From quote requests to business tools: John Hadden on Sesklo
John Hadden is founder and CEO of Sesklo, a St. Augustine, Florida-based business serving homeowners and home service pros. Homeowners can request and compare quotes, while pros can manage quoting, scheduling, invoicing, payments and customer messages in one place. Hadden explains why Sesklo expanded beyond quote matching, how it reaches providers and what early mistakes taught the business.
For software serving home service pros, start by observing the work and listening to providers, then address the everyday friction around lead fees, pricing and tools used on the job. Sesklo’s move from quote matching to business software reflects that approach.
What’s the short story of how your business started, and what makes it genuinely different from the other options your customers have?
Sesklo started in April 2026 as a simple idea: a homeowner should be able to describe a job once and get quotes from local pros that all follow the same shape, so they’re easy to compare. If you Google "kitchen remodelers in my area" and go through the process some of the largest players walk you through, it’s infuriating. Building our solution showed us the other half of the problem. The software pros use is just as broken as the lead sites: $200–$700 a month, with scheduling or invoicing locked behind a higher tier. So Sesklo grew into both. Homeowners request and compare quotes for free. Pros get quoting, scheduling, invoicing, job costing and a customer list in one place on a flat monthly price, with no per-lead fees and no paid add-ons. We don’t sell leads. We’re self-funded and based in St. Augustine, Florida.
How did you win your first customers, and where does most of your new business come from today?
We go straight to service providers in places where homeowners are already asking for their kind of work. We reach out when there’s a real job that matches what they do and where they work, and we offer 30 days free with no card and a free walkthrough to get set up. Early providers came in through our founding-provider program. Today new business comes from that direct outreach, our free cost guides showing up in search, and short daily videos of the product on social media.
What’s one decision that changed the direction of your business, and one mistake that taught you the most?
The decision was to go from "a better way to get quotes" to building the software pros use every day to help run their business. A quote marketplace only works if pros live in it. That meant scheduling, invoicing, payments and a team calendar, not just a place to bid.
The mistake was starting out as "Quotesy" and renaming to Sesklo about a month later. By then we’d already registered everything under the old name, so we had to redo the state filing, our D&B listing and our Apple and Google Play developer accounts. The lesson: settle the name and brand before you register anything. Every registration you make under a name is another one you’ll have to redo if it changes.
What has changed in your industry or in what your customers expect over the last couple of years, and how have you adapted?
Lead fees keep going up, and pros are tired of paying $15 to $100 or more for a phone number that’s also sold to three competitors. Homeowners now expect what they get everywhere else: a clear price in writing, fast replies, updates by text, and paying by card or Apple Pay. And pros want to do all of it from their phone on the job, not at a desk at night. We built around that. Pricing is flat, quotes are standardized, there’s an automated receptionist so no call goes unanswered, and everything works the same on the web, iPhone and Android.
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: talk to service providers before you write a line of code, and keep talking to them. Ride along on a job, sit with someone doing their invoices at 9 p.m., and find out what they already pay for and hate. In this industry the real problem is rarely missing features. It’s lead fees, add-on pricing and tools built for an office instead of a truck. Build for the person holding a phone on a job site, and make the web, iPhone and Android versions work the same from day one.
Ignore: the urge to copy how the big players make money. Per-lead fees, locked tiers and paid add-ons are exactly why pros are open to switching, so a simple flat price is an advantage, not money left on the table. Also hold off on paid ads and fundraising until people are actually using the product. A small team can build a lot now, and being self-funded keeps you building what customers ask for instead of what investors want.
Thank you to John Hadden and the team at Sesklo for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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