AI assistant to help homeowners manage maintenance and repairs
Summary
Starling is a home maintentance platform with an AI assistant that aims to help
new homeowners care for their home. Over the course of 18 months, my co-founder
and I explored several concepts, found a design partner, launched an mvp, and
built related tools to acquire users through SEO marketing. While over 600
homeowners started using Starling, we failed to find a viable business model.

Problem
New homeowners take on the responsibility of caring for a property for the first
time in their lives. Many are unfamiliar with what that requires. Instead of
doing preventative maintenance, they're left responding to emergency repairs.
Research & Initial Thesis
Before building anything, I spoke with a few dozen homeowners. They raised many
issues:
- Some felt they didn't know what maintenance work they should be doing.
- Many expressed challenges with finding trustworthy contractors.
- Some emptied their bank account on their down payment and didn't expect so many first year expenses.
While none regretted their purchase, almost all lamented that they missed being
able to text their landlord or property manager when an issue came up.
Homeowners need a single point of contact to help them care for their largest
asset.
It turns out property managers for homeowners do exist. They're often called
concierge services, and they exist primarily for higher income households. Could
AI help reduce the cost of this concierge service, allowing us to bring a
similar service to middle income households?
Prototyping with a Design Partner
We found one of these boutique concierge services that was managing a few dozen
properties in the Hudson Valley. They used a task management platform to track
each home's work, and communicated with clients through SMS and email. They
expressed some pain points with this setup:
- Onboarding a new home required that they record a lot of information about the home. This quickly became disorganized.
- Texting clients was convenient, but those conversations were mixed in with personal conversations.
- Similar to homeowners, it was difficult to find reliable contractors.
We agreed to build a platform to help manage their work. Through several
conversations with this design partner, we outlined a few key features:
- As a concierge, I need to create a new home and record information about the home in organized way so that I may reference it before each visit.
- As a concierge, I need to track recurring and one-time tasks for each home so that I may keep up to date with each home's maintenance.
- As a concierge, I need to be able to communicate with homeowners about their home's tasks so that I may get their input on key decisions.

Launching an AI assistant
That design partnership helped teach us how to operate a concierge service. The
service should give clients the confidence that their home is cared for. To
establish that confidence, we designed an onboarding experience that created a
maintenance plan tailored to your home.

This onboarding also collected crucial information about the home to provide
context to an AI assistant. This assistant was then available to help answer
maintenance questions. With the homeowner's permission, the assistant should
also be able to automate outreach to reputable nearby contractors to collect a
few quotes.

To overcome the marketplace cold start problem, we made unassigned tasks
anonymously available for public view in an attempt to attract service
professionals to the platform.

We were bootstrapping the project, so we had no advertising budget. To acquire
users, we built related tools that helped us build our marketing site's SEO.

Outcome & Learning
Over 600 homeowners joined Starling and set up their home's maintenance
checklist. We continued to improve the product experience, but it became
increasingly clear that we could not deliver an offering that enough homeowners
would be willing to pay for. While there was potential to position the platform
as a marketplace, we did not feel that it was possible to bootstrap something so
directly competitive with larger marketplaces. We could have done more to
validate our direction earlier on, and this project reinforced the importance of
good market testing before investing too much in product.
Team
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