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MyHandyAI

Our vision is to fix everyday home problems using smart, AI-powered solutions

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Overview

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MyHandyAI is an AI-powered assistant that empowers homeowners and renters to confidently tackle home repairs and DIY projects, without needing professional help. The app delivers personalised, step-by-step guidance and dynamically generates tailored tool and material lists based on the user’s specific task, environment, and inputs (e.g. voice, text, or photo).

 

By combining large language models with image recognition and contextual reasoning, MyHandyAI transforms fragmented DIY knowledge into a seamless, user-friendly experience: lowering barriers for novices, increasing task success rates and saving users money.

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MyHandyAI

Snap. Solve. Save.

Customer Challenge

A recent UK survey found that nearly 5 million people worry about DIY errors. When they do occur, the average cost to fix is around £106 per incident, and people often make four missteps per year, leading to excessive repair bills or calling in professionals.

Why This Problem Matters

The DIY space is vast, yet deeply under-served.

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Despite the scale of spending, many homeowners and renters feel stuck, anxious and overwhelmed before they even begin a project, as you can see from these Reddit quotes:

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"Very frustrated with my lack of home improvement skills... I'm really disappointed in myself for not being [able] to do these simple projects..."

"Does anyone else feel completely overwhelmed by all the work your house needs... it gives me so much anxiety"

These emotional and confidence barriers lead to abandoned projects, tool returns and wasted time, revealing a Blue Ocean opportunity for guidance-first, personalised digital tools that solve unmet needs.

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References: Global and UK data sources

Hypotheses 

Based on this initial research, we recorded the hypotheses we wanted to validate. Here are our top three:

​​​To test our hypotheses, we conducted 20 in-depth Voice of Customer interviews with homeowners and renters who encounter minor home issues and DIY projects. Our goal was to deeply understand their pain points, motivations and what an ideal solution would look like to them.

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Voice of the Customer approach

 

To deeply understand user pain points and build a solution people truly need, we conducted 20 open-ended, qualitative interviews with homeowners, renters, and tradespeople. Our goal was not to test features. We deliberately avoided presenting our ideas or prematurely narrowing the scope. Instead, we prioritised listening, allowing participants to guide the conversation based on their lived experience.

 

We structured the interviews using open-ended prompts designed to uncover the user's natural behaviour, emotional drivers, and unmet needs before, during, and after a repair task. This included exploring:

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  • What people actually do when something breaks or needs fixing

  • How they decide between DIY and calling a professional

  • Their biggest frustrations with existing content (e.g. YouTube, Google, DIY forums)

  • What has worked in the past and what hasn’t

  • What an ideal, “magic wand” solution would look like

 

We also asked tradespeople about:

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  • The kinds of jobs they prioritise

  • Their biggest challenges with customer acquisition and fulfilment

  • Frustrations with platforms like Checkatrade or local directories

 

This exploratory approach helped us:

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  • Identify patterns across personas 

  • Uncover critical emotional barriers

  • Validate real willingness to pay for a solution that reduces effort, risk, and uncertainty

 

The insights directly informed our MVP feature prioritisation, ensuring the first version of MyHandyAI solves real, repeated user problems, not just what we assumed they needed.

 

Key Pain Points Identified​
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Conflicting Information

  • Users are bombarded with conflicting advice from blogs, Youtube and Google

  • Difficult to judge credibility and end up spending hours researching 

  • Information too generic to apply to their specific problem

Fear of Making things worse

  • Uncertainty about instructions causes anxiety and  fear of mistakes: "I don't want to break it more than it already is"

  • Many regret calling a professional for simple tasks, but lack clarity and confidence to try it themselves

Cost & Convenience

  • Professional help is expensive and logistically inconvenient, especially if projects are small or require scheduling around work / busy family life

Emergency Stress

  • In urgent situations (e.g. late-night leaking tap or holiday emergency), users experience high stress finding help fast

  • The situation is exacerbated during holidays, when tradespeople are less available

Personas

Through Voice of the Customer interviews, we identified three distinct user personas representing different needs, behaviours and opportunity spaces. These personas helped drive feature prioritisation for our MVP by ensuring we focused on the most addressable and strategically valuable segment.

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Persona 1: Liam, The Anxious Fixer
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We prioritised Liam because he:

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  • Represents a large and growing segment of millennials and Gen Zs moving into first-time homeownership or long-term renting

  • Is highly addressable through digital channels and open to AI-guided solutions

  • Most of Liam’s pain points: uncertainty, lack of tailored guidance, research fatigue, are directly solvable through MyHandyAI’s step-by-step, personalised experience

  • Provides early product validation and growth potential through referral and trust-based networks



Persona 2: Pat, The Confident DIYer
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Why we deprioritised Pat:

  • Not actively seeking DIY guidance: unlikely to engage with a step-by-step support tool

  • More motivated by professional sourcing needs than personal task execution

  • Less responsive to digital channels, harder to acquire cost-effectively in MVP phase

Persona 3: Colin The Tradesman
 

While it's natural to focus on the most visible users of a product (the end customers) great product strategy requires looking at both sides of the ecosystem. For MyHandyAI, that meant not just understanding DIYers like Liam, but also listening to the service providers who might one day interact with or benefit from the platform.

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Interviewing tradespeople like Colin was both exciting and validating. While they weren’t the core focus for our MVP, their pain points revealed a clear opportunity for future product expansion:

  • The Virtual Tradesperson feature could allow skilled workers to offer paid remote guidance via MyHandyAI, enabling them to earn income from home during recovery or downtime.

  • By standardising how customers describe problems (via structured Q&A and photos), the app could significantly reduce time wasted on vague or inaccurate job requests.

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While Colin’s use case showed strong potential for network effects and monetisation, we made the strategic decision to deprioritise this persona for MVP. Supporting tradespeople would require additional flows, service-tier logic, and legal considerations which are best addressed post-validation of core user demand.

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However, Colin’s insights were powerful enough to shape our long-term roadmap and reinforce the broader vision for MyHandyAI: not just to empower DIYers but also to bridge the gap between consumers and professionals in a scalable, intelligent way.

Customer Journey

Journey Map

This journey map captures the end-to-end experience of our prioritised persona, Liam, navigating home repair and improvement tasks.

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The insights reveal that while Liam strives for confidence, efficiency and minimal disruption, he frequently encounters friction, from unclear problem definitions and overwhelming online advice to challenges executing tasks and finding reliable tradespeople. Emotions fluctuate from anxiety and frustration to cautious optimism and eventual relief or regret, depending on the outcome.

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This journey was instrumental in shaping features for MyHandyAI, such as tailored guidance, to meaningfully reduce friction and empower users.

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User Stories and Acceptance Criteria

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Describing the project
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Clarifying Questions
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Tools and Materials List
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Step-by-step Guidance
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Post-completion Survey
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Overall Usability
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Risks and Remediations

Risk Type

Description

Why It's a Risk

Mitigation Strategy

Schedule Risk

Broad scope with multiple input modes, LLM, media integration, and tailored instructions

Multiple AI-powered and multimodal features increase engineering and testing complexity.

  • Finalise a strict MVP acceptance test: “The app shall allow users to complete two core tasks: hang a mirror and fix a broken toilet, using text, image or voice input. It must return step-by-step guidance and tool suggestions for both tasks.”

  • Maintain agile scope flexibility, allowing photo/audio input and advanced AI explanations to be de-prioritised if not production-ready.

  • Maintain agile scope flexibility, allowing photo/audio input and advanced AI explanations to be de-prioritised if not production-ready.

Budget Risk

Post-launch LLM, image analysis, and cloud hosting costs may be unpredictable.

Users say they’ll only pay if the app is faster and more complete than current online research. This depends heavily on LLM/API quality.

  • Create a cost forecast model using assumptions for: 

    • DAUs (Daily Active Users) ; 

    • Avg prompts/user/session ; 

    • API unit cost for LLM, photo, audio, hosting.

Example: [DAUs] x [Avg sessions/day] x [LLM prompts/session] x [cost/prompt].


  • Explore LLM cost reduction strategies: Prompt tuning, Caching responses, Hybrid model usage (e.g. open-source model for generic queries, commercial model for critical steps).

Operational Risk

Lack of prioritisation discipline could lead to overbuilding or incomplete flow at MVP.

Without laser focus, MVP could ship with impressive features but fail to validate the core value.

  • Lock-in MVP success criteria (above).

  • Assign a PM to enforce trade-offs in sprint planning.

Technical Risk

Integration across multiple services (LLM, image/audio analysis, Amazon APIs); GDPR exposure.

Missteps could create feature delays, failure points or non-compliance.

  • Start with manual fallbacks if AI analysis fails (e.g. allow “I don't know” responses with default advice).

  • Add GDPR consent checkbox on first use.

Programmatic Risk

No legal team to review disclaimers or safety policies.

Legal exposure if users are injured or damage property following app instructions.

  • Draft and publish a clear disclaimer: “Use at your own risk. Always follow safety precautions and local building regulations.”

  • Display disclaimers in context (e.g. before showing high-risk steps).

Business Risk

Low adoption if MVP doesn’t outperform Google/YouTube or lacks trust.

Users will only pay if guidance is faster, clearer, and more trustworthy than existing alternatives.

  • Prioritise LLM, prompt and context design to maximise answer clarity and task relevance.

  • Test guidance vs. YouTube for the two MVP use cases.

  • Include “Why this step/tool?” explanations to build user trust.

  • Launch with a targeted GTM strategy:

    • Beta waitlist for DIYers via Reddit, Pinterest, Facebook DIY groups

    • Influencer outreach to micro-creators in home repair

    • Launch on Product Hunt + Reddit DIY on same day

User Testing Risk

No Task-Based or Post-MVP launch user testing plan yet in place.

Could ship with poor UX or fail to validate real user behaviour.

Run a 3-phase test strategy:

  1. Exploratory Testing (July 29-July 30, complete): 3–5 users validating flows

  2. Task-Based Testing (Aug 6–15): Observe users trying mirror + toilet tasks

  3. Post-MVP Feedback Loop (Aug 20+): In-app feedback button + 5-min post-project survey

Business Model

To encourage broad adoption while maintaining a path to monetisation, the pricing strategy follows a freemium-to-premium model:

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  • Free Tier​

    • Premium Trial: All new users get 1 month of Premium features to experience full value.​

    • After 1 month, downgrade to Basic Tier.

    • Text input only

    • Limited project history

    • No voice / photo features

    • Limited to one project / month

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  • DIY Enthusiast Tier £4.99 / month

    • Unlimited DIY projects​

    • Voice / photo / text interface

    • Save and track project history

    • Early access to new features

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  • Affiliate Revenue Stream

    • Commission from recommended tools and materials​

    • Brand partnerships with hardware retailers

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Future Considerations:

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  • Pro Tier (for Tradespeople) £14.99 / month

    • Unlimited escalations from users

    • Verified professional profile and ratings

    • Priority listings

    • Access to lead dashboards and insights

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System Architecture

MVP

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