Craftwork Co-Founders (l-r) Joey Skavroneck, Chief Growth Officer; Tim Griffin, CEO; Mike Bifulco, ... [+]
Silicon Valley VCs are typically more interested in funding pureplay software companies rather than those working to solve the problems of the physical world. But that is beginning to change. Take for example the Charlotte, North Carolina-based Craftwork who just announced a $6 million Seed Round led by the San Francisco-based Forerunner Ventures.
Less than a year into formal existence, Craftwork is working to make home services jobs like painting or home repairs easy to plan and order, while maintaining pricing transparency and quality.
The brainchild of Charlotte area tech entrepreneurs, CEO Tim Griffin, CTO Mike Bifulco, Suzanne Griffin, COO and Joey Skavroneck, Chief Growth Officer, the idea for Craftwork began when Tim Griffin discovered the “joys” of home ownership and the challenges of home repair and painting. This entrepreneur’s journey is based on my interview with Griffin and Bifulco.
Griffin and Bifulco had known each other for several years, as they both were active in the burgeoning Charlotte start-up community yet hadn’t had the opportunity to work together until both found themselves in between projects. Both were coming off successful exists from their previous startups. Bifulco had successfully sold Smpl and Griffin had a wild ride merging his company Cloosiv with Odeko, another like-minded company in the space, before growing from $1 million to $150 million in sales in 18 months.
“He and I were going on walks a couple times a week and just chatting about what we were interested in and what we wanted to work on, and ultimately came to the conclusion that whatever we built, we wanted to work on it together. We were both homeowners. We live maybe 500 yards from one another. This was my first property, so, I was exposed pretty much immediately to how terrible this experience was to own a home and to find anyone to help you work on it,” says Griffin.
They wondered why no one had successfully modernised the huge but highly fragmented home services market given its obvious pain point for many. While statistics are difficult to verify, as the industry constantly changes, estimates show there are approximately 2.5 million home services businesses in the US representing over $500 billion per year in revenue and employing some 6 million people.
“I can order just about anything from my phone. But I can't order a handyman effectively to come to my house and help with high quality repairs and renovations,” says Bifulco. They then set about to study the industry and research the market. The challenge they found was that software alone could not solve the problem. It was a people business and required both new software and new ways of thinking about the business.
“We realised that there was an opportunity to compromise between the two. And my background at Odeko led me to the concept of vertical integration, that if we not only built software, but also built a model that then employed people and instilled a sense of quality and brand that’s associated with quality, we could really scale something massive, and ultimately decided to proceed forward in January of this year,” says Griffin.
To ensure a committed, well-trained workforce, the company actually hires its home services workers, pays them a good wage for 40 hours per week work regardless of whether or not they’re assigned to a working project, and provides them with healthcare and equity- unheard of benefits in what has historically been a single proprietor business.
The company started in January 2023 and launched to the public three months later. They were able to speed development and hire staff through a $4 million pre-seed round funded by Y Combinator, plus a group of seasoned fellow founders. Since launch, the company quickly gained traction growing 50%- 100% month-over-month and now has over 30 employees.
The positive results to date has allowed Craftwork to attract its next funding round just 11 months into existence. It recently announced its $6 million Seed Round led by Forerunner Ventures with participation from Y Combinator, General Catalyst, Jeff Jordon, Managing Partner at 16z (Andreessen Horowitz) and Evan Moore, co-founder of Doordash.
Griffin’s wife Suzanne has a background in HR and Operations at startups. She has experience scaling them from 30 people to 400 people in 24 months. “This is her bread and butter. And we've really leaned heavily into this model,” says Griffin. The company currently operates in the Charlotte area but has ambitious expansion plans across the country. And while the current focus is on painting services, they plan to expand to other home services. “Our broader vision is building sort of the largest general contracting company in the country, and ultimately building a category defining brand,” says Griffin.
The company sees an opportunity to build a consumer brand for homeowners that becomes synonymous with Home Services. Bifulco is responsible for building the tech stack that will help them both create a national brand and a great customer user experience. “We are approaching this with a product first, tech first approach, building a brand that revolves around a website that takes advantage of all of the modern things that you get with SEO, and with targeted ad placement, and things like that gives us a much bigger funnel to start with people coming in. And then using the tech that we're building helps us to scope out projects in a way that we're confident that the pricing that we're giving our customers will make both us and the customer happy,” says Bifulco. Having the pricing and scheduling process done online helps save on operational costs because they do not have to send a person to do estimates.
Bifulco grew up in Connecticut and graduated from the University of Connecticut with an engineering degree. He leveraged his abilities to work for the likes of blue-chip tech companies like Microsoft, Google and Stripe, but his builder’s mentality led him to start several software businesses along the way. Much of the software he built was focused on creating a community. Smpl, for example is a software platform for the management of shared working space companies.
“I think that I am personally driven by a desire to do more with the little time I have, and to be able to build something that's larger than myself and to pay forward the truly massive amount of privilege I have. So building something that can help people build a stable life, a career that moves upward that makes homeowners happier, and creates opportunities all around is something I've always been interested in,” says Bifulco.
Griffin grew up in Massachusetts and went to the University of Massachusetts Amherst where he met his wife and co-founder Suzanne. After graduating with a degree in English, he wasn’t sure where he was headed. He liked the arts and had a deep interest in design but found himself in the unlikely role of management consulting working on retail payments solutions for large retailers and Fortune 500 companies.
“While Mike was destined to be an entrepreneur, I came to it by accident. I had just started to crack this idea that I thought the consulting firm I was working with at the time could use for a mobile payment solution and the firm encouraged me to build it on my own. But I didn't know the first thing about founding a company. And it took me years after that moment, even to take that that leap,” says Griffin. That leap would lead him and his wife to Charlotte where he went about creating Cloosiv, a payment platform for independent coffee shops, and later joining with his wife, Bifulco and Skavroneck to build Craftwork.
As for the future? “We believe this is a rare opportunity to build something massive, not just to build a national brand in home services, but also to provide good paying, stable jobs and to erase the stigma associated with the trades and to give folks an opportunity for upward mobility,” concludes Griffin.
