Launch HN: HomeBreeze (YC W21) – Easy booking of home repairs

Hi HN, we’re Vineet and Chris, founders of HomeBreeze (https://www.homebreeze.com). We make booking home services radically simpler for homeowners. We do this by using details about the home to provide upfront, guaranteed prices and instant scheduling, with work completed by a network of qualified professionals. We’re starting with hot water heater replacements and are live in Southern California so far.

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.

I really dig the idea, but I wonder - how can you guarantee prices? Homes can differ tremendously. There's a reason plumbers ask to come on site.

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?

A problem highlighted by Uber Eats (etc.) is that when technology comes into an existing market it can distort things by using heaps of Venture Capital that isn't available to the businesses who deliver the actual service to customers. Do you worry that by offering price guarantees ("We honor our online prices, even if it means taking a loss.") you may end up in a similar situation? You're more agency than marketplace, so this is especially relevant.

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.

Homes with majors issues like that have been extremely rare in our experience. When they come up, we've been able to catch them early (at least so far). In the future situation where we miss it, we have some back stops with our scope of work agreements. We would be okay eating losses in a lot of situations, to your point about taking a portfolio approach, and then updating our approach to avoid repeating those mistakes. This was something that worked well at Opendoor (buying/selling houses), where I previously worked.

We haven't met service professionals who have the capability to do that directly, but doing so delivers a much, much better homeowner experience.

Imagining myself approaching the contractor end: why do I need this? There's more work than I can hire people to do, right now; and this looks a lot like "commit to an open ended job, unseen, for a fixed price."

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.