[USA-MI][SALES][17] Home RFQ business.

I’m currently going through customer discovery right now and there seems to be a strong need in the local market. I spent 8 years in home service sales (landscaping, demolition, remodeling, etc) through high school and college; now I work as a consultant in the automotive industry but this need has not yet been met in the market. I’m going to need a technical cofounder to build the infrastructure for the service. A few details of the business below. If interested, please shoot me a DM. Pitch TLDR: “Good help is hard to find, we’ll go find it.” Problems For Homeowners My wife and I purchased a 100-year-old house 18mo ago and have a hell of a time finding good contractors. For every type of service, one needs to use a combination of Google, Bing, Angie’s list, Thumbtack, etc to call 8+ professionals; leave messages at 4, get an answering service at 2 that take a message, and 2 that answer but have no customer service skills. After some phone tag, you might schedule quotes with 5. The homeowner has to take off at sporadic times to meet with them, only to cover the exact same details with each. They all take similar measurements but come back with wildly different prices. Often times, customers may pay a significant deposit to contractors who never complete the job or complete in a poor manner. For Contractors: It’s time consuming to provide quotes. Each quote takes 0.75-1.5hr to deliver properly (travel to and from, costing the job, typing up poorly formatted quotes, emailing, etc). Contractors’ Customer Acquisition Costs (CAQs) are higher than they would estimate due to the opportunity cost of lost revenue generating time due to competing over quotes. The Solution Homeowners will hire us to act as their agent and create a standardized “Request for Quote” (RFQs) to solicit bids to complete the work. An RFQ will have sufficient information and photo documentation for any of our professional, licensed, and insured contractors to submit a quote against the RFQ. These quotes will have enough information around pricing, material quality, and timeframe to meet the requirements of the RFQ. Our customer-facing portal will allow customers to review the bids, provide our contractor insights (KPIs), and provide the means for the customers to select a bid. Revenue Sources Monthly Subscription: A subscription provides the ability to create quotes online, as well as 24/7 phone answering support. Ours would add in priority scheduling to meet an agent. There might be tiers of service depending on the scope of work. RFQs: Included with subscription to begin an RFQ online, however, to have someone come out to the house, measure, and compile the entire RFQ, we would charge a fee relative to size and scope of the RFQ. Service fees for providers: Current related but different solutions (Angie’s List, American Home Shield, etc) charge the contractors 10% of the price of the job + any credit card fees or service charges. I believe by being more competitive here, contractors will be willing to participate in the bidding process. Float: Once selected, we will collect up front for the work to be completed. The funds will not be released to the contractor until the job is completed. Scaling This business would scale by collecting data on home repair and maintenance work to develop the RFQ platform for homeowners seeking help. Unfair Advantage The unfair advantage of our product will be the local agents who will show up in person, on time, and will find someone to get the project completed. MVP/Launch I am in Southeast MI and this industry is hyper local, so initial customers will likely be local as well while developing product. This is not a unique problem, but I believe this solution, executed well, could scale well. submitted by /u/True_Go_Blue [link] [comments] https://www.reddit.com/r/cofounder/comments/mg1dzc/usamisales17_home_rfq_business/