We did a lot of research on different consumer areas that really hadn't been tackled. And I did want to do something that touched the real world as well, kind of moving atoms, not bits. I was interested in doing a marketplace again, as long as it was consumer, but I wasn't necessarily married to doing a marketplace. So we did a lot of research, looked at the top 5 consumer areas of consumer expenditure. I think it's like education, healthcare, housing, transportation, and food. And we kind of looked at all those and landed on housing as the one that interested us and that we thought was less crowded and less disrupted by startups. So we landed on that. We also kind of looked at a lot of companies at the time we really admired. So we actually really admired Opendoor at the time. We admired this company called Lambda School at the time, and we were like, okay, what if We're like, what if those 2 companies had a baby? And we actually did this thought exercise for a lot of combinations of companies. And what we landed on was this idea of doing kind of free home renovations for customers and basically taking a cut of the value of the home so that we could essentially get equity in all these homes across the US. So we ended up landing on that idea just through a very long, protracted brainstorming process. If any of you are in the ideation phase and you want to see the fruits of that labor, you're interested in seeing like the 200 or 300 ideas that we didn't pursue, I have those in a shareable Google Doc. I'm happy to send them your way. Would love to see someone build those. We had a lot of really good ones, but we could only pick one. So that's how we landed on it and then kind of did some early testing and looked pretty good.
Yeah, we might have to check out that Google Doc. I'm sure there's some good ones on there. So, you know, so, so, so going back to the very beginning, you know, what were the, like, the actual first steps that you took to start it as a marketplace?
Well, so for starters, we saw, I mean, there are a few dynamics that we liked about the home renovation space. So we liked that there's growing demand. I mean, the market grew 19% last year. Okay. Like how many markets that are already $160 billion markets are growing by 19%? And now it's like from $160 to $190-something, so it's around $200 billion. So we loved that the demand was growing rapidly, but also supply is scarce. General contractors are aging out. Most of them are like, a lot of them are over 55. The number that are over 55 is growing rapidly. So we liked a lot of those dynamics and we we realized, okay, well, if supply is scarce, we should get to know our supply really well and ensure that we're serving our supply well and we're building up a great product for them. And if we do, if we can aggregate all the supply into one place, then the demand will come. So that was the early thesis. So to your question on what do we do first, I talked to 50 general contractors, just got on the phone with as many as I possibly could. I emailed all my friends that I knew had done a renovation recently, asked for an introduction to their their general contractor, just started cold contacting people on Yelp and Angie's List and stuff like that. And it was really illuminating, learned a lot about that. I would say the other thing we did was a pricing study because like Maid Renovation, or sorry, like Gigster, at Maid, we wanted to offer a guaranteed price for the construction. And this is a, you know, you, you might be saying like, well, didn't I learn my own lesson? Because that didn't work super well at Gigster. Well, home renovation is different because you, you almost always sign a fixed price agreement with a general contractor. Like if you're remodeling your bathroom, they'll tell you it's $12,000. You sign for that and they have to do the work for $12,000 or they're like legally in trouble. So that is the standard of how that industry works. So we, we were building, we built some tools on top of that. So that we could automatically produce, you know, compute a price. And that was another thing we looked at doing. But once we kind of had general contractors interested, we recruited 5 to 10 general contractors, we had pricing figured out, we pretty much just built a front end for it, then started buying Facebook ads. We got the whole thing done in about 6 weeks.
