John Machacek, Chief Innovation Officer for the Greater Fargo Moorhead Economic Development Corporation, has worked with countless startups throughout our community over the years. He knows their ups, and their downs, but most of all, he knows the questions to ask them. Here are John Machacek’s 10 questions for Eric Miller, Founder and CEO, Dwel.
1. Will you please tell me your Dwel elevator pitch?
Dwel’s mission is to help busy professionals complete their routine home maintenance. We do this by creating a customized home care plan to keep your home and its systems in the best shape.
2. To elaborate a bit further, in your current iteration, what do you envision a typical customer relationship or process looks like?
As a Home Inspector by trade, I continued to notice the same routine maintenance not being completed on homes. Over time, this can affect a home and its systems, and cost the homeowner a substantial amount of money. With that, Dwel was born and we took on the mission to help busy professionals complete their routine home maintenance.
We do this by having a Dwel Pro complete a home assessment. That assessment is then used to create a customized home care plan, and this plan incorporates at least two service visits per year by our team. During these visits, the Dwel Pro will complete the tasks within the homeowner’s care plan, which would include things like changing filters, checking pumps, general repairs, etc. A homeowner also can add other tasks to the service visit such as assembling furniture, hanging pictures, etc.
3. From working with you, I’m aware that this is a slight pivot, or maybe a bit of a temporary pause on what your original intentions were. Will you please share a little about that?
Yeah, so originally, we focused on building a consumer software that allowed homeowners the ability to create their own home maintenance lists. As we beta-tested this software, we gathered a lot of great feedback that our beta testers wanted a more hands on approach. We took this information and worked with Shams Jiwani, a local product and strategy leader. He really helped me navigate our pivot and refine our idea to better serve the customer and gain traction.
With the pivot, we decided to first take a more local approach and are focusing on the service side of the business. We still have our long-term goal of developing software that can scale nationally but know that we need to better understand customer and provider needs, in order to then build the scaling part of our business.
