Marketplace / Product
Co-founder and CTO of a home-services marketplace. Designed and shipped the full web, mobile, and backend MVP to investor-demo readiness.
Getting a quote for home repair work starts with a question most homeowners can’t answer: what exactly is the thing that’s broken? Describing an appliance well enough for a contractor to quote it usually means crawling behind it looking for a model plate, or a round of back-and-forth messages before any real conversation starts. renov8 is a marketplace that connects homeowners with contractors, and it was built to remove that friction from the very first step.
I’m a co-founder and the technical lead. I designed and built the full MVP end to end: product architecture, infrastructure, deployment, and everything in between, through to investor demo readiness.
The signature feature is AI-powered appliance recognition. A homeowner photographs the unit, Claude’s vision capability identifies the make and model, and the quote request goes out already carrying the information a contractor needs. What used to be a slow exchange of clarifying messages becomes a single photo.
Around that sits the full marketplace: a Next.js web app, an Expo (React Native) mobile app, a FastAPI backend, and Supabase providing Postgres, auth, and storage. Once a homeowner and contractor are connected, they talk through real-time messaging built on Stream Chat.
Zero-cost infrastructure as a constraint, not an afterthought. Every service in the stack was chosen so the MVP could run at zero infrastructure cost. For a pre-revenue venture, burn on hosting is burn you don’t get back, and the constraint forced clean architectural choices rather than compromising them.
Buy the commodity, build the differentiator. Real-time messaging is a solved problem, so renov8 uses Stream Chat rather than a hand-rolled websocket layer. The engineering time went where the product is actually different: the recognition-to-quote flow.
One engineer, whole surface. Mobile app, web app, backend, database, auth, storage, deployment. Owning the entire surface kept the architecture coherent and the iteration loop short enough to reach demo readiness without a team.
The full MVP was designed, built, and deployed end to end by a single engineer at zero infrastructure cost, and taken to investor demo readiness. renov8 is ongoing as a co-founded venture.