RÜF is a project that myself and one of my closest friends Ethan (of the well known bigcrete.engineering) worked on as part of an entrepreneurship course. The course, BET300 under the Conrad school of business, required a venture to be conceptualized and developed over 4 months. Ethan already had this idea to automate the roofing process and we couldn't poke any holes in it at the time, so we went through with it.
The problem we identified was that the blue collar workforce is shrinking, apprenticeship registration has been declining, and yet the construction industry is growing. In the roofing industry in particular, 39% of expenses are tied up in labor. This increasing cost just gets passed on to the customer, who pays around $10k for a roof replacement. The work is hard, dangerous, and nowadays you have to pay people a lot to do it. There has been almost no innovation in the roofing industry since the air gun 50 years ago.
The solution we came up with takes the form of a robot that can hold a stack of shingles, and nail them down automatically. The robot would traverse to a modified shingle elevator (common in the industry) which would load the robot up, it would diagonally drive across the roof, placing a shingle and nailing it in. We hoped that the robot would be able to do at least 80% of the roof as doing dormers, ridges, and valleys seemed too complicated. A roofing company would rent robots from us, while a small crew would go around and do the parts that the robot couldn't do.
A concept of the robot in question is shown below, but not fully realized or designed.
We also had an idea to produce accurate quotes using drones. The idea being that a drone could fly around the roof recording it. This video could be processed with semantic segmentation and VSLAM to estimate the amount of area and complexity of the roof. This would lead to less material waste and more accurate quotes for customers. A concept of what this would look like is shown below:
One of our assignments in the course was to apply to the Concept 5k pitch competition, which we did. Ethan did a fantastic job at pitching, making it through the semi finals before losing in the finals. You can watch the pitch here: (https://youtu.be/T2CKR_hhoMc?t=2517)
If I'm completely honest, I didn't expect to learn anything by taking this course. It seemed like an easy credit and maybe I could meet some cool people. But what's special about BET300 is that it forces you to commit to an idea for at least 4 months, similar to a capstone project. You better make sure you like your idea and are willing to put a lot of work into it, and this was great for deeply thinking about roofing as a problem space. I think that we could have done better in 2 main ways, so here's what I learned.
You have to get really close to the problem space you want to solve. Even better if it's a problem you personally have. I personally do not have the problem of a roofing job being too expensive. We convinced ourselves really early on that this was a very possible and profitable business, without ever looking at how much labor was actually tied up in nailing shingles. In fact, we still don't know, because it turns out roofers are hard to talk to. But despite this, we dove in head first. It could have ended up only being 20% of their labor charge and we wouldn't have realized this until it was too late. Yes we did our groundwork and our research, but we never actually went out to a job site and watched the process. I think the reason we didn't win Concept 5k was because one of the judges asked "have you ever roofed a house?" and Ethan has to respond with no, and neither have I. It's easy to criticize things when you aren't involved in them. Looking back on it, it seems like a silly idea that a modern robot could pull its weight in a fast paced job site. Maybe one day.
You have to get really close to the problem space you want to solve. Even better if it's a problem you personally have. I personally do not have the problem of a roofing job being too expensive. We convinced ourselves really early on that this was a very possible and profitable business, without ever looking at how much labor was actually tied up in nailing shingles. In fact, we still don't know, because it turns out roofers are hard to talk to. But despite this, we dove in head first. It could have ended up only being 20% of their labor charge and we wouldn't have realized this until it was too late. Yes we did our groundwork and our research, but we never actually went out to a job site and watched the process. I think the reason we didn't win Concept 5k was because one of the judges asked "have you ever roofed a house?" and Ethan has to respond with no, and neither have I. It's easy to criticize things when you aren't involved in them. Looking back on it, it seems like a silly idea that a modern robot could pull its weight in a fast paced job site. Maybe one day.
Your team needs to be on board, and obsessed with the problem. Even though we couldn't kill the idea, none of us were particularly passionate about the construction industry or roofing. We had no family ties to the business, or any reason to be interested. It just seemed to be a space lacking innovation. When I worked at Matician, the CEO Mehul Nariyawala would always preach that there's a lot of potential for disruption in "un-sexy" industries. No one wants to start a company here or wants to work here, but it's something that has to be done. I think PayPal is a good example, it was an uphill battle to convince people to put their money and banking information on the internet. It required fighting regulators, mountains of paperwork, and bureaucratic nightmares. But the result is a clean and easy solution for personal payment or commercial payment. To me, I see it as one of the "enablers" of startups, of which I have found four:
1. No one has thought of it (Tesla, DoorDash, Netflix, Yelp)
2. No one knows how to do it (SpaceX, Neuralink, Boston Dynamics)
3. No one was doing it well enough (Apple, YouTube, Discord, Twitch)
4. No one wants to do it (PayPal, Credit Karma)
If you are able to break one of these four statements, you may have a golden ticket, or so I believe. The problem with our team was that we couldn't find any passion for working on the "un-sexy" problem, and losing the Concept 5k was the last blow.
Edit: A friend of mine recently told me to check out Renovate Robotics who seems to have just launched with a very similar system/vision as us. It's always really cool to see competition because it means you're solving the right problems - all the best.