Roland Ligtenberg is the Co-founder and SVP of Growth and Innovation at Housecall Pro, a leading vertical SaaS platform that empowers home service professionals to manage and grow their businesses more efficiently. Under Roland’s leadership, Housecall Pro has scaled to serve over 100,000 home service professionals, powering tens of billions of dollars in gross merchandise volume and pioneering the use of AI team members to streamline operations for its customers.
Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Hear:
- [04:26] Roland Ligtenberg’s journey from Qualcomm Labs to founding Housecall Pro
- [07:10] Why empathy matters more than experience in the trades
- [10:09] How a mobile-first strategy won over blue-collar professionals
- [13:58] How AI handles calls, accounting, and analytics for pros
- [16:57] Pricing AI features versus including them for free
- [19:06] How AI shifts hiring strategies and job roles internally
- [21:20] Why a powerful mission keeps founders engaged for years
In this episode…
What if the people keeping our homes running could grow their businesses without burning out on paperwork and missed calls? And what if AI wasn’t about replacing jobs, but about giving small, hands-on entrepreneurs a real edge in a world that keeps demanding more from them?
According to Roland Ligtenberg, a longtime builder of technology for real-world problems, the answer lies in using AI as a set of practical teammates rather than shiny experiments. He believes blue-collar business owners shouldn’t have to choose between doing the work they love and managing the back office chaos that comes with growth. When AI can answer phones, track finances, and surface insights the same way a seasoned assistant would, it frees owners to focus on jobs, customers, and building wealth that lasts.
Tune in to this episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast as John Corcoran interviews Roland Ligtenberg, Co-founder and SVP of Growth and Innovation at Housecall Pro, about harnessing AI to empower blue-collar entrepreneurs. They discuss how AI “team members” help home service businesses handle more demand and how technology can minimize hiring bottlenecks. Roland also provides insights on building a mission-driven company that stays meaningful as it scales.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- John Corcoran on LinkedIn
- Rise25
- Roland Ligtenberg: LinkedIn | Contact no.: (858) 215-1512
- Housecall Pro
Special Mention:
Quotable Moments:
- “The best way to build for them is to invite them out to lunch; buy them coffee.”
- “Money talks, and when you can help champion your pros to success, they will change their behavior.”
- “If you could hire a master plumber or an apprentice and they cost exactly the same, which one would you want?”
- “At the end of the day, you always have to provide a lot more value than you cost.”
- “If you’re doing something you believe in, who cares what others think about you?”
Action Steps:
- Treat AI as a team member, not a tool: Framing AI as an assistant helps business owners delegate work confidently and focus on higher-value activities.
- Build technology around existing habits: Designing solutions that fit how people already work increases adoption and reduces resistance to change.
- Use data to guide better decisions: Leveraging historical job and financial data allows businesses to move from guesswork to informed action.
- Remove back-office work from the owner’s plate: Automating administrative tasks prevents burnout and gives owners time to grow the business.
- Anchor innovation to a clear mission: Keeping technology aligned with a meaningful purpose ensures growth benefits both the business and its customers.
Sponsor: Rise25
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Episode Transcript
Intro: 00:00
All right. Today we’re talking about how one company is putting in place AI team members to help deliver better results for their customers and be more efficient for their business. My guest today is Roland Ligtenberg. I’ll tell you more about him in a second, so stay tuned.
John Corcoran: 00:16
Welcome to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast, where we feature top entrepreneurs, business leaders, and thought leaders and ask them how they built key relationships to get where they are today. Now let’s get started with the show.
John Corcoran: 00:33
All right. Welcome, everyone. John Corcoran here, I am the host of this show. And you know, every week we have smart CEOs, founders and entrepreneurs from all kinds of companies and organizations. And we’ve had Netflix, Grubhub, Redfin, Gusto, Kinkos, EOH, Activision Blizzard, lots of great episodes.
So go check out those in the archives. And of course, this episode is brought to you by rise 25, our company where we help B2B businesses to get clients referrals and strategic partnerships with podcasts and content marketing. How do we do that? We do that by helping companies to create a podcast business development funnel. And if you want to learn more about it, you can go to our website, rise25.com, and learn all about our platform, Podcast Co-Pilot.
You can also email our team at support@rise25.com. All right I’m super excited for today’s guest. As I mentioned, Roland, he’s the Co-founder and Senior Vice President of Growth and Innovation at Housecall Pro. It’s a software platform that serves, I think, over 100,000 different home service professionals. He can tell us exactly how many they have.
And prior to that, he helped. He worked in mobile product development. He worked for Qualcomm Labs, founding tech and venture initiatives, and also had some quirky different roles along the way, which I want to hear about as well. But Roland, it’s really exciting to have you here and you have this really big goal. You have this goal of helping 50,000 blue-collar business owners to become millionaires.
I love that because there is so much focus and attention, especially around Silicon Valley, which is where you and I both live in the vicinity of Silicon Valley. So much attention on, you know, software and those types of companies these days. And you are really as your core for your business is focusing on plumbers and HVAC and tradespeople. And there’s also this massive lack of capacity. There’s a need for people to have professionals.
And what’s really interesting to me is that you are using AI to help tradespeople to actually get more of that work done. So let’s, let’s before we get into that first scuba diving outfit, you were a semi-pro poker player and you also are an EDM promoter, so you have a bizarre background. Tell me about some of those different roles and then we’ll get into what you’re doing today.
Roland Ligtenberg: 02:44
Sure, sure. I grew up in Silicon Valley, so I grew up, you know, my dad doing different tech companies. When I went to do my own thing, I found myself doing well on poker online. And this was back in the party poker days, PokerStars, Full Tilt and from there I just kind of used math to win. I’m not very good in person.
I’m not a good poker face online, did well and rolled it into a scuba diving business down in Cabo.
John Corcoran: 03:18
She took your poker winnings and you bought a scuba diving business.
Roland Ligtenberg: 03:22
Built? Yeah.
John Corcoran: 03:23
Built a scuba diving business. Okay.
Roland Ligtenberg: 03:24
Yeah, yeah. Bought a boat. Built. Built a diving business that was probably midway through my college career. Took a little bit of a break, moved down there and and then started going back to school at the same time too, but, you know, did that and ended up deciding that wasn’t maybe my, my life’s ultimate goal and moved back to the States, finished my degree.
And while I was there, I did bring some Dutch, brought some JS into town back when EDM was still a rising kind of an underground kind of a thing. And so, yeah, so did that and eventually did a couple other businesses and found my way to Qualcomm, which is where I met my current co-founders.
John Corcoran: 04:08
Wow. That must have been an interesting job interview at Qualcomm, talking about all those different background roles and things like that. So you meet your co-founders at Qualcomm. So Qualcomm, what were you doing there and how did you guys end up coming up with this idea for Housecall Pro.
Roland Ligtenberg: 04:26
Sure. So we worked in the labs. And what we got to do is we got to play with all the fun stuff that was coming out of corporate R&D, and we built products out of it. And so one of the things we worked on is a mobile context SDK that allowed mobile developers to pull context from all the chips and the phones to do really cool things in the apps. So if you ever found yourself, you know, looking at ads and all of a sudden it’s like, hey, I was just talking about this, here’s this ad.
You know, there are all kinds of fun ways that you can use all the chips on the phone to kind of determine these kinds of things. So while we’re there, we really wanted to scratch one of our own itches, which is like, hey, we don’t have a lot of time. We want to find really great home service professionals. You know, let’s give this a go. So we left and we first started looking at, you know, how do we build Uber for home services.
This was back in 2013 when Uber was the rage. There were still black cars and only black cars. Maybe they were starting to open up the platform a little bit, but either way, we started building that out and figured out that’s a tough business to build, especially the home services. When you’re driving a car from point A to point B, it doesn’t really matter as long as you get there. Safe get home services clogged toilets could be, you know, Buzz Lightyear flushing the toilet or it could be a sewer line.
Main repipe so it could cost you 50 bucks. Could cost you 15 grand, right? Same symptom, different result. And so anyways, as we’re building that, we found out that there was just no one that was focused on building any kind of software for the trades. I was back in 2013, so we launched Housecall Pro, the Pro side in 2015, and we’ve been at it ever since.
So we’re, you know, decade into launch and, you know, 50,000 customers companies and hundreds of thousands of pros using our software every single day.
John Corcoran: 06:14
First, I want to ask you about how you convince these, especially the early adopters, to use your software. I imagine many of your early customers are using paper or whatever cobbling different systems together, and that’s always hard to convince people to change that. But before I get into that, though, I’m looking at your LinkedIn here. You’re a Mensa member. You now live on a vineyard up in wine country.
I want to push back on this a little bit. How, you know, what was it like for you going into it? I don’t see any background in the trades, but sometimes that’s a real challenge, is to go into a market where you have to be empathetic, where you’re serving a clientele that you don’t have that background. So was that a struggle for you in the early days, going into starting a company where you have to empathize with your clientele, you have to understand their pain, their challenges, that sort of thing.
Roland Ligtenberg: 07:10
Not really. I think, you know, when you go to build a business, a lot of people tell you, well, like go solve a problem that you’re experiencing because at least you know, you’re your own user. And so you can kind of go down that path pretty easily because you know what you’re experiencing. You know how to solve it. You know, for us, coming from kind of a more of tech background coming into the trades, we learned really quick.
The best way to build for them is to invite them out to lunch, buy them coffee. So our earliest users, we would say, hey, let me buy you a coffee. Can I show you an app I built? I just want your feedback, and if you really like what you see, you can buy it. Does that sound like a fair trade, John?
Like, yeah, I’ll give this tall guy a chance. I’ll talk to him. And then once we got our original early users, we’d go down to the local Fuddruckers on Wednesdays and buy them burgers and beer, and we just sit down and talk to them about their business, their struggles, how they’re using the app, what they like, what they don’t like, what they wish they could change, etc.. So I think, you know, if you have a general tendency to want to help others, which I think all good humans have, then, you know, jumping into this is not that difficult. But yes, you have to spend time with your customers, and you have to sit down next to them.
You have to ride alongs, you have to sit in a truck with them. You have to go on a job site with them. You have to stock the warehouse with them. You have to go, you know, to their place of business, which might be their garage. Right.
These are these folks that live and breathe and are in trucks all day, have a lot of windshield time. So anyways, you get to kind of build empathy over time. You don’t necessarily have to start with it, but you have to be able to have conversations and spend time with your customer. If you’re not willing to do that, you’re only going to get so far.
John Corcoran: 08:57
You know, I’ve been podcasting for 16 years. One of my first interviews, one of my very first interviews, was one of the Co-founders of OpenTable, OpenTable, like one of the first platforms to help, you know, restaurants to take reservations digitally. And in those early days, one of the big challenges I remember him telling me was that they didn’t have the internet, they didn’t have computers, you know, at the hostess station. So they literally drove around town in San Francisco with a big old computer because they were huge back then. And this is like 2000 or something like that, with a computer on the back like a moped, and then had to wire internet lines.
There was no Wi-Fi, you know, all these like kind of fundamentals. And it was a real challenge. Was it? There must have been a challenge for you convincing some of these, like, blue collar guys to say, okay, here’s what it is. You’re going to have a computer.
You’re going to have, you know, this is also I think we’re talking about a time period of ten years ago. Now there’s much more proliferation of, you know, you know, mobile devices, mobile tablets, stuff like that. Tell me a little bit about the early days. It was hard to convince them to do something that was digital and to throw out the paper that they were using.
Roland Ligtenberg: 10:09
Yeah. But I think back then, you know, we were probably on iPhone 3G or iPhone four. So we’re 3 or 4 generations into mobile, and you had some pretty good Android alternatives as well. And so independent of whether our pros had computers or laptops or tablets, they all have phones. And so when we launched Housecall Pro we built phone only mobile first, mobile only.
And that was really a big differentiator for us because a lot of people had tried to, you know, build on prem solutions, you know, and you’re talking about servers and and so, you know, for us, we approached a problem more like what did our customers already have. Let’s not try to change their habits too much from things that they’re used to using. And how do we introduce a new part of the workflow? And back then it was just a simple list of jobs and a way to take credit card payments. And honestly, the easiest way to get someone to switch their behavior is say, hey, look, John, you can make some more money.
You just accept a credit card. Why? Because people don’t always have the right amount of money in their bank accounts. But what do they have? Plenty of credit.
Okay, so do you think you can sell a higher job if you can give someone the ability to put on a credit card? Yes. Okay. Do you want to use Housecall Pro? Okay, I’ll give it a shot.
So you might not start with 100% of jobs. You might not start with 100% of workflow. You might not get a 100% switch right out of the gate. But money talks. And when you can help champion your pros to success, which is our mission, and you can prove it to them, they will change their behavior.
John Corcoran: 11:34
Yeah, good way in the door using that smart. I want to ask about, you know, the last couple of years of a lot of talk of AI. There’s even a lot of podcasts talking about predictions about what will happen with AI, which, you know, is not always worth a lot. But, you know, some are saying the death of software, saying that everything will become custom software. Does that scare you at all with the, you know, business that you’ve built, or does that get you excited about, you know, applications for the way you can fold in AI for Housecall Pro?