Ian Heidt
Ian Heidt is CEO and Co-Founder of Housecall Pro, the mobile software company that empowers home services professionals.
What’s your earliest entrepreneurial memory?
I designed the first t-shirt for the Weezer fan club. It was a sweet shirt.
Did your parents instill a sense of entrepreneurship in you?
My mom was a customer service representative for United. My dad was a housepainter. He worked harder than most people think possible. He’d wake up at 4 to 5 AM and get home at 6 PM every night. All in order to feed his kids and get them to a better life than he had. He taught me that relentless work ethic. He also taught me the importance of delighting your customers. He was earning less than $30,000 per year while supporting three kids. He didn’t always know where his next pay check was going to come from, but he did know that word of mouth was incredibly important. Whenever he was at a job, he would do his best work each and every time to ensure repeat and referral business.
How did your dad’s housepainting business inspire the idea for Housecall Pro?
I was a kid from pretty modest means. I was also that nerd in the family who did well in school. But I never forgot where I came from. And as I grew older, I began to couple my sophisticated understanding of software with what I’d observed about my dad running his business. I saw that in the services economy, there are a massive number of people who have quite literally built America, but who are feeling left behind. They’re not naïve — they use Uber, they use Amazon. But there’s no easy on-ramp for them to use software in their businesses. At Housecall Pro, we are their champion. Our app is super easy-to-use. And when they use our software in front of their own customers, they win. They’ve stayed independent and small, but they look like super pros.
The day I visited your office, your team was hosting a happy hour for your Pros. The customer love in that room was palpable. How did you get there?
Even the word community feels too small to capture what our family of customers mean to us. We run a series of Mastermind events for our Pros across the country. And our Pros trust us so much that they bring their friends and families in the trades to these events. How did we get there? First, we simply bought lunch at Fuddruckers every week for the eight services providers on our platform. It was a great way to get product feedback and build trust. Today, we require every engineer at Housecall Pro to understand the customer that they’re building for. Quite literally, if an engineer writes a bug, it may start as a customer support ticket, but will ultimately result in that very engineer talking to the customer until it is resolved. It creates an engineering team unlike any other.
You’ve also built a pretty remarkable culture. It’s a really fun place to work. How would you define the culture at HCP?
We have a set of cultural values that you had better see us demonstrate on a daily basis or they aren’t worth anything at all. They are:
- Have profound empathy for our customer
- Have a positive impact on the world (we think we’re doing a great thing, and delivering awesome value)
- Respect data driven decisions
- Do the work (It ain’t easy, and it’s going to be a grind at times)
- Be a good human and have fun along the way
What’s your big vision for what HCP becomes?
One thing we’re doing really well right now is participating in a big macro trend that’s in our favor. The entire $500B+ Home Services industry is moving from offline to online. Eight years from now, no one in the US will book a home services professional over the phone. That may sound crazy in our industry, but it’s already happened in most other parts of the economy.
