appliance-repair
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How Silica Dropped the Hardware - and Built a 104-Year Moat Around the Hard Part
Silica For Your Home outlived its original hardware-store identity by owning the awkward work national chains often hand off: advice, delivery, installation, integration, and repair. Its most useful lesson is not nostalgia - it is how a local retailer makes the last mile the product.
Abt Built One Store. Then It Outlasted Everyone Who Built a Thousand.
A family-owned retailer in the Chicago suburbs has spent nearly 90 years betting everything on one store - dancing fountain, saltwater shark tank and all - while national chains opened, expanded, and disappeared around it.
The 80-Year-Old Appliance Shop That Never Tried to Be the Cheapest
For three generations the Formisano family has sold refrigerators in the Hudson Valley on a stubborn premise: be the most helpful store, not the cheapest one. Here is how that bet held up over 80 years.
Nine Siblings, One Store, and 75 Years of Not Selling Out
A St. Paul bookkeeper bought the store he balanced the books for, plastered his family's name on it, and left it to all nine of his kids. Three generations later, they still won't sell.
The Quiet Subscription Empire Behind the Broken Washing Machine
Domestic & General built a billion-pound business around the moment a fridge stops humming. Its real product is not a warranty - it is the network, data and recurring relationship that make an ordinary household crisis fixable.
Field Complete
Field Complete is an Atlanta-based software company that builds a field service management platform for home-service and trade businesses - HVAC, plumbing, electrical, appliance repair, landscaping, painting, property maintenance and more. Founded by contractors-turned-founders, the product lets small crews schedule and dispatch jobs, estimate and invoice on-site, collect payments, and - unusually - sub-contract portions of a work order to other companies while keeping full visibility. It launched with a free tier and paid plans, and integrates with QuickBooks and Stripe. The company has since begun operating under the brand Mr Task.
SkillCat
SkillCat is a mobile-first, simulation-based training platform that turns a smartphone into a trade school. For about $10/month it teaches HVAC, plumbing, electrical, appliance repair and maintenance skills, prepares learners for industry certifications like EPA 608 and OSHA-10, and connects them to skilled-trade jobs. More than 300,000 learners have used it to launch or advance a trade career.
Ruchir Shah
Ruchir Shah is the founder and CEO of SkillCat, a mobile-first training platform that has taught more than 300,000 people to enter skilled trades like HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and appliance repair. A Rice-trained energy engineer with a Stanford MBA, he started building animated industrial simulations after researching the BP oil spill and concluding that bad training kills. His first company, LearnToDrill, trained 25,000 oil and gas workers for clients like Halliburton and BP. When COVID threw skilled workers out of jobs while contractors begged for help, Shah pivoted to SkillCat to bridge that gap with simulation-based, $10-a-month trade education. He also runs the GRIT Foundation to introduce trades careers to underserved youth, and once spent a summer doing stand-up comedy in New York.