Compa

Case Study By John Lattanzi

Overview / TLDR

• Product: Compa

• Type: Home Services B2C Marketplace

• Timeline: September 2024 – June 2025

• Team: Founder-led with 1 designer, 1 PM, contract engineers

• My Role: Founder, Product Strategist, Lead UX Designer

• Tools Used: Figma, FigJam, Lovable, Miro

• Outcomes: Launched MVP, validated core workflows with 15+ contractors, brand identity and product positioned for pilot funding and partnerships

Challenge

Independent contractors are skilled craftsmen, but daily administrative tasks and predatory pay-per-lead businesses prevent them from growing their business. They’re often left to navigate a fragmented system alone.

"I'm really good at what I do, but it’s hard to prove I can do every job I bid for. I do this on my own and without a paper trail of jobs, I lose out on a lot of jobs.” - Juan, contractor.

Existing tools like Thumbtack or Angi offer leads instead of jobs, pushing the burden to the contractor to convert those leads.

How might we help reduce stress for contractors by removing barriers that block them from finding work?

Goal: Build a contractor-first marketplace that helps contractors receive well-earned peace of mind in the communities they help build​. We want to build contractors up, replacing pay-per-lead with "I know a guy"​.

Business Goal

We aimed to reduce time spent on admin tasks, improve job opportunities, and build trust for our contractor users by reducing friction and providing E2E solutions.

KPIs:

• % of successful jobs

• # of client sites

• # of active users on the platform

• # of annual revenue

With a focused approach, we were able to take the original ActiveDisclosure and modernize it.

Discovery & Research

To ensure we were solving the right problems, we did several rounds of interviews with contractors and homeowners. We built interview guides, did several SWOT analyses of our competitors, and ended up with personas and a clear JTBD.

When I am growing my services business, I want to legitimize my business without financial or legal barriers, so I can have consistent work and live the American Dream.

Three insights about contractors that was particularly interesting is how routine their days look and how much money is wasted on pay-per-lead services.

• Every day they wake up early to check pay-per-lead sites for any traction, respond to messages, schedule further conversations, then go to a construction store (Home Depot) to pick up their materials for the day. They often get there by 7AM, spend time shopping, and start the commute to their first job of the day by 8AM. That’s about 2 hours of work before their work day starts.

• Pay-per-lead services also don’t deliver jobs to them, they grant them access to applying for jobs. In order to bid on jobs, they can spend $600 for 35 leads, where maybe 10-15 are projects they’re interested in bidding on. If they’re lucky, they’ll get 2-3 jobs from those bids with the hope of getting long-term customers. However, they have to spend a lot of money to find clients.

• There is no system for tracking all the projects and work they’ve done so far. Contractors with more work experience typically have websites or facebook pages, but most contractors just store the photos on their phone. It’s very hard to prove you can do the work when your work history is hidden between photos of your family.

If we want to reach contractors and market to them, we have to meet them where they are, fit into their current routine, and help them earn more money.

After we gather our data and insights, we utilize our personas to build journey maps, user flows, and service blueprints.

After this process, we took all of our ideas to the branding table to start thinking about initial design concepts.

Branding / Design Concepting

When trying to determine our initial design concepts, we wanted to discuss branding. We wanted to build something friendly, intuitive, and contractor-focused. We landed on the name Homie at first. We loved how it sounded - home centric, fun to say, and something that didn’t appear to take itself too seriously. We built a few design concepts based on that. We thought of ourselves as “GeekSquad for Contractors”.

Here were a few of our initial logo ideas:

We began with either a form-building flow for homeowners to send to contractors so their estimates could be more accurate and contractors could reduce the back-and-forth. Our next step was creating portfolios in the app for contractors, so when they make a bid for a project, the homeowner can see photos of the other projects they’ve done to reduce time finding the right contractor. Then, we wanted to give homeowners a way to easily compare contractors’ bids.

We took this back to our contractors. They thought the name and branding was ok, but didn’t like the idea of this being a desktop experience. They have their phone on them when they’re estimating jobs, when they’re looking for jobs, and when they’re doing other jobs - their main pain point is wasted time, so we wanted to make this as easy to use as possible.

We also chatted with homeowners and they weren’t sold by Homie as the brand name - they thought it made the service sound less reliable. However, they liked the app and were particularly interested in ways they could track their home’s health over time and if HOAs or apartment buildings could maintain upkeep across multiple properties. Their interest in the potential scale of this made us feel like they resonated with the mission, we just had to deliver on the brand goals.

So, we rethought the name and came up with Compa. Compa is Spanish for friend/buddy/pal and it bridged the gap between our mission for a friendly assistant and a language-support tool. Our goal is to get the most skilled person to do the job and to help them continuously book work.

We then considered other ways we could touch on branding in our community. A few fun ideas we had were:

• Marketing through local Spanish and Polish radio station

• Coffee stands outside of Home Depot and Lowe’s in the morning

• Easy pickup for tools and materials with our branded tote bags

With a refocused goal, we started to build prototypes and test them with users, then we vibecoded the software to have better validation testing before we got an engineering team to take the lead.

Solution

Compa has several different features we’ve developed. The goal of each of them is to offer contractors more peace of mind, better ability to showcase their skills, and a way to help them get more jobs.

The features I’ll describe are:

• Inbox with Language Support

• AI-Powered Smart Quotes

• Location and Material Tools

• Shareable Portfolio

Here is a video walkthrough of all features I vibecoded in Lovable.

Inbox with Language Support

When contractors are communicating with homeowners, they want to understand exactly what they’re looking for to give them the best service possible.

User Goal: Contractor users need to improve the communication process so they can understand the job request better, offer more accurate pricing, and offer more clear updates to the homeowner

Brief: Optimize the messaging process so that homeowners can always speak with the expert, even when English isn’t their native language. Not all contractors are native English speakers and spending time translating or having another service speak for you only slows down the process of contractors getting more jobs.

AI-Powered Smart Quotes

When contractors are trying to book work, they have to send a quote with the scope of the project and the estimated cost that helps them get the job and make a competitive offer.

User Goal: Contractor users need to improve the quoting process so they can send more accurate quotes in a shorter amount of time.

Brief: Improve the quoting process. Today, quotes can take 1-2 hours - that is wasted admin time that doesn’t help them book work. Finding a way to speed up this process using AI could

Location and Material Tools

When contractors are on their way to a job, they need materials for the job and to arrive within an agreed upon time. Oftentimes, jobs can run over time and material pickup can take longer than expected - this means homeowners in the afternoon who expect you between 12PM-8PM get frustrated when you arrive at 5:30PM instead of 12PM.

User Goal: Contractor users need to build trust with homeowners and sometimes that can be tested early when they arrive late to a project.

Brief: Offer options for contractors to be able to order materials ahead of time to make their shopping trips easier and share their location with homeowners, so they know they’re 30 minutes away instead of arriving within an arbitrary block of time.

Out of scope (future): Allow contractors to order materials to the home for delivery to reduce any additional trips if they’ve forgotten something.

Shareable Portfolio

When contractors are trying to book work, they have to prove they’re capable of doing the job. Many contractors don’t store their work in an accessible way, adding unnecessary blockers to their bid creation process.

User Goal: Contractor users need to share their work history so they can highlight their experience better and book more work.

Brief: Simplify the portfolio building process. Today, many contractors don’t have websites or social media pages, making it difficult to get larger jobs because there is no proof they can accomplish what the homeowner wants. We want to store all projects created on the site in a portfolio format so all of your previous history is stored in one location and you don’t have to scroll through your camera roll on job sites.

Other features

Licensing, Permits, and Home History are additional features we ideated on throughout this process, but they did not make the MVP scope for our vibecoded project. Happy to share additional information on them at request.

Results

Now, contractors can have peace of mind that they can spend less time looking for jobs and more time actually doing the jobs - that is how they’ll earn more money. Homeowners also get peace of mind because they can spend less time looking for the perfect contractor since they see their qualifications right away. This helps both sides of the marketplace spend less time on administrative tasks and more time building their dream homes or dream careers.

Conclusions and Future Recommendations