Q&A with Jessica Majno, founder and CEO
Idyllo launched in December 2022 after completing the Techstars Accelerator program in Birmingham. It currently has seven team members.
What does innovation mean to you?
Innovation is about reimagining and reconfiguring the way the world works in a way that creates more value for people and the planet. When we innovate, we unlock the opportunity to advance prosperity — and the best kinds do that with more impact, for more of our world, today and in the future.
We often associate innovation with just technology, but it can take a lot of forms — innovating around business models, brands, how we engage customers or constituents and on all can unlock tremendous value in the right context.
I've always been drawn to the act of innovation, because it takes creativity and combines it with impact. I love the act of building and solving puzzles and doing that in a way that's oriented toward making the world a better place gives that act even more meaning and purpose.
What ways has your company innovated and/or created meaningful impact?
Idyllo is innovating on the way homeowners and local home improvement businesses connect and get work done together.
Today’s marketplaces are all built on ad revenue, which means they serve whoever is willing to pay the most for ads, and in some cases, send your information around to ask many businesses as are willing to pay for it. This is frustrating for homeowners, and for businesses, who often end for paying for bad leads (one of the largest incumbents in our market was recently actually sued by the FTC for selling bad leads). People and businesses on both sides of the marketplace end up wasting time and money trying to get work done, and in many cases, work that should happen isn’t happening. Home improvement is a huge market. Americans spend $650 billion on home services every year (this doesn’t even include our DIY spend), so even if it’s a fraction of a percentage of jobs that don’t happen or aren’t done right, that’s a huge amount of economic opportunity we’re missing out on — jobs, income, wealth creation and on.
We’ve reimagined the traditional marketplace model so that we make money when work gets done, not on ads. This means that when you use Idyllo, we’re focused on helping you find a business (or customers if you're a vendor) that you’re going to be excited to get work done with, as efficiently and smoothly as possible. Tell us what you need, and Idyllo gives you our top three recommendations based on your home and goals, and helps you book the first step with whoever you choose. That business model innovation is just one of the ways we’re innovating though; to make that model work we’re innovating in other ways, for example around our brand, customer engagement and technology.
In the few months since we’ve launched (spending very little on marketing), we’ve done $200,000 in home improvement transactions, touching great small businesses and homes all across Birmingham. We’ve built a network of nearly 100 vetted local contractors and are seeing nearly 50% of customers who complete a job do a second within a couple months.
