Latest news with #Roofbuddy
Techday NZ
2 days ago
- Business
- Techday NZ
Roofbuddy processes NZD $78.7 million as it transforms roofing
Innovation occurs at the intersection of complementary disciplines. Apple entered the market at the intersection of personal computing and design, making the PC sexy and approachable. IBM was the dominant market leader, but until Steve Jobs introduced Apple's iconic design aesthetic, the PC was about as sexy as Bill Gates dancing on stage at the Windows 95 launch - an acquired taste at best. Roofbuddy sits at the intersection of the Trades and Tech and has found this a rewarding and somewhat neglected niche. The first principle that became part of our DNA was to test everything under real-world conditions. To call the system we entered the market with in May 2022, a BETA would be generous, we pushed the envelope for what could be called a minimum viable product and went straight into the market to transact. It was messy, uncomfortable, time-consuming and incredibly manual, but it worked (just). 3 transactions in May, 15 in June and 10 in July - it was like the Wright Brothers prototype; off the ground, and we built the rest while we were in flight. Ukraine's drone industry has transformed from nascent to world-leading in under 3 years. For this very reason, they didn't have the best people, tech, or abundant funding - the advantage they had was real-time battlefield testing. Test in the real world, fail fast, measure results, adapt, iterate and optimise - this is one of our core values we discuss internally as a "culture of continuous improvement". Secondly, money talks AND pays the bills, transacting early generates revenue that fuels growth and covers costs. If you are profitable, the runway is infinite, you retain your autonomy, set terms for investors or eschew them altogether and exist in a healthy 'growth management' mindset. The Eisenhower Matrix, Pareto Principle and Elon's much-touted "First Principles Thinking" all guide the Roofbuddy team to the same conclusion - earning income and remaining profitable is core. It follows that supporting revenue growth has been the tech team's primary prerogative from the outset. We have built more than our fair share of zombie features that didn't commercialise as anticipated - that's healthy attrition. However, if every epic, sprint and ticket is viewed through the lens of increasing revenue or decreasing cost, prioritisation becomes incredibly simple - estimate by magnitude and execute. The Roofbuddy marketplace has been an ambitious, tech-driven reimagining of how roofing transactions are conducted - so far as we know, we are the greatest (only) roofing, sales, tech, price aggregation marketplace in the world. When Uber and Airbnb started growing parabolically, they got significant blowback from market incumbents with entrenched vested interests. We have seen a bit of that ourselves, too and anticipate more. Transcending these 'speed limit' warnings is all about value creation - how is our product and service making the lives of our users easier and better? Roofers can quote a job in 2 minutes instead of 2 hours - that's measurable value created. Customers can get multiple competitive, comparable quotes in 24 hours instead of 24 days - more value. A core function of technology is to systematise and rationalise complex information and distil it down into its functional essence - in Roofbuddy's case, that means answering one question as quickly and accurately as possible: What is the price? The extent to which we have made that easier for our Roofing partners to calculate and our customers to receive and understand; that is the value we have created. True value is immutable; Trademe is not a garage sale. Napoleon's Grand Armée conquered the entire European continent in an administratively led war of self-defence, ostensibly. This revolution in military affairs had nothing to do with better muskets, cannons or ships. It was a revolution of meritocratic management, administration, supply chain, logistics and information flow - doing the boring stuff several orders of magnitude better than competitors was (and still is) the path to total victory. Creating our own proprietary CRM as opposed to grafting our tech stack onto an existing offering was a huge inflection point but dividends abound. It's allowed us unconstrained flexibility and freedom of movement to handle internal and external workflows in a profoundly efficient way. Like the proverbial marble run, our proprietary CRM now serves and automates the information and workflow between customers, roofers and our staff to achieve an unprecedented level of service, accuracy of information and end-to-end workflow management. Roofbuddy's tech excels in the 'boring' details, and it's been a boon for team morale and overall performance. Plugging another of Roofbuddy's values at this point seems inevitable - "esprit de corps"; my penchant for military history foisted on my poor unsuspecting colleagues at every opportunity - and now you too. At Roofbuddy, performance is tangible and measurable across all departments. In 3 years, the Roofbuddy marketplace has served 35,469 unique customer enquiries, delivered 39,325 quotes and processed 3,594 orders totalling $78,707,202.51 in roofing services transacted; we measure innumerable performance metrics that instruct daily discussion and action. Our mature codebase (~2964 commits) sees ~3.3 commits and 1.5 deployments daily, with a robust CI/CD pipeline achieving 100% successful builds, thanks to extensive frontloaded checks. We maintain 71% test coverage, uphold a 99% uptime, and average a 2-minute rollback, ensuring rapid recovery from any issues. New developers land their first meaningful commit within 10 days, reflecting our inclusive, fast-moving culture. Our developers aren't hidden away in caves - they're deeply embedded in real-world problems, working shoulder-to-shoulder with the front line team. From the very start, our engineers are shaped to be product champions, not just coders, ensuring that every line they write solves meaningful challenges. Without a scoreboard, it's just exercise. Roofbuddy enjoys a fantastic culture of high performance and achievement, and I'm proud of the results the team have delivered over the last 3 years - we aspire to be a bright spot of innovation and kiwi dynamism during a bleak and attritional economic period for Aotearoa. We believe we are building unique tripartite, transactional, marketplace technology that can be adapted and utilised in hundreds of different countries and thousands of different industries; Roofbuddy's CTO, Igi Manaloto, just had an involuntary heart palpitation as I wrote that. We have achieved profound product market fit, proof of concept and dramatically altered the transactional dynamics in the Roofing industry - to some incumbents' chagrin. So far, we have greatly improved the level of service and value for money customers can expect from a roofing service provider, that's only been possible with our tech-first approach, and there is much more work to do! Our proprietary tech stack is portable, dynamic and can be deployed into different verticals and horizontals at scale; so we are extremely excited to see how far we can go in New Zealand and abroad over the coming years.
Techday NZ
2 days ago
- Business
- Techday NZ
Roofbuddy processes USD $78.7 million as it transforms roofing
Innovation occurs at the intersection of complementary disciplines. Apple entered the market at the intersection of personal computing and design, making the PC sexy and approachable. IBM was the dominant market leader, but until Steve Jobs introduced Apple's iconic design aesthetic, the PC was about as sexy as Bill Gates dancing on stage at the Windows 95 launch - an acquired taste at best. Roofbuddy sits at the intersection of the Trades and Tech and has found this a rewarding and somewhat neglected niche. The first principle that became part of our DNA was to test everything under real-world conditions. To call the system we entered the market with in May 2022, a BETA would be generous, we pushed the envelope for what could be called a minimum viable product and went straight into the market to transact. It was messy, uncomfortable, time-consuming and incredibly manual, but it worked (just). 3 transactions in May, 15 in June and 10 in July - it was like the Wright Brothers prototype; off the ground, and we built the rest while we were in flight. Ukraine's drone industry has transformed from nascent to world-leading in under 3 years. For this very reason, they didn't have the best people, tech, or abundant funding - the advantage they had was real-time battlefield testing. Test in the real world, fail fast, measure results, adapt, iterate and optimise - this is one of our core values we discuss internally as a "culture of continuous improvement". Secondly, money talks AND pays the bills, transacting early generates revenue that fuels growth and covers costs. If you are profitable, the runway is infinite, you retain your autonomy, set terms for investors or eschew them altogether and exist in a healthy 'growth management' mindset. The Eisenhower Matrix, Pareto Principle and Elon's much-touted "First Principles Thinking" all guide the Roofbuddy team to the same conclusion - earning income and remaining profitable is core. It follows that supporting revenue growth has been the tech team's primary prerogative from the outset. We have built more than our fair share of zombie features that didn't commercialise as anticipated - that's healthy attrition. However, if every epic, sprint and ticket is viewed through the lens of increasing revenue or decreasing cost, prioritisation becomes incredibly simple - estimate by magnitude and execute. The Roofbuddy marketplace has been an ambitious, tech-driven reimagining of how roofing transactions are conducted - so far as we know, we are the greatest (only) roofing, sales, tech, price aggregation marketplace in the world. When Uber and Airbnb started growing parabolically, they got significant blowback from market incumbents with entrenched vested interests. We have seen a bit of that ourselves, too and anticipate more. Transcending these 'speed limit' warnings is all about value creation - how is our product and service making the lives of our users easier and better? Roofers can quote a job in 2 minutes instead of 2 hours - that's measurable value created. Customers can get multiple competitive, comparable quotes in 24 hours instead of 24 days - more value. A core function of technology is to systematise and rationalise complex information and distil it down into its functional essence - in Roofbuddy's case, that means answering one question as quickly and accurately as possible: What is the price? The extent to which we have made that easier for our Roofing partners to calculate and our customers to receive and understand; that is the value we have created. True value is immutable; Trademe is not a garage sale. Napoleon's Grand Armée conquered the entire European continent in an administratively led war of self-defence, ostensibly. This revolution in military affairs had nothing to do with better muskets, cannons or ships. It was a revolution of meritocratic management, administration, supply chain, logistics and information flow - doing the boring stuff several orders of magnitude better than competitors was (and still is) the path to total victory. Creating our own proprietary CRM as opposed to grafting our tech stack onto an existing offering was a huge inflection point but dividends abound. It's allowed us unconstrained flexibility and freedom of movement to handle internal and external workflows in a profoundly efficient way. Like the proverbial marble run, our proprietary CRM now serves and automates the information and workflow between customers, roofers and our staff to achieve an unprecedented level of service, accuracy of information and end-to-end workflow management. Roofbuddy's tech excels in the 'boring' details, and it's been a boon for team morale and overall performance. Plugging another of Roofbuddy's values at this point seems inevitable - "esprit de corps"; my penchant for military history foisted on my poor unsuspecting colleagues at every opportunity - and now you too. At Roofbuddy, performance is tangible and measurable across all departments. In 3 years, the Roofbuddy marketplace has served 35,469 unique customer enquiries, delivered 39,325 quotes and processed 3,594 orders totalling $78,707,202.51 in roofing services transacted; we measure innumerable performance metrics that instruct daily discussion and action. Our mature codebase (~2964 commits) sees ~3.3 commits and 1.5 deployments daily, with a robust CI/CD pipeline achieving 100% successful builds, thanks to extensive frontloaded checks. We maintain 71% test coverage, uphold a 99% uptime, and average a 2-minute rollback, ensuring rapid recovery from any issues. New developers land their first meaningful commit within 10 days, reflecting our inclusive, fast-moving culture. Our developers aren't hidden away in caves - they're deeply embedded in real-world problems, working shoulder-to-shoulder with the front line team. From the very start, our engineers are shaped to be product champions, not just coders, ensuring that every line they write solves meaningful challenges. Without a scoreboard, it's just exercise. Roofbuddy enjoys a fantastic culture of high performance and achievement, and I'm proud of the results the team have delivered over the last 3 years - we aspire to be a bright spot of innovation and kiwi dynamism during a bleak and attritional economic period for Aotearoa. We believe we are building unique tripartite, transactional, marketplace technology that can be adapted and utilised in hundreds of different countries and thousands of different industries; Roofbuddy's CTO, Igi Manaloto, just had an involuntary heart palpitation as I wrote that. We have achieved profound product market fit, proof of concept and dramatically altered the transactional dynamics in the Roofing industry - to some incumbents' chagrin. So far, we have greatly improved the level of service and value for money customers can expect from a roofing service provider, that's only been possible with our tech-first approach, and there is much more work to do! Our proprietary tech stack is portable, dynamic and can be deployed into different verticals and horizontals at scale; so we are extremely excited to see how far we can go in New Zealand and abroad over the coming years.
NZ Herald
24-04-2025
- Business
- NZ Herald
Auckland man claims Roofbuddy operates as ‘modern-day cowboy'
'I know that Roofbuddy checks all their roofing partners, so I was pretty confident they were all really good options,' he said in a YouTube marketing video. While his talent agent told the Herald Green is not involved in Roofbuddy operations, Green and his wife Matilda Green are listed as company shareholders. The company's website says it's a 'hassle free service' that connects customers with professional roofers with 'proven track records' and warns customers 'cowboys are always lurking'. However Fatherly told the Herald his attempt to get a new roof for his family home ended in a bitter legal dispute. An independent assessor has determined the workmanship of the contractor Roofbuddy recommended for Fatherly's job was so poor, the entire roof must be removed and replaced. 'It [Roofbuddy] is like a cowboy with a fancy website and some social media influencer on the front page to make it look pretty' he said. Kenian Fatherly said he signed up with Roofbuddy because the company says it performs safety checks on roofers, and because it claimed to use third-party quality assurance experts to check workmanship before signing off the job. Roof cladding has been poorly installed and not by a qualified roofing contractor or not supervised by one. Independent building survey An independent building surveyor who Fatherly engaged after being dissatisfied with the work on his re-roof issued a scathing report of the quality of the finished product. Among the defects found were visible deformities and indentations in the cladding, rust marks from metal debris being left on the roof, and incorrectly installed gutter fixings. 'The author is of the opinion that the roof cladding has been poorly installed and not by a qualified roofing contractor or was not supervised by one,' the report said. The report went on to recommend the roof be removed and replaced in its entirety. Fatherly told the Herald he took the contractor Trade Winds Limited to the Disputes Tribunal and won with the authority ordering the company to refund Fatherly $17,000 because the work was not carried out with reasonable care and skill. Since the ruling, Trade Winds owner Sandy Song has not made payment, and Fatherly says Roofbuddy has 'run for the hills'. 'The thing that really annoyed me the most with Roofbuddy is that it took no accountability.' Kenian Fatherly The Herald approached Song for comment but is yet to receive a response. Roofbuddy CEO James Logan said Trade Winds is highly experienced and had completed almost 100 other jobs on the Roofbuddy platform. 'Trade Winds is one of the largest and most capable roofing companies in New Zealand,' he told the Herald. Despite this Logan acknowledged there were problems with Fatherly's job, and its quality assurance expert identified 'a number of deficiencies'. Logan said he urged Trade Winds to fix the problems but said Fatherly then escalated matters by taking the case to the Disputes Tribunal. 'At all times Kenian had our full support in the matter.' Fatherly rejects the claim Roofbuddy was supportive, saying Logan stopped answering his phone calls. 'He washed hands of the whole thing altogether. To this day he still won't take my phone calls.' 'The thing that really annoyed me the most with Roofbuddy is that it took no accountability.' Fatherly was also critical of Roofbuddy's so-called third-party quality assurance checks on completed work saying there's a clear conflict of interest when their expert is an employee of Roofbuddy. 'A third party would be somebody who's not employed by the roofing contractor and not employed by Roofbuddy.' Logan maintains the company's quality assessors are independent but acknowledged they can and have made mistakes in the past and the company is focused on making improvements. 'An absolute nightmare' Tim Stewart who lives in Sydney told the Herald he faced a 'nightmare' 18 months dealing with RoofBuddy and the contractor it organised to work on his rental in Auckland's Titirangi. Roofbuddy was engaged to find a contractor to replace his roof in mid-2023, but Stewart said it took until late December last year before he had a roof that was watertight and compliant. He described the ordeal as an 'absolute nightmare'. Stewart said the roof on his rental was replaced and then signed off by RoofBuddy's quality assurance inspector. Despite this, in the weeks that followed, he said there were leaks which caused damage to the home's interior plasterboard and circuitry shorted because of water ingress. 'I went to the property and was horrified. I could see issues.' Tim Stewart Stewart then returned from Sydney to Auckland to inspect the work and said the poor workmanship was obvious. 'I went to the property and was horrified. I could see issues,' he told the Herald. He suspects the contractor engaged to do the work had minimal roofing experience. 'It was my layman's inspection which raised some red flags. I was like, hold on, this has been certified. How has this been certified when it looks like this.' He noticed damaged panels and said the roofing iron extended so far into the gutters he was barely able to get his hand inside to clear them of debris. Stewart then engaged his own independent roofers to inspect the work both of whom identified significant flaws. 'It was basically a s*** show,' he said. In the meantime, Stewart's tenants took him to the tenancy tribunal because of the leaks, rubbish being left strewn around the property by contractors, and ongoing disruptions from workers turning up unannounced at the property. 'I am completely in their [his tenants] camp. I think I would have done that same had it been me.' His tenants won their case at the tribunal, and he had to pay them $5000 in compensation. He said while RoofBuddy acted to remedy the issues he said he had to nag the company constantly for updates in an 'incredibly stressful' process that dragged out for months. 'It felt very much like a shirking of their [Roofbuddy's] responsibilities or unloading the responsibility to someone else.' In total, it took around 18 months before he had a roof that was watertight and compliant. He said he signed up with Roofbuddy because they secured the cheapest quote, but he wouldn't do it again. 'In hindsight, had I known the dramas, I would have been more than happy to fork out a bit more upfront and with the peace of mind.' Roofbuddy's CEO James Logan maintained the roofer contracted to work on Stewart's rental was experienced but did the job poorly, engaged in misleading conduct and then became uncontactable. 'Our degree of confidence in him was ultimately misplaced.' 'Quality assessors are subject to human error' James Logan Logan said the quality checks were completed and the roofer was asked to fix issues that had been identified. 'The roofer subsequently leveraged his personal relationship with our assessor and used a series of misleading photographs to falsely show the remedial actions were taken – so he could induce our send out of the QA [quality assurance] report and collect payment. Asked why Roofbuddy would sign off jobs when other experts had raised serious concerns, Logan said roofing is 'complex' and issues can be 'opaque'. Advertise with NZME. 'Quality assessors are subject to human error and have gone through an iterative improvement process of refinements; instructed by events such as Tim's installation,' he said. He said all roofers joining Roofbuddy must have 'appropriate trade qualifications' and be certified. 'I acknowledge that these requirements and the quality assurance assessments we conduct are an imperfect filter and subject to human and system error; they are also the most rigorous in the industry.'
