Developing Owner-builders App

[Mohamed Baddar]

Dear all,

 I am working on an app to help people who aspire to build their own houses. It will be a project planning, site diary, and supplier/vendor management app and I was wondering if I could get some feedback about the pain points of self builders and possibly meet some to share their stories.

I believe planning and organization is the most difficult part of the process. I've heard people spend months planning and calling vendors and subs before ground breaking. Whereas this overhead could be reduced substantially if automated. 

I have started to build the feature set assuming the owner already acquired their plot and permit. And they have some realistic estimate about their budget. 

 I imagine the first decision the owner should make at this point is to find out which foundation and framing they would go for. The system I'm building will ask the owner a few questions in a wizard form and will generate an initial project plan.  Owner can amend the plan as they go.

 Owner can then start contacting vendors/suppliers, receive and approve bids and link them to the plan. Suppliers will use the app to communicate their progress,get paid, and flag dependencies on other suppliers etc. 

I would love to hear your views. In this thread or in person. I will be visiting Boston, Plano, San Jose and San Francisco in the upcoming weeks. 

All the best,

M