Review capture for home service trades

The idea

The crowd rated the incumbent testimonial tool replaceable at $29/mo — but that product is built for SaaS founders harvesting tweet-shaped praise into wall-of-love pages. A roofer’s economics are different: they live and die on Google review count, their customers are 60-year-old homeowners who will never fill in a web form, and the moment of maximum goodwill is the hour the job finishes, not a week later via email.

The wedge is meeting that moment in the channel that converts: an SMS at job completion, a 1-5 reply, and an AI-drafted review the customer can paste into Google in two taps. Low scores route privately to the owner instead of the public page — reputation triage the generic tools do not think about. Same $29 price point the market already validated, aimed at a buyer the incumbent never courts.

Who pays

The buyer is the owner of a 1-15 person home-services company at $29-59/mo, and each new Google review has directly measurable lead value to them. The multiplier channel is the local-marketing agencies and Jobber/Housecall Pro consultants who set up tooling for dozens of these businesses. Distribute through trade Facebook groups, field-service software ecosystems via Zapier, and comparison content against NiceJob and Podium pricing.

MVP scope

• SMS request flow with 1-5 scoring and business-name sender setup (A2P 10DLC registration in onboarding)
• Claude-drafted review from the customer’s reply plus Google review deep link
• Negative-score interception routed privately to the owner
• Zapier webhook trigger from invoicing tools plus manual send
• Embeddable website proof widget and conversion dashboard
• Skip for v1: direct Jobber/QuickBooks integrations, email fallback, Facebook reviews, multi-location reporting

Build JobProof, a review-capture tool for plumbers, roofers, electricians, and HVAC companies. Stack: Next.js (App Router) on Vercel, Twilio for SMS, Claude API for review drafting, Supabase for auth, Postgres, and widget data.

Core flow: when a job wraps, the owner (or their office) triggers a request — tap a contact in the web app, forward a Zapier webhook from their invoicing tool (QuickBooks, Jobber, Housecall Pro), or text the customer's number to a dedicated line. The customer gets an SMS from the business name: how did we do on today's water heater install? Reply 1-5. A 4-5 reply gets a follow-up asking one line about the experience; Claude expands their reply plus the job type into a natural 2-3 sentence draft review, sent back with the business's Google review deep link (the g.page/r URL that opens the review box pre-focused) so the customer pastes and posts in two taps. A 1-3 reply routes privately to the owner's phone instead — complaint intercepted, never pushed toward Google.

Collected testimonials also feed an embeddable proof widget (one script tag) showing star average and recent quotes on the business website.

Screens: dashboard with request feed and conversion stats, customer send screen, widget configurator, settings with SMS templates and the Google link.

Non-obvious details: register A2P 10DLC properly at onboarding or messages silently fail; throttle to one request per customer per 90 days.

Pricing: $29/mo including 100 SMS requests, $59/mo for 500 plus multi-location.