Dmitrii Malashkin on the moving estimate problem
Dmitrii Malashkin, CEO of Virtual Estimate, has worked in the moving industry since 2013 and helped build software that uses home videos to generate moving estimates. He explains why firsthand industry experience shaped the product, how real-world estimates helped win customers, and why accurate pricing matters.
Show busy customers value in their own business rather than relying on a polished demo. Malashkin’s advice is to learn the work firsthand and get estimates and pricing right before investing in appearances or chasing every sales channel.
What’s the short story of how your business started, and what makes it genuinely different from the other options your customers have?
I’ve been in the moving industry since 2013 and founded my own moving company, Born to Move, in Boston in 2016. For years I watched the same problem cost movers money: estimates. Either you send someone to the customer’s home, which is slow and expensive, or you guess over the phone and end up with angry customers and lost margin on move day. So my co-founder Yehor Novakov and I built VirtualEstimateAI. The customer gets a link, records a short video walking through their home, and our AI calculates the cubic footage and turns it into a price inside a CRM built for movers. What makes us different is that we’re not a tech company guessing what movers need. The product was designed by someone who has run crews, priced thousands of moves and dealt with the fallout of bad estimates. We built the tool we wanted for our own company.
How did you win your first customers, and where does most of your new business come from today?
Our first customers came from the industry itself. I know how moving company owners think because I am one, so we went straight to them: cold calls, demos, and conversations inside movers’ communities. Today most new business still comes from direct outreach. What changed is the offer. Instead of asking busy owners to sit through a demo, we run a free estimate on one of their real customers’ homes. Once they see an accurate cubic footage number from a video in minutes, the product sells itself.
What’s one decision that changed the direction of your business, and one mistake that taught you the most?
The decision that changed everything was building the AI inside a full CRM instead of selling it as a standalone estimating tool. Movers don’t want another app to log into; they want the estimate, the price and the customer record in one place. That turned VirtualEstimateAI from a nice feature into something a company can run its sales on. The mistake that taught me the most was assuming a great demo is enough. Early on we focused on booking demos, and many owners never showed up or never got past "interesting." I learned that busy operators need to see results on their own business, which is why we switched to free real-world estimates. Show, don’t pitch.
What has changed in your industry or in what your customers expect over the last couple of years, and how have you adapted?
Customers now expect everything to be fast and remote. Nobody wants to take time off work for an in-home survey, and they expect a reliable price quickly, from their phone. At the same time, movers are squeezed by higher labor, fuel and insurance costs, so an inaccurate estimate hurts more than ever. We adapted by making video the starting point of the estimate: the customer records their home whenever it suits them, and the mover gets an accurate inventory and price without driving anywhere. It respects the customer’s time and protects the mover’s margin.
If you were advising someone starting out in your industry today, what would you tell them to do first, and what would you tell them to ignore?
First, learn the work from the ground up. Carry boxes, run a crew, price jobs and handle a claim yourself. You can’t build a good moving business, or good software for movers, without understanding what actually happens on move day. Second, get obsessed with accurate estimates and honest pricing early, because that’s where trust and profit are won or lost. What to ignore: the urge to look big before you are big. Fancy branding, complicated tools and chasing every channel at once won’t matter if your estimates are wrong and your customers aren’t happy. Do the basics exceptionally well and let reputation compound.
Thank you to Dmitrii Malashkin and the team at Virtual Estimate for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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