Domis started with a simple question, “Why is it so hard to take care of my home?”

My co-founder and I were both relatively new homeowners and were overwhelmed with everything we knew we had to do and trepidatious over everything that we didn’t. Things would break and we wouldn’t know why, didn’t know who to call, and would be expensive to fix.

Our informal network of friends and family were primarily filled with:

• Fix-it people where none of this was a problem. (Not helpful!)
• People who wouldn’t do anything and their homes were falling apart. (Not helpful!)
• Or, like us, had busy lives and wanted to do a reasonable amount but wanted to be smart about it, not get ripped off, and not feel like they were starting from scratch every time. (Also, not helpful!)

That’s why we started Domis.

Our tagline is “Your home doesn’t come with an instruction manual. We think it should,” We hope this conveys what we’re trying to accomplish, but hopefully the execution is better than a traditional instruction manual (which, if you’re like me, you generally don’t read.)

We set out to build an app that you can use to manage your entire home. Before Domis, I kept track of my house stuff with a combination of notes on my phone, folders on my computer, lots of saved random pieces of paper, Google Calendar reminders, and memories that I hoped I wouldn’t forget.

Now, I do almost all of that in Domis.

Rest assured, when we say we built the app we wanted to use, we mean it literally. Even if we’re not successful, at the minimum, Domis will be an app that I can use to manage my own home. No McDonald’s CEO biting into their Big Arch like they’re a foreign traveler here.

What to Expect from Domis

Domis is built around two main ideas:

• Tasks: Basically, keeping tabs on what you have to do right now.
• Cataloging your whole house: What paint did we use for this room? How old is our condenser? etc.

We thoughtfully use AI within the app to save you time and help simplify the complicated parts of taking care of your home. Two of my favorite features that do this include:

• Scan It: Take a picture of the label or sticker on your appliances and other items, and it will fill out the information for you.
• Inspection Report Decoder: Turns gigantic inspection reports into individual tasks. Having gone through the inspection process multiple times, I remember well getting the report, being told to do one or two things, and not having the time or wherewithal to wade through the entire 119 pages — literally the length of one of my reports. No one is going to do all the tasks that’s on 119 pages, but hopefully we’ll make it a lot easier to do the ones you want.

The Team Behind Domis

We have a bang up designer named Hridae Walia, who lends a wonderful and unusual combination of structure, whimsy, and beauty to his work.

Our sensibility here is clean and modern with a bit of fancy, which isn’t always everyone’s sensibility (just like not every architectural style is everyone’s taste, though I do think Frank Gehry’s stuff is remarkable). At minimum, we strive for extreme usability and if you give us a try, hopefully you’ll find that as well.

Our writer, Anna Wenner, is clear and diligent and so versatile that she handles essentially anything that has words in it (including copy editing this post!) She’s written for publications ranging from National Geographic to Consumer Reports, is a published children’s book author, and even has a greeting card background from Hallmark.

She’s also a contributor at Wirecutter, a website that I personally am borderline obsessed with and have used to purchase many items for my home. We aim to bring that same level of Wirecutter diligence, thoroughness, and readability to all Domis content.

We also have a truly excellent engineering and development team that is, at its core, a no drama, get-things-done group. They ensure we have a regular release cycle and a constant push for improvements and useful features.

How Domis is Funded

The app is free and we intend to always have a free (and largely fully featured) version of Domis.

My co-founder and I have funded this company ourselves, and we hope to keep it that way. What this means is that we hopefully will never have idiot venture capitalists telling us to grow at all costs or otherwise enshittify the app just because users or customers will pay more for less or don’t have a good alternative.

If you read the relatively small landscape of technology startup business books, you’ll see that the range of bad behavior and stupid ideas from venture capitalists knows almost no bounds.

Nearly every famous tech CEO has or has been threatened to be fired by their backers including Jeff at Amazon, Larry and Sergey at Google, Ev Williams at Twitter, and, of course, most famously, Steve Jobs at Apple. (Let alone a former Google colleague of mine who got funded by a bold name venture capitalist / firm and less than a week later, I had a friend of mine reach out to me saying that they were doing a confidential CEO search for a startup and if I knew anyone… and it was to potentially replace that friend who was just funded; yup that happens)

Since we don’t have unlimited funds, we will eventually have a paid version of the app, but it won’t be aimed at the average user trying to take care of their single family home. The goal is to always have a free version of the app that I could use to run my own home.

It’s still early days, but we hope you get real value out of the Domis app. If you have thoughts or feedback, feel free to reach me at nelson@getdomis.com.

Hope to have you as part of our journey.

Nelson

CEO / Co-Founder