Reno

Reno was my first real startup attempt.

The idea came from watching my parents go through a home renovation. They would have to leave work to go meet the contractor at Home Depot, deal with materials, and manage a lot of moving parts in a way that felt way more painful than it should have been.

The question for me was: why isn't there one vertically integrated platform that handles the whole process? Design, ordering materials, matching with a contractor, and creating more price transparency around the job.

Part of what made it exciting was the idea of using extended reality to help people actually see and understand their renovation before anything got built.

It was early, imperfect, and very much a college-age first swing, which is part of why it matters to me.

I also did the part that matters most: talking to the market. I spoke with more than one hundred general contractors and homeowners who were actively in the middle of renovations.

In the end, I came away thinking there was not real product-market fit, at least not in the form we had imagined, so I shut it down.

It was still an important project for me because it was one of the first times I went from seeing a real problem to trying to build a company around it.

You can look at the original pitch deck here:

• Reno pitch deck (2021)