8. If I Were You: The Next 90 Days
The single most important thing
Get 3 home-services agencies paying at least $99 a month for a hand-built booked-jobs report before you build anything.
- Segment: US agencies with 5–30 contractor clients in HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing or garage doors, whose clients use Jobber (first) or Housecall Pro, and who track calls with CallRail.
- Job: "Show my client how many jobs and dollars their ads produced, so they don't fire me."
- How: start by hand. Take the CallRail call export, the Jobber invoice and job exports, and the Google Ads and LSA reports. Match by phone number in a spreadsheet. Write a one-page report. Charge from week 3. Automate only what you've done by hand at least 10 times.
The plan fits limited hours per week: weeks 1–4 need no code, and every step after that is chosen to reduce ongoing operations.
Week-by-week
| Weeks | Goal | Exit criteria (~15 hrs/week / full-time) |
|---|---|---|
| 1–2 | Discovery. Talk to home-services agency owners. Ask: the last 3 clients you lost and why; the report you send today (ask to see it); which tools you pay for (AgencyAnalytics, CallRail, WhatConverts, GoHighLevel); which field-service systems your clients use. | 12 / 15 calls. You can write the top 3 reasons agencies lose clients, in their words. You know the Jobber / Housecall Pro / ServiceTitan split across their clients. |
| 3–4 | Concierge pilot. Build the booked-jobs report by hand for one client per agency. Charge ≥$99/month for up to 5 clients. | 3 / 5 agencies paying. If fewer than 2 will pay, the pain isn't real enough. Switch once to LSA-heavy agencies (LSA leads to jobs only). If that misses too, stop. |
| 5–8 | Build the thin v1: Google Ads API with LSA leads (Explorer token first, apply for Basic), CallRail API, Jobber OAuth app, phone-number matching with an unmatched queue, one report template, white-label PDF and link, a contractor-language summary, pre-send data-gap checks. | Pilots move from spreadsheets to the app. ≥60% of leads auto-matched. |
| 9–10 | First channel beyond your network. Publish 5 niche guides ("cost per booked job for HVAC", "LSA report template", "how to prove plumbing ads work"). Offer the free one-off booked-jobs report from CSVs. Start the Jobber App Marketplace application. | 10 / 20 trial sign-ups outside your network. |
| 11–12 | Measure and decide. | 5 / 8 paying agencies, ≥60% match rate, zero reports sent with silent data gaps, ≥1 documented client save. If you hit it, add Housecall Pro next. If you miss it, go back to discovery. |
Kill criteria (write these down now)
If at day 90 you have fewer than 3 paying agencies, or fewer than half of pilot agencies renewed after their first month, the wedge is wrong. Don't respond by adding connectors. Respond by changing the niche (e.g. roofing on JobNimbus) once, or stopping.
The one thing to stop doing
Stop planning a general dashboard tool with a long connector list.
It's the most expensive part of the idea (every connector is permanent upkeep), the most contested (AgencyAnalytics has 85+ integrations for $20 a client, and Looker Studio is free), and the least likely to earn anything a new entrant keeps. It feels like progress because connectors demo well, but it's building to avoid selling.
A close second: stop treating AI commentary as the reason to buy. Every incumbent includes it, and Google's and Meta's official MCP servers give it away.
What stays on the long-term roadmap (only after proof)
- Housecall Pro, Meta Ads and Google Business Profile connectors.
- The agency roll-up view (at-risk clients across the book).
- Year-on-year seasonality and job-type breakdowns.
- A quarterly "cost per booked job by trade" benchmark from consenting customers.
- Then, a second niche on the same engine (roofing on JobNimbus, or another trade system). That's the only route past ~$20k MRR.