JMCQUARRIE.co.uk
James McQuarrie - Helping founders and product teams understand what to build before they build it.
DAD
Reframing a home repair problem around expert advice
DAD was a startup that helped homeowners diagnose and solve home repair problems by connecting them with trusted experts remotely.
The idea started with a challenge from HomeServe.
Its customer base was ageing, and younger homeowners weren’t replacing them. The initial brief was to explore an “Uber for plumbers” - a faster way to connect homeowners with tradespeople.
The more we explored the problem, the less convinced we became that people wanted quicker access to a plumber.
What they really wanted was to know what to do next.
For many homeowners, especially first-time buyers, home repairs can be unfamiliar territory. Previous generations might have called a parent or a trusted local tradesperson for advice. Increasingly, those relationships no longer exist.
We wondered whether expert advice, delivered remotely, could help people much earlier in their journey. If someone could quickly understand what had gone wrong, whether it was urgent and what their options were, they could often avoid the cost, delay and uncertainty of arranging a home visit before they even knew whether one was needed.
Over the following few years we worked with homeowners and engineers to explore what that experience could look like. Much of that work centred on understanding the customer’s journey, observing behaviour and refining the product as we learnt more.
I’ve written about a couple of those experiences in more detail:
How we learnt we needed to slow our app down from observing user behaviour
Building DAD also exposed a commercial reality we hadn’t fully appreciated.
Homeowners valued the service enormously when they needed it.
The problem was that they only needed it every few years.
Curious how experiences like this have shaped my approach?
Many of the principles that guide how I build products today were shaped by experiences like this, where understanding the customer’s problem was only the beginning.