Keepingly. Our "Why"

Keepingly is an answer to the needs of homeowners to be able to manage their home and all the things around it.

In my homeownership experience, I realized that the current processes around my home management, maintenance, record-keeping, and bill payment were immensely disjointed and fragmented. I was thoroughly frustrated by my experience and started to ask myself — Am I the only one experiencing this?

I reached out to a few friends who owned homes and realized they all had the same issue to varying degrees. We all used a hodgepodge of solutions to manage and navigate our homes. Most notably, all were manual (calling, notepads, saving receipts in a drawer in the kitchen, etc.).

As a former product manager in the Internet of Things (IoT) space, I spent significant time in telecom, mapping, and developing a business case for IoT usage. For most homeowners, the promise of IoT has not materialized beyond apps and devices that help improve the security of their car or home. Therefore a solution is still required.

My own childhood played an essential part in how I viewed the home maintenance process. As a child, my father worked at an institution where young men were trained in several trades (carpentry, woodwork, welding, masonry, and electrical engineering). I saw firsthand what it took to master many of the skills required to fix things around the home and believed there must be a better way. Not every homeowner has the skills or the time to do all of the work himself. As a result, integrating vendors became an essential part of Keepingly.

As I researched the needs of homeowners, I put together a survey and interviewed homeowners outside my circle to get their perspectives on how they managed and maintained their homes. I overwhelmingly found that most homeowners did not have a management process. It got even more complicated to track bills, expenses, documents, or record details from the most simple to the most important. Only 1% of homeowners were super organized and had all their documents and bills organized.

I spoke to female homeowners who expressed frustration at being ripped off by contractors, and some even expressed the fear of having a stranger come to the home — opting to leave maintenance undone. As a counterpoint to that, I found that emergency home repairs were a Billion dollar business.

I met with first-time homeowners; some were the first in their generation to own a home, others had inherited their house, and were unprepared for the cost of maintaining an older home, often resulting in the sale of said home. The correlation between lack of maintenance and a low home valuation is obvious, but many homeowners of color also got lower valuations for their well-maintained homes. How do we even begin to address the correlation of racism to homeownership?

The survey revealed that 90% of the homeowners under the age of 45 were so busy managing the day-to-day aspects of their lives that while homeownership was important, having a digital platform that would assist them in home management and maintenance best suited their lifestyle. It also revealed that many homeowners just needed to be educated about what it took to maintain a home.

Two questions popped up that formed the foundation of Keepingly, and the answers to these questions overwhelmingly drive our mission.

1. What do Homeowners need to manage their homes better?
2. How do we create a tool that allows the homeowner to feel empowered and engaged during home management, maintenance, and growth?

I realized that we would need to build a solution focused on the homeowner’s current experience while continuously satisfying their evolving needs at each level or stage in their ownership journey. That means meeting my own needs, those we surveyed, and potentially millions of homeowners across the US and the globe. Let’s face it — home management and maintenance can be an exhausting and time-consuming process, and many of us would rather skip the homework until it becomes mandatory.

As I started to formulate what the solution could look like, I realized that it would be essential to create a solution that encapsulates the homeowner’s journey from start to finish while tracking the critical interactions within the homeowner experience.

Thus Our Mission: We’re building the trusted platform for homeowners to manage, maintain, pay, and keep records of all their home services and expenses.

With Keepingly, everything will be in one place, just like home.

Signup at https://www.keepingly.co/

Daniel Smith — Founder