Sutro’s Concierge Offering

At Sutro, we’re striving to break barriers in the pool and spa industry, and eventually the larger water industry.

The Sutro 1-liner is (for those of you who don’t know):

Sutro is a robot that floats in your swimming pool (or spa) and tells you what and how much chemicals to put in your water.

Yours truly is the CEO and founder of said Sutro.

The Sutro floating lab in your swimming pool

We target three main B2B channels in the swimming pool industry:

Retailers (brick and mortar pool and spa supply stores)
Service (the pool guy that comes to clean your pool weekly), and
Builders (the folks that actually build the pools)

For this post, I’m going to focus on the 2nd channel, service technicians.

What does a service technician do?

First, it’s important to understand what a service technician does.

Image of a service pro taken from Home Guide

Side story — I actually used to be a service tech down in Riverside, CA. My Dad used to own a chain of pool and spa supply stores, and I did everything from manually test water to run routes (more on this later).

OK — so back to what a pool service technician does.

The majority of pool service technicians will have anywhere between 50–100 swimming pools that they service. This is called a route.

A pool service technician will visit these pools maybe once a week, and the services that they’ll provide are:

Chemistry maintenance (they’ll test the water and then dose it with the right amount of chemicals)
Skimming (removing the dirt and debris floating on the top)
Brushing (the sides of the swimming pool need a bit of agitation, as water sometimes can get stale and not circulate)
Checking the equipment (the pump, filter, heater that circulate and keep the water moving)
General back yard cleaning (any sort of dusting or sweeping in the backyard)

Got it? Got it.

So, where does Sutro come into play?

Sutro, as mentioned earlier, is a robot that floats in your swimming pool. The image below shows the n Sutros floating in swimming pools. This information all gets aggregated to a common dashboard where the service pro can see what is going on at these pools, for two main reasons:

They can proactively approach problems. They can proactively approach problems BEFORE the pool starts to go green (which can happen after a pool party or a lack of chemical management), and
They’re smarter before they walk in. Instead of going back to their truck 2 times to get more chemicals, they’ll know EXACTLY what to put into the pool before they park in front of that house.

Networked Sutros on ’n’ pools in a service pro route

With Sutro, now you can provide better, faster, smarter service.

Whats the concierge service?

OK, here’s the cool part! Sutro is a network of devices, and there are devices in peoples pool’s that Joe the pool service tech doesn’t service. Part of Sutro’s offering is the magic of its Premium offering (to provide Sutro Pro recommendations). This is an offering where a home-owner that owns a Sutro can get connected to a Pro incase they have questions or need service. Where do we get our network of qualified pros that can help you in your local area?

The SutroPro program, of course.

Below is a little diagram that explains the connectivity of the platform.

Pool City, USA and the Sutro Concierge Program

Theres a city in USA called Pool City. There are 11 pools in this city, and there are Sutros in all 11 of them.

There is 1 service technician in Pool City, Joe. He services pools 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7.

Joe doesn’t have business with pools 8, 9, 10, and 11. The SutroPro concierge program allows Joe to take leads, monetize these other users, and also provide helpful services to a part of the market that he didn’t service before.

It’s a win, win, win.

Why do we care?

You could say that Sutro is competitive to the service professionals, takes away business from pool stores. We’re exactly the opposite. We want to use the existing infrastructure to help the pool stores, pool service technicians, and pool builders to be better, faster, and smarter.

Sutro is the Robin to the industry’s Batman (Batmen?).