Blueberry Home Catching Fire in the New Year

Written by damianwolfgram | Published 2017/01/06
Tech Story Tags: startup | entrepreneurship | home | home-improvement | tech

TLDRvia the TL;DR App

This past year was a tremendous success for our company, neighbors, and service providers.

The end of the year marks our first full year operating our home services marketplace with hundreds of neighbors and dozens of pros benefiting from our desire to build the world’s most delightful home service experience.

At Blueberry, we’re not only improving how we care for our homes, but also transforming the ways we live and work together.

Each pin represents a neighbor in South Bay Blueberry

One neighbor, then two, each inviting another. Neighbors started discussing Blueberry over Facebook and Nextdoor. Before we knew our neighbor crowdsourcing movement was spreading like wildfire across the South Bay Area.

Local newspapers started covering our happenings (Los Altos Town Crier, Silicon Valley Business Journal, and a few others). By now thousands of neighbors are following their neighborhood calendar.

The Blueberry community has amazed us with their enthusiasm — kids racing down the streets in their tuned-up bicycles, moms showcasing their homes with perfect parties, dads once again anointed “grill masters” smitten with their clean BBQs, grandmas have someone to call to fix a drape or a faucet, and the pets, well, the pets are ecstatic!

One of our many delighted Blueberry pups. Pet grooming was our most popular service in 2016. Pets love the low-stress grooming environment and pet owners enjoy the convenience of not having to leave the house with a car full of animals.

Today, we’re a small, focused team working everyday to bring new tools to service providers and neighbors, creating a fair and equitable marketplace for everyone.

Grouping services together remove inefficiencies and help all stakeholders save time, money, and the planet.

Legacy competitors have created unsustainable business models that layer costs, squeeze supply-side vendors, fail to support local and/or address larger environmental issues.

We believe we are at the threshold of the next major phase in local — drawing on past attempts, the emergence of the smartphone, a shifting labor landscape, and the democratization of local paid ad channels having all culminated in the perfect time to build a service like ours.

As a mission-driven steward of innovation, Blueberry represents the potential to transform local into a movement that changes the world.

We believe local *is* the economy. By bringing the village back to the neighborhood, Blueberry is empowering neighbors and pros to rise above the doldrums of work and home maintenance.

Tomorrow’s reality is that you can get anything delivered to your door with confidence-building transparency every step of the way.

With the turn of the calendar year, we’re thrilled to announce that starting in January all payments will be completed through our platform.

No longer will neighbors and pros have to chase down checks or dig through paper archives to find past receipts.

By bringing payments online, we’re among the world’s most transparent end-to-end home service experiences.

In 2017, you can expect us to deliver many more enhancements across the service experience.

We’ll have native iOS/Android apps available by spring that’ll include the ability for neighbors and service providers to message each other directly.

Throughout the year we’ll maintain a measured pace introducing new service categories. We’re human-centered in everything we do, and that means we’re focused on experience touchpoints. We’re thoughtful in standardizing care and onboard only the best, most-recommended local service providers.

We started this journey two years ago, and while it hasn’t been without sleepless nights, we couldn’t be more excited about the future.

We have all of you to thank for rooting us on as we champion a more delightful and sustainable home.

- Damian

Learn more at bluberryhome.com


Published by HackerNoon on 2017/01/06