Automating Office Work for Residential Contractors.
Residential contractors are drowning in office work. Drillbit automates all of it. We use AI receptionists and an LLM based quoting tool on top of our own CRM to entirely manage jobs from lead, to quote, to scheduling, to staffing, and even collecting payment.
Active Founders
Alexander Seutin
Alex graduated from Stanford with a degree in CS & AI. After school, he worked as an engineer at SpaceX, Apple, Rivian, and Built Robotics. Alex is passionate about affordable housing, and after years of doing construction on the side, he merged his passions and started Drillbit. His company seeks to optimize and scale home service businesses through automating their operational & administrative workflows.
Liam Osler
I make powerful and complex systems accessible to underserved industries. At Drillbit we simplify the operations of home service businesses using AI.
Company Launches
~TLDR~
Residential contractors are drowning in office work that has nothing to do with their core business. Drillbit automates all of it. We use AI receptionists and an LLM based quoting tool on top of our own CRM to entirely manage jobs from lead, to quote, to scheduling, to staffing, and finally payment.
Problem🚨
Residential contractors provide a critical service to our economy: building and maintaining the supply of housing. Unfortunately, those businesses are still operated in an incredibly manual way. Across the U.S., we spend about $675B/year on simple home maintenance. A significant portion of that cost is attributed to the office work involved with finding, coordinating, and managing those small jobs. Business owners need to (and prefer to) remain focused on the real work instead of non-value-driving efforts.
Solution 🏗️
Drillbit allows contractors to be entirely hands-off, enabling them to focus 100% of their time on their core business. We have built AI receptionists that can coordinate with businesses and homeowners at every stage in the process. The receptionists then work with our AI estimators to provide quotes. Together, they are able to use our CRM, project management, and payment solutions to store updates and take action throughout the process.
Landscape ⛰️
Platforms that have come before us were able to move service business operations from texting and emailing over to CRMs and project management solutions, but they suffer from massive churn rates. Owners we have spoken with have consistently voiced the feeling that they were “babysitting” the tool. All of that “homework” they had to do entirely undermined the value of the solution in their eyes, and so, most users would abandon the platform. Rather than expecting our users to change their behavior - ie. start using technology that they would rather not be interacting with - we have met them where they are by handling the job coordination in a way that feels familiar to them: offering the ability to talk to your “employees” on the phone like you would a real person, and having those “employees” be able to engage with homeowners over the phone like real people would too.
Team 👷👷♂️
Alex (Stanford CS / AI) and Liam (WashU CS) first worked together developing robots for industrial construction projects. Alex would go on to spend a few years renovating airstreams and building a house for his family. During that time, Alex became intimately familiar with the pain points in the construction and home service industries and realized how much of a need there was for better, more automated software. At that point, Alex called Liam, and together, they started building Drillbit to support the folks maintaining America's housing.
Ask 🙏
The platform has been built, and now we are looking to drive revenue. If you know of any business owners in the industry (plumbers, electricians, house cleaners, lawn care providers, landscapers, tilers, roofers, etc) please introduce us at alex@drillbit.com 🙂
Links 🔗
In the meantime, we’d love it if you followed our journey:
& finally, check out our website!
Demo Video:
YC Sign Photo
Company Photo
Hear from the founders
How did your company get started? (i.e., How did the founders meet? How did you come up with the idea? How did you decide to be a founder?)
Alex and Liam first worked together developing robots for industrial construction projects. Alex would go on to spend a few years renovating airstreams and building a house for his family. During that time, Alex became intimately familiar with the pain points in the construction and home service industries, and realized how much of a need there was for better, more automated software. At that point, Alex called Liam and together they started building Drillbit to support the folks maintaining America's housing.
What is the core problem you are solving? Why is this a big problem? What made you decide to work on it?
Across the United States, we spend $700B/year on maintaining homes. Half the cost of any given home service is attributed to compensating the work it took just to coordinate that job. We believe that can and should be solved for. Owners need to (and prefer to) remain focused on “the real work” instead of non-value driving efforts. Businesses in this industry provide an essential service to our economy - they maintain our supply of housing - but they are operated in an incredibly manual and wasteful way. We solve that with AI receptionists that can coordinate with each of the parties at every stage in the process. The receptionists can then work with our AI estimators to provide quotes, and together they can use our CRM, project management, and payment solutions to store updates and take action throughout the process.
What is your long-term vision? If you truly succeed, what will be different about the world?
There are many elements that contribute to the inflated cost of housing and they impact everyone from the homeless, to renters, to homeowners, and investors. An often-overlooked contributor to this cost is the high opEx in owning and maintaining a home. The most wasteful element of that expenditure is not materials or labor - it is compensating businesses for their administrative work (finding, quoting, managing, and coordinating jobs). My dream is to cut out those inefficiencies by bringing true automation to the home service industry. In doing so, we as a society can take a step towards better, more accessible housing.
Selected answers from Drillbit's original YC application for the S24 Batch
Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.
AI powered ERP for Home Service Businesses
How long have each of you been working on this? How much of that has been full-time? Please explain.
Alex: Full-time for 8 months. Liam: Full-time for 2 months.
What is your company going to make? Please describe your product and what it does or will do.
Home service businesses spend half their day finding work and doing administrative tasks. Jobber & ServiceTitan helped by moving businesses from paper to digital, but those platforms still require a huge amount of manual input and babysitting. AI has unlocked the next wave of automation. We already have an instant quoting system that is solving a huge pain point for SMBs: getting work. It does this by expediting the process from lead to quote. Our platform will eventually cut out all of the manual processes involved in operating any service-based business, enabling its personnel to cut out the busywork, "get back to building", and double their revenue.