TerraQuotes

Type an address, pick your house from a list, and get a yard-care price built from the county's own lot sizes; a pilot operator, Quiet Village Landscaping, runs it live.

One feature, start to finish Pricing a yard from the county's lot sizes

  • Research found the real problem
  • Design designed the answer
  • Measurement partly measured

Partly measured. A pilot operator runs it live, but price accuracy is unproven: I threw out the test before scoring it, because 215 of 347 old sales rows mixed prices.

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Context

Why did this work matter?

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A friend asked a landscaper for a lawn price and got a plan, a fire pit and a design bill. He only wanted the number. Pricing without a visit meant knowing yard size.

Assumptions

What did we believe going in?

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The riskiest hypothesis: a free source of lot sizes existed and was good enough to price from. No national service offered one, and the product depended on it.

Research

How was it tested?

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I tested county records in St. Louis city, St. Louis County and Maricopa County, Arizona, showed an early build to Jeff Haring of Sundown Landscaping, and tested against Quiet Village's price list.

Discoveries

What did we learn?

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All three counties give away lot and building square footage. Jeff and Quiet Village both said: good for upkeep, not installation. Homeowners marking their own yards got it wrong.

Intervention

What changed because of it?

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So the homeowner measures nothing. The app takes the lot, subtracts the buildings, and multiplies what's left by the contractor's own rate per square foot. If your address isn't listed, it says so instead of guessing.

The chosen address bar reading 1 World Wide Way, Maryland Heights, MO 63146 with a green tag beside it showing 26,863 sq ft
The lot minus the buildings: 26,863 workable square feet.

Outcome

What was the impact?

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It's live: a priced maintenance package in about a minute, no sales call. Price accuracy is still unknown, and the machine-learning model meant to fine-tune prices has never priced a real quote.

One address in, a monthly price out, on a live contractor's site.

Also on this project

Read the full study →

  • A training gate: 75 won and 225 lost jobs before the model may learn. Today it has 6 and 49.

  • 63 requirements tracked, with the 19 that ship with a known gap listed.

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