In July 2024, during a brutal 110-degree week in Dallas, my wife and I came back from vacation to find our HVAC system had failed. This experience frankly absolutely sucked. As our family slowly melted into the floor, I began the frantic process of trying to find someone to fix it.
Over the course of five days, I got three quotes. Here’s what that looked like:
HVAC Company #1: 5 days to get someone onsite, missed the first appointment, quoted me $14K for a system with roughly $3K of materials.
HVAC Company #2: 1 day to onsite, staggering $22K quote.
HVAC Company #3: Same-day onsite, $6K quote.
The same problem, in the same city, and it took nearly a week to sort through an answer that solved the problem. In the end, I was convinced I was still not getting an optimized price, but when you’re getting cook you gotta make decisions. I chose the cheapest quote with the hope that nothing bad would come if quality was meaningfully worse with the cheaper option.
The Core Problem
I walked away from that experience extremely frustrated. I was particularly irritated that the “high-trust” companies in Dallas, the ones with thousands of glowing Google reviews, were the worst offenders when it came to price gouging. I spent weeks researching these companies and came away convinced that most of them paid for fake reviews to overtake negative ones. It felt like wandering through a Bizarro-world of a rapidly degrading consumer experience, at ever-rising prices, consolidated among fewer and fewer players, propped up by fake reviews and misleading advertising.
Why does it take five days to get three completely different quotes on something that happens to millions of Americans every year? Why is the experience so slow, so expensive, so inconsistent, and so completely lacking transparency?
Why Does This Suck So Much?
We wanted to properly understand the core reasons why this degrading experience is occurring. We met with hundreds of CEOs, investors, and industry experts; the result of which we boiled down to the following:
Information Asymmetry: Homeowners (ourselves included) don’t know what a fair price is, much less if the solution is the right one. Labor rates, markups, and system specs are hidden behind technical complexity.
Doctor Writing Their Own Prescriptions: Without transparency, techs charge whatever they think they can get away with. When a plumber tells me that my air valve is broken, I have to assume they’re telling the truth because to be honest, I have no idea what an air valve is (turns out it’s a $15 part that I at one point paid $2K to have installed).
Market Concentration & Fake Reviews: As private equity consolidates the trades, local competition shrinks. Large firms spend heavily on marketing and reviews, crowding out smaller operators. The result: you pay more but don’t necessarily get better service.
Urgency = Exploitation: When your AC dies in 110-degree heat or your pipes burst in the winter, you don’t have the luxury of waiting weeks for multiple quotes. Contractors know this and build business models around high-pressure upsells and inflated pricing.
No Platform Standardization: In ridesharing or food delivery, you can open an app, compare prices, and know roughly what you’ll get. In plumbing and HVAC? It’s a shot in the dark every time.
Local Regulatory Moat: Plumbing and HVAC licenses are heavily regulated at the local level. When I mean heavily regulated I mean heavily regulated. Installing a water heater without a permit can/will result in meaningful fines or jail-time. While the licensing requirements are reasonable in-and-of-themselves, local license holders use the regulation to prevent new entrants and keep prices high.
Why Haven’t Tech Companies Fixed This?
On the surface, these problems seem solvable with enough capital and ambition. When we took over Stellar, we thought the same thing. But almost every tech company that starts with the “Uber for home maintenance” thesis has ended up falling into one of three buckets:
The Predatory Lead Generators: Think Angie’s List, HomeAdvisor, Thumbtack. They sell you “leads” at high prices, often recycled and resold to multiple contractors. Consumers don’t get better service (I do not enjoy getting 5 quotes), and contractors are squeezed on margins. These platforms optimize for transaction volume, not customer experience.
The Hero Becomes A Villain: Some startups raise venture money and try to vertically integrate, hiring techs, buying trucks, running as a scaled contractor. But as the capital requirements rise and scale gets hard, they curb their ambition and raise rates by 10x and become a part of the problem.
The Tech Platforms (With No Ownership): Others stay “asset light,” building scheduling, payments, or dispatch software. While this makes contractors’ lives easier, it doesn’t solve the consumer’s pain around transparency, quality, or price. These platforms skate on the surface of the problem without owning the outcome to the consumer.
The Gap That Remains
That leaves us with a massive, unresolved gap: there is still no platform that delivers a magical experience for homeowners in plumbing, HVAC, or other maintenance.
We all know what it should look like:
An Uber-like, magical experience that you can trust to show up on time, do the right thing on your behalf, and fractionalize prices in an antiquated industry.
Transparent pricing (preferably upfront if possible) that doesn’t feel like a hostage negotiation.
Verified quality standards that reward great work instead of great marketing budgets.
A single interface that actually empowers the customer, instead of exploiting their urgency.
We see this problem clearly in our seats leading Stellar - folks deserve a better experience than they’re getting today.