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If you own a home, you know there’s always something that needs fixing, installing, or general repairs. Whether it’s a faucet leaking, a new bed in need of assembly, or a Nest thermostat in need of installation, there’s always something.
A startup wants to make that particular part of homeowning less of a pain by offering a dedicated handyman to take care of all the random tasks on your to-do list. It’s an interesting model. honey houses hires the handyman as part of its staff as an employee to ensure the work is consistent throughout your home. Homeowners pay Honey Homes a flat fee ($200 per month or $2,000 per year) for the convenience of an “end-to-end” membership-based service through the app.
The way it works is that members are assigned a dedicated handyman who visits at least once a month to take care of home improvement and preventative maintenance. Because employees are salaried, they also receive benefits, including parental leave and paid time off, a rarity in an industry that has historically relied on contractors.
Honey Homes launched the company with its first 10 beta customers in August 2021 and is currently available to single-family homeowners in all suburbs of the San Francisco Bay Area, excluding San Francisco itself. It recently began operations in Dallas.
man woman team Vishwas Prabhakara (Yelp’s first General Manager) and Avantika Prabhakara (former marketing director at Opendoor, Trulia and Zillow) joined forces with Katie Pham and Rory O’Connell to found Honey Homes in 2021.
In the last two years, Honey Homes has grown to over 500 members and claims to have completed over 20,000 homeowner tasks Vishwas. The company has grown membership — and therefore revenue — eightfold in 2022, he added, and has already nearly doubled this year.
Since inception, the company has raised a total of $12.1 million in funding, most recently raising $9 million in Series A led by Khosla Ventures. Khosla and Pear VC co-led the Honey Homes seed round in 2021. Other supporters are: Team builders Ventures and Moving Capital, as well as angel investors such as DoorDash co-founders Tony Xu and Stanley Tang, Lyft co-founders Logan Green, Opendoor co-founders Eric Wu and Mercury co-founders Immad Akhund.
Vishwas informed TechCrunch that he has started working on the company in earnest after speaking to a number of homeowners and Conclusion: There would be enough people who would be interested in paying a generalist to come to their home once or twice a month to do ongoing maintenance or enhancements.
“I asked her, ‘Would that be interesting for you?’ Would you pay for it?’ And surprisingly, for me, the answer was a resounding yes,” he said. “We seemed to have struck a chord with homeowners.”
With the Honey Homes app, a homeowner can create a to-do list and schedule appointments. It also helps homeowners work with specialists when needed.
But what if I was curious and crossed all tasks off your to-do list? So what?
“The one thing that’s really eye-opening for me is that when you offer this as a membership service, you suddenly realize you want more,” Vishwas said. “And there are some people who just like peace of mind.”
Honey Homes employs 45 people, including 25 tradesmen. Vishwas said the staff’s consistency helped boost the company’s credibility.
“Of a From a homeowner’s perspective, you want someone you can relate to and trust,” he told TechCrunch. “Therefore, seeing the same person over and over again is extremely valuable for a homeowner.”
The startup has also created what it calls Honey Homes University, a training facility for people working in the field so they can build their skills. Looking ahead, Honey Homes eventually plans to expand into urban centers, but for now is focused on serving suburban single-family homeowners, who Vishwas said tend to have greater maintenance and upkeep needs.
Khosla partner Evan Moore, who joined Honey Homes’ board of directors as part of the Series A funding round and is also a co-founder of DoorDash, said that as vice president of products at Opendoor, he saw the company “could get significantly better service, quality and prices from home service providers.”
But as an individual homeowner, “it’s difficult to reliably do a good job at a reasonable cost.”
Moore wrote via email, “Many startups have tried and failed to improve this customer experience, but Honey Homes seems to have gotten it right.” Rarely does an idea work so well so quickly. I’ve been there since day one and have been fortunate to see the incredible response from customers.”
He believes Honey Homes differs from many other consumer home services startups that simply match homeowners with potential vendors or “act as a concierge.”
Moore added, “Honey Homes solves the entire home improvement and maintenance problem, from idea to completion. By doing quality work repeatedly, we build trust with our customers. They then reward us with more work over time.”
