The startup that splits time between Philly and DC — and says the challenge is totally worth it

Starting a company in one region can be stressful enough, but the startup Birdwatch bet on two. Founders say that decision has led to its swift growth.

The home maintenance startup quickly launched in both the DC area and Philly, growing to a nearly 30-person team and raising a $3 million seed round at the end of 2023. From their experience, cofounders Stephanie Toler and Chris Rosenbaum learned that the challenge their startup addresses isn’t unique to any specific market: It has broad value.

“Yes, we need to show growth and traction today,” Rosenbaum said, but added it’s necessary to experiment to find the right path. “Part of the benefit of being in two different cities,” he told Technical.ly, “is that we can accelerate that learning.” 

Birdwatch is a tech platform that connects homeowners to maintenance and repair professionals. The cofounders wanted to come up with a home task service that was more reliable than review sites like Angie’s List and treated technicians better than home repair marketplaces like Handy. 

The startup is also working to be more involved with the communities it serves. It’s classified as a public benefit corporation that donates 1% of its net revenue Birdseed, a foundation that provides down payment grants to first-time homebuyers of color, per Rosenbaum. 

Double the markets, double the learning opportunities

Despite the increased operational challenges, Rosenbaum said they didn’t want to build the company in just one city. Being in two places gave them a better idea of what would work and what wouldn’t in the bigger picture. 

“If we just built a business in DC, it would be hard to say, ‘Okay, was this because of the unique environment in DC, or is this a larger need that we’re actually addressing?’” Rosenbaum said.

The 28-employee company operated in DC only for the first 6 to 9 months to get its footing, then soft launched in Philadelphia after raising a pre-seed round. At the moment, the market in the DMV is bigger, per Toler, but she credits that to launching in the region first. 

Early on in its time in Philadelphia, the company tested working with rentals and condos, but found its niche with single-family homes in the city and the suburbs, Rosenbaum said. 

“Those are the properties that have the most need, because you just have a lot more things that can break or go wrong or that you have to care for,” he said. 

People are less transient in Philadelphia, he said, so there’s not as much of a need to take care of people’s homes while they’re out of town for business. In the DC region, traffic is bad, but the density offers some ease for technicians to get around, Toler said. 

Both the DMV and Philadelphia offer strong potential to scale and grow, per Toler. 

Thinking about future markets, cities in different environments will always have some different needs, but most of what homeowners are looking for is pretty similar, Rosenbaum said. 

Still, two-thirds of the employees are located overseas, as only the field staff needs to be local to each market. 

Addressing homeownership, not just rentals

The startup first launched in DC in January 2022, with the team branching out of a rental property management company called Nest DC that had been around for almost 15 years. Birdwatch launched in Philly about a year later so it would have a better idea of broader market opportunities, and raised a $3 million seed at the end of 2023. 

Nest saw landlords and homeowners asking if the company’s maintenance team could help out with their own homes. Cofounder Toler along with the rest of the team saw an opportunity in that. 

Toler noted she met Ryan Troll, another cofounder at the firm, because he was a client of Nest. 

After customers sign up on the Birdwatch app, they can schedule a home walkthrough where an operations manager comes to log information about the home and make a list of maintenance tasks. Customers can use the platform to update their to do lists, schedule repair visits and request emergency video call visits. 

“It’s a fundamentally different experience to serve people in their own home,” Rosenbaum said. “There’s a higher degree of hospitality that we all saw as a unique opportunity in the market.” 

A pilot version was created out of Flock, Nest’s parent company, and Birdwatch’s cofounders eventually launched the startup as its own entity. The company started in DC because the Nest team had existing vendor relationships that made it easier for the company to get started. They tested the idea with 30 initial customers.

Now, Birdwatch serves about 500 customers across the two markets. Of the 28-person team, only about a third of employees are local to each market, mostly technicians. 

Making home repair tech more human   

The technology of Birdwatch is meant to support homeowners, cofounder Toler explained, and not provide a catch-all answer. An app isn’t going to retile a bathroom, she said. 

To get at that human side, each client has a personal home manager who coordinates fixes and jobs to better work with homeowners. 

“This is not a company that is just a tech platform,” Toler said. “We’re really trying to build the technology that will support the human side of the work.”