Why Join - Avoca

Many sellers flock to the "sexy" markets. Selling software to software companies. AI tools to AI companies. I know I’ve been a victim of doing this.

But there's an arbitrage in going the other direction.

When we interviewed Raphael Parker on the vibescaling podcast in November (see at 58 minutes here), he said something that stuck with me:

"Swim in the shallow end of the gene pool."

AKA - Attach yourself to these massive, fragmented, private equity-backed industries where the competition isn't as fierce, and the problems are painfully obvious.

Nick Huber shouts this from the rooftops, to pick “less sexy industries” in order to get more alpha, or return/ability to actually be successful:

Same with Scott Galloway, who consistently says "The sexier an investment, the lower the returns."

Hopefully you get my point - there is career arbitrage in going after these types of industries.

Home services are exactly that.

To paint the reality, picture an HVAC owner.

He's spending $5k a month on Google Local Services Ads just to get his phone to ring. Each call costs him $40 to $150 before anyone even picks up.

Then the phone rings while he's under a crawlspace. He doesn't answer. The customer calls the next guy/business on the list.

That's not just a missed lead. That's a lost $500 job. Sometimes even a $20,000 job.

And the data backs this up. 78% of customers hire the first company that responds. Responding within 60 seconds improves conversion by 391%. Wait five minutes? Your chance of qualifying that lead drops by 80%.

Another kicker: 80% of callers who hit voicemail don't leave a message. They just dip. And 30 to 40% of service requests come in after hours, when most offices are closed. These are often emergency calls. Burst pipes. AC failures in a heatwave. High-ticket, high-urgency work that's currently left to chance.

So the owner is stuck. He's burning cash on ads, missing a third of his calls, and watching revenue walk out the door. He could hire a receptionist, but that would cost $35k+ per year for someone who can handle only one call at a time. Three people call at once? He still loses two.

This is the "hair on fire" problem. It's not theoretical. It's not a nice-to-have dashboard. These owners are hemorrhaging money on their most expensive line item (marketing) and they know it.

The average small contractor loses $45k to $120k per year to missed calls. For larger operations, it’s in the millions.

A rep from Avoca told me they recently landed a large enterprise sales contract where leakage from abandonment was $11M/year. Wild.

And I know what you’re probably thinking - why can’t general AI tools/LLMs do this? They don't speak the customer's language. It’s a common theme of why vertical AI is booming right now (right behind code gen & customer support use cases).

A chatbot doesn't know that a "clicking sound in the furnace" is a different priority than "regular maintenance” & doesn’t have proper context.

Avoca is filling this gap.

This might sound obvious, but TAM is a huge predictor of your future growth at a company.

I didn't optimize for this at one of my last companies before vibescaling, and it ended up being quite a limiting factor. Hope you all don't make the same mistake I did 🙂.

The US Home Services market sits at $800B today. Forecasted to hit $1T in two years 🤯.

And unlike selling another AI tool to tech companies, this market is recession-proof.

People's toilets will break. ACs will die. When it's 100 degrees outside, and your HVAC goes out, you're not "cutting the budget." You're paying whatever it takes.

There's also a generational tailwind here. The average US home is 40 years old. Millennials and Gen Z are becoming homeowners, but they're not doing repairs themselves. The shift from DIY to DIFM (Do-It-For-Me) is real, and it's accelerating demand for these services.

Now let's talk fragmentation.

There are over 120,000 HVAC businesses in the US alone. Add plumbing, electrical, and roofing, and you're looking at 500,000+ potential logos. 90% of this market is still local owners. There's no "Microsoft of Plumbing" blocking you. No incumbent fatigue. Most of these businesses haven't even been pitched AI yet.

For a seller, this is greenfield territory. Outbound actually works here. Referrals are gold.

And we know these businesses will pay for software. ServiceTitan (the CRM of the trades) just crossed nearly $1B in revenue with an $8.6B+ valuation. They have 9,500+ enterprise contractors on the platform. Avoca plugs directly into ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, and Jobber. So for these owners, Avoca isn't another dashboard to check. It's an upgrade to the software stack they're already paying $50k a year for.

The "Why Now" is also clear. Large Language Models have finally reached the latency and human-likeness required to talk to a 60-year-old homeowner without them hanging up. Two years ago, voice AI wasn't good enough. Now it is.

Only about 50% of service pros are projected to adopt AI tools by end of 2026. You're selling at the very beginning of the S-curve.

One more thing worth noting: 62% of customers call during their purchasing journey. Phone leads convert 10-15x more revenue than web forms. The phone is still the lifeblood of this industry. And right now, 18% of weekday calls and over 40% of weekend calls go unanswered.

The math is simple. If a shop gets 100 calls a month at $100/lead and misses 20 of them, that's $2,000 in wasted ad spend. But it gets worse. Those 20 missed leads would have closed at ~40%. At a $1,000 average job, that's another $8,000 in lost revenue.

$10,000/month in lost opportunity. Avoca costs a fraction of that.

Big market. Clear pain. Buyers who already spend on software. And a timing window that's wide open.

And on top of this, you’re running with the tailwinds of PE firms rolling up these “less sexy” mom-and-pop shops and wanting to inject technology (aka Avoca), into all of their portcos.

As a seller, that translates to larger deals which translates to commission checks and slinging deals.

When Avoca started in YC, they were known for after-hours AI answering. A bot that picks up when the office is closed.

They've evolved way beyond that.

Today, Avoca is building the AI workforce platform for the trades. And the key word is workforce. They're not just answering calls. They're handling the entire customer lifecycle.

The product suite now has four core modules:

Speed To Lead is their speed-to-lead engine. When a lead comes in from Angi, Thumbtack, or a web form, Avoca can outbound call or text within 30 seconds. It dedupes submissions, handles follow-ups, and pushes bookings directly into the CRM. In a market where 78% of customers hire the first company that responds, this is a weapon.

Responder is the AI voice CSR. It picks up in under 3 seconds (less than two rings), speaks naturally, and books jobs directly into ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, or Jobber. It handles ~90% of inbound calls end-to-end without human intervention. And when it hits something complex (a frantic customer with a flooded basement), it seamlessly escalates to a live U.S.-based team.

Outbound handles automated outbound. Happy calls, maintenance reminders, confirmation texts, review requests, win-back campaigns. All the stuff that fills the board during slow months and keeps customers coming back. AI-enabled SMS when a customer needs to reschedule. Routing the job to the right technician. The full loop.

Coach is the layer that makes the human team better. Most managers listen to maybe 1-2% of their CSRs' calls. Avoca reviews 100%. It auto-tags missed opportunities ("CSR forgot to ask for email," "Technician didn't mention the membership program") and sends instant alerts when a high-value lead hangs up without booking so the owner can save it.

What makes this defensible?

The moat isn't the AI. The moat is the integration.

Avoca has deep, native read/write access into ServiceTitan and the other major platforms. It sees the real-time capacity of technicians. It can quote diagnostic fees from the price book. It recognizes whether a caller is a long-time member or a new lead and routes accordingly.

A generic voice bot can take a message. Avoca books the job, checks the calendar, and closes the loop without any human in the middle.

This is why it's sticky. Once you're plugged into the source of truth, you don't rip it out.

For a seller, this matters. You're not pitching a nice-to-have dashboard. You're pitching an employee who works 24/7, handles 150 calls simultaneously, never calls in sick, and performs within 2% accuracy of the company's top human CSR.

The ROI pitch writes itself: +35% to +70% lift in bookings from after-hours and overflow traffic. Response time under 3 seconds vs. an industry average of 42 hours.

Tyson Chen (CEO) and Apurva Shrivastava (CTO) met at the MIT Voice AI Lab. They've been obsessed with the intersection of LLMs and voice long before it was a trend.

Tyson was an early Product Manager at Nuro, the autonomous delivery vehicle company. If you can manage the product complexity of self-driving cars, handling an HVAC service call is an engineering problem you can solve with your eyes closed. Before that, he was a consultant at BCG and an AI researcher at MIT CSAIL.

Apurva is a second-time founder who was a core engineer at Retool. He spent his time building internal tools for massive enterprises, which explains why Avoca's integration layer into ServiceTitan and Jobber is so robust.

They went through YC W23 and have been executing at a pace that matches the pedigree.

The team is now 110 people. They doubled in 6 months. They'll double again this year.

Here's what I like most: despite the MIT backgrounds and VC backing, this isn't an academic exercise. The team is famous for being "in the trucks" with plumbers and technicians, doing ride-alongs to understand exactly how a service call goes wrong in the real world.

They're building for the trades, not theorizing about them from a WeWork.

On the GTM side, they brought in Jack Gashi as VP of Sales. Jack is a seasoned enterprise sales leader with stints at CHEQ (where he ran North America as AVP Sales for 5+ years), PatientPop, Foursquare, and Yext. He's built and scaled sales orgs before.

When I had him on the pod, it was clear he's not hiring standard "SaaS sales" reps. He's hiring high-agency executors who can speak the language of a blue-collar business owner and back it up with analytical rigor.

Quote from Jack that had me loling - “if you like a Cholula on your eggs, come sling with us, baby.”

😂

Seems like an awesome, winning culture they are building there.

Alright, let's talk about why this actually matters for your career as a seller, and why we think Avoca is a good bet.

The problem is real and the buyer knows it.

This is the dream scenario. You're not selling a "nice-to-have" dashboard where you have to spend the first 20 minutes of every call educating the prospect on why they even have a problem. Every HVAC owner, every plumber, every electrician already knows they're losing money on missed calls. They feel it in their gut every time the phone rings and they can't pick up.

The ROI conversation is dead simple: "If our AI books just two jobs you would have missed, the software pays for itself for the month." That's an easy demo-to-close ratio.

Inbound is strong. Outbound actually works.

In a market this fragmented (500,000+ potential logos), you're not fighting over the same 500 accounts that every other AI startup is chasing. Most of these businesses haven't even been pitched AI yet. There's no incumbent fatigue. Cold outbound actually lands. And referrals are gold in the trades because these owners all know each other.

You're selling at the beginning of the S-curve, not fighting for scraps at the end of it.

The backing is legit.

YC W23. Top-tier investors. A team that just doubled to 110 people and will double again this year. This is a rocket ship with fuel in the tank, not a "let's see if we can make payroll" situation.

For anyone who's been burned joining a startup that ran out of runway, this matters. Avoca is playing to win the category, and they have the capital to do it.

The career upside is real.

Joining a 110-person team with this pedigree and trajectory is how you go from AE to sales leader in 2-3 years instead of 7. You're not a cog in a 500-person sales org waiting for your manager's manager to notice you. You're building the playbook. You're in the room.

When this company 3x's (and it will), the people who were there early get the titles, the equity upside, and the resume line that opens every door after.

The final word.

You can go sell another CRM to SaaS companies. Fight over the same accounts as 30 other vendors. Pray that your "AI feature" is differentiated enough to get a callback.

Or you can sell a product that stops the bleeding on a business owner's most expensive line item, in a market with 500k+ logos, where the buyers already know they have the problem.

That's Avoca.

If you're interested, check out their open roles or DM me and I'll make an intro.