Tech startups continue to target the pool industry, all eager to find ways to automate and facilitate pool care, maintenance and route management. This week, a new app has officially joined the fray: PoolToday. Self-described as an “Uber-like experience" for pool cleaning, PoolToday seeks to connect homeowners and pool professionals for on-demand pool cleanings with as little as two hours’s notice, as well as regular service.
The app is co-founded by Santo J. Leo, a Boca Raton-based tech entrepreneur who modeled PoolToday after his previous startup, MailMyPrescriptions.com.
“While building my last startup, I noticed even though I was spending over $1,000 a year on pool service, it was never clean when I wanted to use it on the weekends. The last thing I wanted to do after an exhaustive work week was clean it myself in Florida’s humidity,” he says. “I realized that every week a contractor showed up unannounced in my backyard and I really had no idea what they were doing. I didn’t know if I was overpaying. After doing some research I realized there are hundreds of millions of pool cleanings each year, and no one was solving these problems.”
While PoolToday is not the first platform to target pool homeowners and maintenance technicians — pHin offers Pool Service on Demand — Leo says his app has several significant differences designed to better support the pool professional. Rather than a platform for lead-generation, like Angie’s List, Home Advisor or Thumbtack, Leo describes PoolToday as a “curated peer-to-peer marketplace." On PoolToday, service technicians are vetted before joining the provider network, and the app offers semi-exclusive and exclusive territory options to pros who join the platform. All prices are predetermined and, unlike the aforementioned lead-generation services, PoolToday has limited its scope to on-demand pool cleans and weekly maintenance subscriptions. More substantial/technical endeavors, like pump repair, winterizing, acid washes, etc., are not currently offered in the app.
RELATED: pHin Launches Pool Service on Demand, a New Lead-Generation Tool
After beta testing in several markets, PoolToday is now live and available to the general public in more than 100 cities across Florida, California, Texas, Arizona and Nevada. Since its official launch earlier this month, the company says it has scheduled more than 20,000 weekly pool cleanings.
