I’ve spent the last 5 years as the CTO of Installation Made Easy, where I built one of the most comprehensive software platforms in the home improvement services industry. This is where I’ve experienced first hand how fragmented the software stack can be in this space. Most mid-market multi-location companies run a collection of systems duct-taped together that work well enough to keep the business running, but make it very hard to make significant changes that move the needle.

The customer acquisition stack is one of the clearest examples. For companies that run paid user acquisition, every step from ad impression to revenue is handled by a different tool and often a different team. Getting a clear view across that funnel requires an incredible amount of data engineering work, including pulling data out of different systems, building and maintaining a data lake, matching customers across systems and transforming that data into something the ad platforms can actually use for better targeting.

The result is that most companies remain heavily dependent on lead aggregators, lead generators and agencies. They abstract some of the complexity away, while keeping the overall process opaque, inefficient and unscalable. Every markup along the way adds up and renders paid customer acquisition unprofitable.

The world of paid customer acquisition is changing rapidly. Google and Meta have largely automated ad buying and targeting, while AI has dramatically increased the speed at which companies can create and test advertising. The marketer’s competitive advantage has shifted from operating the ad platform to experimentation, iteration and conversion optimization. Yet, taking advantage of this while tied to a series of agencies and middlemen is practically impossible.

Taking advantage of this shift requires connecting the entire acquisition funnel and bringing it in-house. Many first-movers have started this process, but it requires people, tools and data infrastructure that can take many years to get right. Why should running your own marketing require building your own data engineering team?

At ngen, we want to help you take advantage of the latest shifts in technology, and we have built the right software that allows you to do so. We are building an AI-powered customer acquisition engine specifically for home improvement services. We gather data from the systems you already use, unify it and transform it into signals that can improve targeting. We then give AI agents visibility into the entire acquisition loop so they can continuously experiment and optimize toward lower customer acquisition costs. Every signal, from bids and impressions to calls, bookings, quotes and sales, becomes part of a closed loop that continuously learns what produces profitable revenue and does more of it.

We are a group of software engineers, marketers and operators who have spent years working inside this industry. We are here to help home improvement companies build better customer acquisition capabilities without relying on agencies or having to become software companies themselves. If we can help you lower acquisition costs, move faster and own more of the customer relationship, that is what we are here to do.