Rich was an electrical contractor and after running his firm for 10 years he started to find it harder and harder to compete on price against bigger companies because they could offer pay-monthly options to their clients and he couldn't. When he started to look into it he realized how unrealistic it would be for a little guy like him to be able to offer a pay-monthly option anytime soon.
Why? Because lenders put arbitrary barriers to entry like needing to have a yearly revenue of a $1M, so local contractors like Rich get frozen out and bigger companies can dominate the market. Over 80% of construction businesses are local contractors and most of them face the same problem Rich did. So, together we set out to build a solution and we ended up with Kanda.
Kanda is an estimating tool that contractors can use to send clients estimates. When the client receives the estimate, we (Kanda), will offer the client the option to pay the contractor in full (like they normally would) or to pay them monthly.
If they choose to pay them monthly, then we pay the contractor in full once the client signs off the work and then the client pays us back over the term of the finance agreement, which could be from 10 months to 10 years. This not only helps the contractor to compete on price but it also makes it more affordable for the homeowner to have work done on their house. Win-win.
The way we see it, buy now, pay later is revolutionising e-commerce (for good or bad), and the only reason it isn't happening in offline services like construction is because it's hard to standardize the process of a contractor offering the finance. So, that's what our product aims to do. It aims to standardise how contractors send estimates and how they offer finance. Making it easy for them to do both. We’d love your ideas and feedback on what we are making.
by Andrey
Azimov