Nate Custard and Bryan Borek wish to prove it doesn’t take advanced business degrees or Silicon Valley office space to develop industry-changing tech.
Custard had been operating his St. Paul-based general contracting company, Aequo Builders, for greater than a decade when he and his project manager got here up with the thought for an app to alter the house remodeling experience.
As with countless other corporations, the pandemic required Custard to get creative about minimizing physical contact with clients. The answer, project manager Borek helped discover, was latest technology that eliminated the necessity to schedule home visits from multiple contractors to search out one of the best quote and plan for any home remodeling project.
3-D SCANNING DEVELOPS IMAGE OF PROPERTY
Aequo Builders began using a 3-D scanning device to develop imaging of a customer’s property to be sent on to contractors, eliminating the necessity for them to come back and take their very own measurements.
“We did loads of work in offices, and we’d scan the property so we wouldn’t must have a walkthrough to elucidate the project and interrupt the people working within the offices,” Custard said. “It was already working for the opposite company, and we type of realized that this might help out loads of other people.”
Custard and Borek’s app, Aequo, provides a database of contractors that homeowners looking to rework can communicate with directly. Homeowners are in a position to book a 3-D scan of their homes, which contractors can review and offer quotes for immediately.
Using the app is free, but Aequo charges for an optional home scan through the corporate that gives an in depth image of the property for contractors. It currently costs $199 for a “standard scan” and $349 for a “premium scan.”
Nevertheless, the founders claim that despite the up-front cost, the common homeowner will still save between 20 percent and 50 percent when hiring a contractor through the app compared with the standard method.
“It costs less to cite through a system that doesn’t drive across town,” Borek said.
AEQUO MAY EXPAND BEYOND TWIN CITIES
Borek said homeowners should feel secure using the app, as contractors are usually not given any identifying details about clients until the client agrees to work with them.
“For homeowners looking to avoid wasting time on establishing a project and getting bids for a project and you wish to make sure that that you simply’re getting all the identical information to match contractors, that is the proper service,” said Borek.
While the app is offered to download, Custard and Borek said they’re still working on recruiting contractors to make use of the service and expect it to be fully functioning inside roughly the subsequent two weeks.
Currently, Aequo targets only Twin Cities homeowners, but when successful, they hope to expand nationwide and into different industries that may benefit from the 3-D scanning services, corresponding to real estate and insurance.
“We’re excited to see how homeowners use it,” Borek said. “I feel we’re gonna learn quite a bit just from constructing through this next 12 months.”