Q&A with Dan Spinosa and Drew Stanley from Fixable on building a managed marketplace for DIYers

People who wouldn’t ordinarily invest resources into their home are seeking the resources to learn, buy, and complete these improvements on their own. But for their direct-to-consumer era, there isn’t a proverbial “Toolman” Taylor or a modern DTC marketplace for the tools of the trade. The conventional model has been slow to catch up to modern reta... See more

Today, there is an ecosystem of retailers, services, and brands primed to appeal to modern consumer behavior. There are prominent, online-first furniture marketplaces like Houzz and Wayfair. Yet, there isn’t a digitally-native home improvement hub for modern brands like Sunday, Titan Sinkware, Setter, Article, Clare, Open Spaces, Burrow, and The In... See more

When our new dryer’s electrical power singed the dryer sheet and caught fire, I was fortunate enough to prevent any further trouble. But I found that the easy part was over with the damage caused to our basement. The harder part was dealing with an antiquated system of supply chain, service, and logistics. The longer Americans are sheltered in plac... See more

For me, at least in this space, even from the beginning, I knew that parts of it were against the odds, and so, what I mean by that, is if you know the category that I’m working within is childcare, it’s already an inherently margin challenged kind of category. What I mean by that, what parents are willing and able to pay for this kind of work, and... See more

Assess the potential and spot the openings:  “We spent a lot of time thinking about ‘What is the market for this?’ Spreadsheets have been around forever, but most of the time, people use them to track objects: people, companies, simple tables. They're not doing modeling and number crunching, which they were invented for,” says Ofstad. “And wh

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