A membership home-services business for Baton Rouge homeowners — and a plan to get it taking money inside thirty days, without building software first.
Every homeowner has the same unsolved problem: something breaks, and they have no idea who to call. They ask a neighbor, they search Google, they get three voicemails and one guy who never shows.
The business sells them a way out of that. One number to text. We find the plumber, verify he is licensed and insured, read his quote before the homeowner does, and stay on it until the work is done. The homeowner pays the contractor directly. The membership buys coordination, not labor — which is why it can cost $39 a month instead of $200.
The model is already proven nationally at much higher prices, because those companies bundle labor. Honey Homes charges $2,000–$4,750 a year. Latitude runs $210 a month including a monthly handyman visit. This version is asset-light — no trucks, no technicians, no payroll against the work — so it can be priced where a Baton Rouge homeowner will actually say yes.
You are not being asked to imagine this. Three working prototypes are live right now — open them on your phone during this conversation.
There is a real decision here and it is yours, not mine. I have priced both honestly, and I will build either one well.
| Web & text messagesMY PICK | Apps on the App Store & Play Store | |
|---|---|---|
| Build cost | $35k–50k for the dispatch console, $12k–20k for a member portal later — or $12k–19k if you buy only the dispatch piece | $80k–130k across the three pieces it takes |
| Time to first version | 8–10 weeks | 3–4 months, then again per surface |
| What a contractor does | Answers a text at a red light | Installs an app, makes an account, enables notifications, remembers to open it |
| What a member does | Texts one number | Installs an app — or texts you anyway |
| Shipping a change | One deploy, live for everyone in minutes | App Store review, then users have to update |
| Membership billing | Stripe. You keep all of it | Apple takes 15–30% of anything sold in-app, so you sell on the web anyway |
| Yearly overhead | Hosting and texting | Same, plus developer program fees and store compliance |
| The real risk | Members never get an icon on their home screen | Your contractors never install it, and you are back to phoning around |
Your contractors will not open an app. A plumber is in a truck, hands dirty, three jobs behind. He will answer a text in forty seconds — trade, address, distance, likely ticket, reply Y or N — and he will never once install something to do it. That is not a workaround. For this side of the business it is the better product.
And your members will not hunt for an icon. Water is coming out from under the water heater. The app they already have open is Messages. "Text us" has no install step and no learning curve, and it is the entire promise you are selling.
There are honest reasons to choose them, and if any of these is true you should — I will build it and I will not sulk about it.
You intend to raise outside money and expect investors to want an app as evidence the thing is real. That is a fundraising argument rather than an operating one, but it is not a stupid argument.
You want the member experience to be the product — browsing the home file, maintenance history, a nudge every few weeks on a day nothing is broken. That is a genuine retention play, and it is what an app is actually good at.
You want the icon on the home screen as a brand asset and accept what it costs. Being on someone's phone is worth something. It just is not worth it yet.
Your first hundred members need a phone number that a person answers and a plumber who shows up Thursday. If we spend four months building software for a business with zero members, we learn whether anyone wanted this in month five instead of month one.
Software earns its place around 150 members, when tracking jobs by hand starts costing you real hours. By then you will know exactly what it needs to do, because you will have run the business yourself and watched where the time goes. That is a far better specification than anything either of us could write today.
The prototypes above are the blueprint for whichever path you pick — every one of them is a web page today, which is also how you can open them on your phone right now without installing anything. Launch on a phone number and a website. Software comes out of revenue, later, when it is buying back hours you can count.
Everything required to take the first membership payment, with no custom software.
Run real jobs through the network and measure the things that decide whether this scales.
With real usage data in hand, and all of it in a browser — nothing to install, on either side.
Both routes start the same way. What differs is who runs the business once it is open.
Thirty days from signature to your first paying member. Fixed fee, no hourly billing, no change orders.
You take the member texts and dispatch to your own bench. I stay on for the judgment calls — not the day-to-day.
5 hours a month at the founding rate, 8 after. There is genuinely less to review at twenty-five members than at a hundred and fifty, so the rate steps with the work rather than the calendar. Either way it covers the weekly review, the bench sweep and the numbers pack. Unused hours roll into the next month; anything beyond is $150/hour, agreed before it is spent.
Pick this if this business is your main focus. Answering the first few hundred texts yourself is how you learn what your coordinator will need to know — and it keeps $1,250 a month in the business through the quarter you can least afford to spend it.
I take the member texts, the dispatching and the contractor chasing for the first 90 days while you sell memberships and build the bench.
25 hours a month. Roughly six hours a week, which is what the first quarter's volume actually takes. Includes everything in Option A. Beyond 25 hours it is $95/hour, and if we are regularly going over, that is the signal to hire your coordinator.
Pick this if you still have a day job, or if your first quarter is better spent in front of realtors and contractors than in a text thread. It buys back roughly twenty hours a week.
Neither retainer covers recruiting your contractor bench, selling memberships, or building software. Those are separately scoped and separately priced — said here so we never have the awkward version of this conversation in month two.
Around 120 members, when you should stop answering texts yourself: the written operating procedure, help hiring the right person locally, training them, and two weeks of shadowing before they are on their own. Either option leads here — it is the point of both.
The dispatch console at roughly 150 members — $35k–50k in full, or $12k–19k if you buy only the offer engine, which is the piece that actually gives you your hours back. A member portal follows later at $12k–20k. If you choose the app route instead, budget $80k–130k. Either way it is deferred, and none of it is something I would take your money for today.
See every day of work behind those numbers → Sixty days, itemised, plus three ways to pay less.
Separately, budget roughly $35,000–$50,000 of your own launch capital for entity formation, legal, insurance, branding, initial marketing and working capital. That is your money, not mine — the figure is in the plan so nobody is surprised by it in week three.
If this is right, the first thirty days start the week you say go.
Everything I need from you is already written down — accounts to open, decisions to make, and the paperwork that genuinely gates launch. Open the kickoff checklist → It is shared, so we both see the same list as things get ticked off.