Co-Founder of HomeZada, a Homeowner AI platform that serves consumers to manage, maintain, protect and improve their largest financial asset and biggest expense, their home. HomeZada also provides customer engagement to real estate, insurance, mortgage and home improvement professionals. John previously was a co-founder and president of Meridian Systems which bootstrapped, grew profitably, raised a Series B Round from Summit Partners, a corporate venture round from Hochtief, and had a mid 8 figure exit to Trimble (NASDAQ: TRMB). The company was the leading construction project management software solution, with 200 employees operating globally. It customers included Fortune 500, Public Sector, and Engineering and Construction verticals with software, SaaS, professional services and support revenue models. John has a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Notre Dame.
Company: HomeZada
We are thrilled to have you join us today, welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine’s exclusive interview! Let’s start off with a little introduction. Tell our readers a bit about yourself and your company.
John Bodrozic: I am a second time entrepreneur with a passion for creating digital products that improve the lives or businesses of our customers. My first company was a B2B software business for construction project management software for large scale commercial buildings. We did the entire startup journey from a napkin sketch idea, building the product, finding customers and growing revenues, raising venture and corporate venture capital, being a leader in our vertical on a global footprint to a successful sale to a public company.
HomeZada leverages project management concepts and distills it down to individual homeowners, where it is an all-in-one SaaS platform to empower consumers to manage all the physical and financial details of their home. We are leading in delivering “Homeowner AI” technology that saves money, improves value, and gets people organized during the continuous journey of being a homeowner. We launched HomeZada as a B2C platform and have proven product market fit with every generation of homeowner all across the country. We are now pursing B2B2C relationships with home improvement, real estate, mortgage and insurance markets who are looking for customer engagement, marketing and data platforms to provide more value to their homeowner clients.
Residential real estate is the largest financial asset class in the US, valued at over $44 trillion dollars with over 100 million homeowners. The opportunity of establishing Homeowner AI to not only the consumer market but to the multiple multi-billion dollars industries that serve them is tremendous. We are excited about scaling our amazing innovation that we know provides value to a really big market.
What emerging technology trends do you believe will have the most profound impact in the next 5-10 years?
John Bodrozic: Vertical Generative AI. The foundation and rails of generative AI have been established by many well-known massive companies that have built and are continuing to scale AI hardware chips, data centers, energy, large and small language models, multiple forms of input and output and more.
But every vertical industry has a massive opportunity to create verticalized versions of this generative AI boom. Insurance, lending, home improvement, real estate, financial services, manufacturing, health care, etc. have the opportunity to innovate and lead with verticalized AI platforms.
I will date myself, as I remember the internet boom back in the late 90s, early 00s. The infrastructure of the internet and devices and browsers were launched and were available. What came next is every industry leveraging that internet foundation to transform their vertical market using the internet as a backbone.
This is why we are so excited at HomeZada, because Homeowner AI targets not only every homeowner, but all the different vertical markets that already sell products and services to homeowner customers.
Can you share a specific technological breakthrough from your company that has the potential to reshape your industry?
John Bodrozic: Let’s get into the details of why Homeowner AI is such a breakthrough. The first is that through the HomeZada platform, each homeowner gets personalized and customized AI answers about their specific home, not just generic web search or generic AI answers. This is extremely important because each home in the US is different, with a different location, age, size, and current market value. HomeZada’s Homeowner AI considers the uniqueness of each home and tailors the response to be much more valuable to each homeowner.
In addition, the input is either text-based questions a customer can ask about their home, or it can be their photos of any aspect of their home. Our Homeowner AI identifies objects in any photo, estimates the value of each item, and provides descriptions for a home inventory for insurance, maintenance and estate planning purposes. It even processes photos of repair tasks to give guidance on how to troubleshoot the issue, steps to repair with DIY or via a contractor, and provides cost estimates.
We just launched home improvement AI which creates a material list for any remodel project, provides a budget for each item, does research on different materials, and even facilitates using natural language AI to find specific products and brands across multiple ecommerce sites giving homeowners the power to control their material selection costs. Each home also gets personalized AI recommendations on energy efficiency projects and ROI calculations on which projects to do.
The last layer is providing financial insights, trends, and future forecasts on managing the financial aspects of this asset and expense. Based on the age, size and location of your home, instantly get a forecast of future maintenance and replacement projects if you stay in your current home. Or even better, get an investment analysis of how your home performed financially if you sold it today based on current market value.
How do you approach innovation while balancing the need for practicality and market readiness?
John Bodrozic: Our philosophy is in order to lead, you need to invest in innovation before the majority of the market is ready. This is because you need time to understand, build and tweak the innovation with early feedback which also builds a competitive moat because big breakthrough innovations take time. We know that based on our long-term investment in building a digital home management platform that now incorporates generative AI, we not only have a big competitive advantage, but the consumer market and partner opportunities are now ready for a solution like HomeZada.
What challenges do you face in integrating cutting-edge technology into existing business models?
John Bodrozic: For us, the innovation of generic generative AI is not enough to create personalized value to each homeowner. We benefited from already having an existing platform that managed home maintenance, home remodels, home inventory and home finances for both consumers and professionals. Then incorporating generative AI and “verticalizing” it for homeowners really supercharged the existing business model and the overall platform.
How do you foster a culture of innovation within your organization to stay ahead in the tech race?
John Bodrozic: HomeZada has three co-founders where innovation is in our veins. It is not just the innovation from a technology perspective, but innovation in both B2C and B2B2C go to market approaches, innovation in micro-messaging, business model innovation and lots of different ways to approach digital marketing. This culture of innovation then permeates through anyone we work with whether they are part of the core team or even with extended other companies we work with.
