Home Maintenance as Saas
Exploring opportunities to sell to homeowners instead of HVAC servicerss
3 week cross-functional experiment to identify new product opportunities to help homeowners avoid problems with home service contractors.
- Role
- Experiments, market research, user testing, analysis, workshop facilitating, customer journeys, user flows, personas
- Timeline:
- 3 weeks ◊ January 2020
- Team ◊ Pointman
- David Thiemecke, Kurt Stangl, Tim McGuire, Denise Nadal, David Cloyd, Chris Schobert, Seth Zielinski, Jay Pawlowski, Nick Kaszmarek
Process
The process for this project was fast and experimental.
Understand the Problem Space
We conducted several rounds of lean experiments to test hypotheses about the market, as well as using several methods to collect first-hand personal experiences to inform our thinking.
Some of the methods we used were in-depth interviews, guerilla surveys, paid surveys, informally interviewing everyone we know and looking at general market data. Some of the most common sentiments we heard from homeowners are listed to the right.
Below are some examples of the experiments we ran.
Key Insights
- "I don't know how to tell if I'm being charged fairly"
- "I don't know if the work I'm being charged for is necessary"
- "I don't know how to tell if they're doing a good job"
Define The Problem
Using our research we were able to define our personas, their experiences, and clarify the biggest impact problem we could solve for them.
We build a customer journey map of their experience hiring a contractor for home repairs. We were able to distill all of the complexities around planning and conducting home repair to two problem statements.
Problem Statement
- Homeowners don't know how to tell if they are getting a "good deal" (paying fairly for quality and necessary work)
- Homeowners frequently end up paying too much for repairs because they didn't do or don't know how to do regular maintenance.
Ideate
We also conducted collaborative design sessions and workshops to ideate product opportunities and define and test a value proposition.
Our Solution
-
A subscription service for regular home maintenance and regular inspections, by qualified and trustworthy advisors to discover repair needs before they become problems.
Next Steps
Next we would have tested several of our best ideas for viability, desirability, and feasibility.
Project Outcome
The final result was a pitch deck that we presented to the CEO, with illustrative design artifacts. The summary of our pitch is as follows:
Homeowners end up paying almost 10K a year in unexpected hidden costs most of which could have been avoided with regular, simple maintenance.
Let's make it easy for homeowners to save money and protect their homes with a subscription service that provides regular maintenance.
Over $80 billion is spent on home repairs each year and of the homeowners we've talked to 75% are interested in a service to provide regular maintenance.
Now is the time to act. There's only a handful of competitors trying similar ideas and no one is doing it right.
This is a real opportunity to help homeowners build wealth and invest in their homes and communities.
