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Paint vacation cabins on a whim, post some ads, and pull $11K in your first month – the services market is bigger and faster than most founders think.
ENTRY ANGLES
Build owned crews with designed processes for scheduling, execution, and quality control · Embed software and oversight into third-party contractors or franchisees · Sequential city-by-city and service-category-by-category expansion model
VERTICALS
CAPABILITIES
Operations management and quality control systems, Software for scheduling and execution oversight, Local market reputation and customer acquisition
CRAFTWORK FOUNDER
“a good business idea is one where you can start making money fast and easily.”
This one almost slipped by. The startup showed up last fall and didn't make the cut at the time. Then a conversation in a founder chat recently circled back to a simple idea: "a good business idea is one where you can start making money fast and easily."
One member shared a story about deciding on a whim to try painting vacation cabins. Within a week of posting ads, he had dozens of orders. He bought equipment, hired workers, and in the first month pulled in around $11,000. Revenue doubled month over month until the season ended.
His conclusion: "painting services are a wide-open, high-margin, underserved market." That's when this startup came back to mind.
Craftwork offers Americans "an easy way to paint their homes." The scope is comprehensive – exterior and interior painting, whether it's new construction, a full renovation, or a cosmetic refresh.
The process starts in the app or on the website. A homeowner answers a few questions about the project and gets an estimate – on cost and timeline – within 30 seconds.
If that looks good, they upload photos of what needs painting along with any requirements, preferences, and notes. Craftwork's team reviews the specifics, refines pricing and scheduling, and sets up a calendar of crew visits around the homeowner's availability – all in what the company promises are "just minutes."
From there, the homeowner can step back. Work starts at the scheduled time, with regular updates – who's coming, when, and what they'll be doing – followed by confirmation of what was completed. The quoted price covers everything. No extras, no mid-job surprises from either the company or the crew.
Craftwork launched in January 2023 and started operating three months later in Charlotte, NC and the surrounding area. In 2023, the company was growing revenue 50–100% per month.
That summer, Craftwork was accepted into Y Combinator, raising a first round of $4M from YC and co-investors. By November of the same year, it had closed another $6M.
Three months from founding to first job, doubling revenue each month, and two investment rounds totaling $10M within eight months of launch – the trajectory is hard to argue with.
Where does that kind of growth come from, and why are investors interested in a painting company? The market data tells the story.
The US residential painting and finishing market is worth $24.7 billion. It's also deeply fragmented and opaque – dozens of small local operators in every market, inconsistent quality, and a booking process that still runs mostly on phone calls, verbal estimates, and the constant risk of scope creep and surprise surcharges.
As one of Craftwork's founders put it: "I can order almost anything from my phone – except press a button and get a tradesperson to show up on time and do quality work for the price they quoted."
The problem isn't that there's no software for booking trades. The problem is that software alone doesn't fix it – the underlying business model has to change too.
Most home services marketplaces pass orders to independent contractors and call it a day. That model can't guarantee timing or quality, because the platform has no real control over either.
Craftwork's answer is to hire its own crews – and to offer them genuinely good terms. Employees receive a weekly salary regardless of how much work Craftwork has lined up. The company also provides health insurance and professional development opportunities. In return, it can hold workers to quality standards they'd be reluctant to lose.
Craftwork isn't alone in trying to modernize this market. Another startup, Improovy, has raised $3.3M – including $2.8M in a single 2022 round – taking a similar approach.
Zoom out and the opportunity gets even bigger. The entire home repair and renovation market in the US involves an estimated 2.5 million companies employing 6 million people – an average of 2.5 workers per firm. Total market revenue: a staggering $500 billion a year.
Startups are moving into that broader space too. Honey Homes, [covered previously](/review/bolee-vygodnaja-podpiska-rabotaet-po-drugomu), built a subscription for a dedicated handyman who visits twice a month and works through whatever list of small repairs the homeowner has been collecting in the app. At $200/month or $2,000/year, the company has raised $12.1M total.
A conceptually similar model applied to automotive services produced Carma, a Y Combinator company [covered in December](/review/a-na-rynke-uslug-jetot-shans-eshhjo-est) – an app that finds a nearby auto shop with same-day availability in under 30 seconds.
The home services market is genuinely maddening. It's enormous, and yet almost every category of it still runs the same way: delayed, over budget, or below the quality promised – often all three.
The size of the prize attracts founders who try to build specialized marketplaces for home repair – a Craigslist for contractors, essentially – but that brute-force approach doesn't solve the timing, pricing, and quality problems. It just moves the chaos online.
Moving up a level requires either: a) building your own crews with tightly designed processes for scheduling, execution, and quality control, or b) embedding software and oversight into third-party contractors or franchisees that achieves the same result.
Either way, expansion should be sequential – city by city, service category by service category – to maintain control, build the necessary reputation in each market, and accumulate enough clients to reach critical mass before moving on.
The direction is clear: services businesses that can actually deliver what they promise – on time, at the quoted price, at the stated quality. That sounds basic, but in home services, it's still rare enough to be a meaningful competitive advantage.
Those are the "next generation" home service businesses – and when they exist, they'll take customers from the current generation of marketplaces and keep them.
It's operationally demanding, no question. But the market is so large and the problem so persistent that the reward justifies the hassle.