Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by eldavido 1393 days ago
Predictive/preventive maintenance is actually a big thrust behind my current company, Dials.

HOAs, which we serve, are run by busy volunteers, yet expected to perform almost insane financial gymnastics, planning 30 years of major component replacement, e.g. common area roofs, piping, asphalt resurfacing. This involves (a) estimating each component's lifetime (total and remaining), (b) getting a cost estimate, and (c) coming up with a plan to spread paying for it out over however many years before it's needed, breaking that up between the units in the HOA, and collecting the funds, month after month.

People blame cultural issues ("people won't pay for maintenance") or "laziness" but the truth is, it's just too damn hard to do predictive/preventative without a very accurate inventory of what you have. You need to get all of this into a cloud environment, and then somehow expose it so that either internal staff or external vendors (more common) can see exactly what you have, bid on fixing it, and track status and work in a fine-grained way.

Our ultimate goal is doing the entire inventory automatically using computer vision (partner and I used to work in self-driving) and having enough data around that we can price and estimate everything accurately.

Nobody wants to pay for this as a standalone product so we just decided to build a payment collection product (for monthly dues), start with that, and build it up. It's going pretty well and we'd love to get more people on it. Email's in my profile in case you want to chat

2 comments

Tracking stuff is hard. I wonder why QR codes won't work in this case, or something similar, or super basic otherwise / stickers or codes at first. Might be more annoying to generate and maintain them initially. CV could work really well to keep track of inspection steps as well, or to recommend what you should do next, and how to do it
We considered this, but it's another step. What I'm talking about is going to be hard and take a while, but feels like the "endgame" for how this is going to be done--automated, done with phones, no extra work.
This is really compelling!

How will you protect from incorrect estimates, insurance?