Exclusive: Tech startup AutoBot launches online scheduler for contractors

AutoBot.ai, a new startup co-founded by Cardinal Plumbing & Air owner Nikolai Matveev, launched to offer contractors a “more effective, affordable online scheduler,” Matveev tells Homepros. 

The big picture: Home services trail other industries in online booking usage, but they’re catching up.

• ServiceTitan noted its customers’ online bookings more than doubled from 2020 to 2022. 

• “A meaningful segment of the market simply doesn’t want to call… So, companies that offer [online scheduling] tap into a pool of customers they previously didn’t have access to,” Matveev says. 

Details: The company currently integrates with ServiceTitan and works with contractors in seven states. According to Matveev, the scheduler itself works like others, but with two caveats.

• “30% of Cardinal’s jobs get booked online, but with other schedulers, we didn’t know which marketing campaign they came from — we have SEO, Google Ads, Yelp, and more,” he says. “We also didn’t know how many people started scheduling but didn’t finish.”

• “[In our case], traffic is immediately tracked. We help [contractors] map these various traffic types to the correct ServiceTitan campaign,” he adds.

Plus: “When customers begin the booking process [with other schedulers], but don’t complete it, they kind of fall into the abyss,” he notes.

• “We enable contractors to send SMS messages if customers don’t complete it… Those customers are very expensive. We want them to get a second chance.”

Looking ahead: AutoBot plans to integrate with more software providers and expand its product set to include “analytics services, review generation, and response services.” 

• “We have so many ideas, but first thing’s first, we want to make sure our main product works very well,” Matveev says.