Fix the cracked foundation of the home improvement industry.

The idea for Estimarket started when my wife and I purchased a century-old fixer-upper home in the West Highlands neighborhood of Denver, CO. We chipped away at renovations for years, dreading the hiring process more each time.

We dealt with many salespeople who only asked a few basic questions about our project, took some measurements and photos, and then spent the rest of their time on a high-pressure sales pitch.

We got sick of the long evenings of salespeople bad-mouthing competitors, the pressure of sign-today deals, and the theatrics of high-tech props like mini-windows and blowtorches.

We were baffled by quotes ranging from $15,000 to a very “f-you” $52,000 to renovate our small bathroom — including one from an estimator who proudly informed me they “don’t do tile work,” despite the tile shower specified in the quote request.

Worse than the quote process itself was when a subcontractor doing the actual work on our bathroom mentioned that if they had been hired directly, they would have charged much less. We loved the final product, but I suspected we might have been ripped off.

I started to imagine ways technology could help homeowners actually get a good deal on their project. I wondered why it was so hard to get a sense of the real cost of a project — and who was benefitting from that.

As I dug deeper, I found that many contractors were just as fed up as I was. They were sick of competing for low-quality leads on contractor aggregator sites, and the burden of providing free estimates for those leads. It became obvious those sites want to keep the quote process inefficient so they can keep charging contractors for ever-expanding ad placements.

It dawned on me that nobody was benefitting from this disconnect between homeowners and contractors except the aggregator sites — a process where both sides lose while a middleman wins.

I decided then to build what I think the home improvement industry really needs: a real marketplace that gives homeowners and contractors a fair, easy way to find each other and match on a ballpark estimate of project cost. And so Estimarket was born.