Innovation occurs at the intersection of complementary disciplines. Apple entered the market at the intersection of personal computing and design, making the PC sexy and approachable. IBM was the dominant market leader, but until Steve Jobs introduced Apple's iconic design aesthetic, the PC was about as sexy as Bill Gates dancing on stage at the Windows 95 launch - an acquired taste at best. Roofbuddy sits at the intersection of the Trades and Tech and has found this a rewarding and somewhat neglected niche.
The first principle that became part of our DNA was to test everything under real-world conditions. To call the system we entered the market with in May 2022, a BETA would be generous, we pushed the envelope for what could be called a minimum viable product and went straight into the market to transact. It was messy, uncomfortable, time-consuming and incredibly manual, but it worked (just). 3 transactions in May, 15 in June and 10 in July - it was like the Wright Brothers prototype; off the ground, and we built the rest while we were in flight.
Ukraine's drone industry has transformed from nascent to world-leading in under 3 years. For this very reason, they didn't have the best people, tech, or abundant funding - the advantage they had was real-time battlefield testing. Test in the real world, fail fast, measure results, adapt, iterate and optimise - this is one of our core values we discuss internally as a "culture of continuous improvement".
Secondly, money talks AND pays the bills, transacting early generates revenue that fuels growth and covers costs. If you are profitable, the runway is infinite, you retain your autonomy, set terms for investors or eschew them altogether and exist in a healthy 'growth management' mindset. The Eisenhower Matrix, Pareto Principle and Elon's much-touted "First Principles Thinking" all guide the Roofbuddy team to the same conclusion - earning income and remaining profitable is core. It follows that supporting revenue growth has been the tech team's primary prerogative from the outset.
We have built more than our fair share of zombie features that didn't commercialise as anticipated - that's healthy attrition. However, if every epic, sprint and ticket is viewed through the lens of increasing revenue or decreasing cost, prioritisation becomes incredibly simple - estimate by magnitude and execute.
The Roofbuddy marketplace has been an ambitious, tech-driven reimagining of how roofing transactions are conducted - so far as we know, we are the greatest (only) roofing, sales, tech, price aggregation marketplace in the world. When Uber and Airbnb started growing parabolically, they got significant blowback from market incumbents with entrenched vested interests. We have seen a bit of that ourselves, too and anticipate more. Transcending these 'speed limit' warnings is all about value creation - how is our product and service making the lives of our users easier and better? Roofers can quote a job in 2 minutes instead of 2 hours - that's measurable value created. Customers can get multiple competitive, comparable quotes in 24 hours instead of 24 days - more value.
A core function of technology is to systematise and rationalise complex information and distil it down into its functional essence - in Roofbuddy's case, that means answering one question as quickly and accurately as possible: What is the price? The extent to which we have made that easier for our Roofing partners to calculate and our customers to receive and understand; that is the value we have created. True value is immutable; Trademe is not a garage sale.
Napoleon's Grand Armée conquered the entire European continent in an administratively led war of self-defence, ostensibly. This revolution in military affairs had nothing to do with better muskets, cannons or ships. It was a revolution of meritocratic management, administration, supply chain, logistics and information flow - doing the boring stuff several orders of magnitude better than competitors was (and still is) the path to total victory. Creating our own proprietary CRM as opposed to grafting our tech stack onto an existing offering was a huge inflection point but dividends abound.
It's allowed us unconstrained flexibility and freedom of movement to handle internal and external workflows in a profoundly efficient way. Like the proverbial marble run, our proprietary CRM now serves and automates the information and workflow between customers, roofers and our staff to achieve an unprecedented level of service, accuracy of information and end-to-end workflow management. Roofbuddy's tech excels in the 'boring' details, and it's been a boon for team morale and overall performance. Plugging another of Roofbuddy's values at this point seems inevitable - "esprit de corps"; my penchant for military history foisted on my poor unsuspecting colleagues at every opportunity - and now you too.
At Roofbuddy, performance is tangible and measurable across all departments. In 3 years, the Roofbuddy marketplace has served 35,469 unique customer enquiries, delivered 39,325 quotes and processed 3,594 orders totalling $78,707,202.51 in roofing services transacted; we measure innumerable performance metrics that instruct daily discussion and action. Our mature codebase (~2964 commits) sees ~3.3 commits and 1.5 deployments daily, with a robust CI/CD pipeline achieving 100% successful builds, thanks to extensive frontloaded checks. We maintain 71% test coverage, uphold a 99% uptime, and average a 2-minute rollback, ensuring rapid recovery from any issues.
New developers land their first meaningful commit within 10 days, reflecting our inclusive, fast-moving culture. Our developers aren't hidden away in caves - they're deeply embedded in real-world problems, working shoulder-to-shoulder with the front line team. From the very start, our engineers are shaped to be product champions, not just coders, ensuring that every line they write solves meaningful challenges. Without a scoreboard, it's just exercise.
Roofbuddy enjoys a fantastic culture of high performance and achievement, and I'm proud of the results the team have delivered over the last 3 years - we aspire to be a bright spot of innovation and kiwi dynamism during a bleak and attritional economic period for Aotearoa. We believe we are building unique tripartite, transactional, marketplace technology that can be adapted and utilised in hundreds of different countries and thousands of different industries; Roofbuddy's CTO, Igi Manaloto, just had an involuntary heart palpitation as I wrote that.
We have achieved profound product market fit, proof of concept and dramatically altered the transactional dynamics in the Roofing industry - to some incumbents' chagrin. So far, we have greatly improved the level of service and value for money customers can expect from a roofing service provider, that's only been possible with our tech-first approach, and there is much more work to do! Our proprietary tech stack is portable, dynamic and can be deployed into different verticals and horizontals at scale; so we are extremely excited to see how far we can go in New Zealand and abroad over the coming years.
