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20 | October 18, 2018 | The Northbrook tower news northbrooktower.com Northbrook resident pioneers home maintenance internet company Neil Milbert Freelance Reporter Northbrook’s Allen Shulman believes we’re all in this together. He has put his philosophy of life into practice by starting DwellSocial, an internet company that is a vehicle for connecting with friends and neighbors for an easier, less-stressful and more cost-effective way of getting things done. DwellSocial specializes in home maintenance. “We believe DwellSocial can fundamentally change the way people think about taking care of their homes,” said Shulman, who left Angie’s List to partner with his co-founders, Highland Park’s Mike Cerna, and Daniela Tomas, of Chicago, in the summer of 2017. “We all have to do the same things to properly maintain our homes. When we do it on our own there’s the pain in the rear end factor. DwellSocial lets us do all the things we need to do together.” DwellSocial membership is free for consumers, while contractors pay $25 monthly. When you log onto dwellsocial.com you’ll see a menu of what Shulman calls “open groups” that show what neighbors are doing with regard to home maintenance. Currently, there are 18 groups on the North Shore from Evanston to Lake Bluff but most of the members are from Highland Park, Deerfield, Northbrook and Glenview. “Click the group you want and you’re in,” Shulman said. “You’ll see which contractors are recommended. Right now if you went to dwellsocial.com you’d see there is a tree-trimming group, a carpet-cleaning group, a gutter-cleaning group, a window washing-group, a new-carpet installation group and a sewer-routing group. “We provide a platform for contractors. Once they’re on the platform they have access to the groups. They can get five jobs in one, eight jobs in one, 10 jobs in one, which is why they can give the discount. “We find great contractors and provide them with opportunities they can’t find anywhere else. When people recommend a contractor we let the contractor know.” Before launching DwellSocial, Shulman, Cerna and Tomas all had a wealth of experience that they acquired by working with contractors and working for firms offering discounts. Shulman’s father was a professor at Michigan State University and he grew up in East Lansing, Mich. before going to college at the University of California/San Diego. However, he had grandparents from Chicagoland and after college he came to the area to learn the construction business by working for his father’s firm, Red Seal Homes. He met his future wife Debby, a Northbrook native who went to Glenbrook North and they settled in Northbrook. “I enjoyed working for Red Seal but I felt passionate about doing something on my own,” he said. “I started NorthStar Homes and was a custom builder all over the North Shore for 15 years. That’s where I started interacting with contractors and working with home owners and learning what they don’t understand about taking care of their homes. “Based on my experience with NorthStar Homes, I founded the Internet (home maintenance) company BrightNest in 2010. We helped people know what they should do, when they should do it and how to do it. We would provide that information based on where they lived in the country and customized a digest for them that came out every Friday at 9 a.m.” In 2013 Angie’s List — which refers home owners to plumbers, roofers, electricians, heating and air-conditioning firms, Northbrook resident Allen Shulman started DwellSocial, a home maintenance internet company. Photo Submitted “We believe DwellSocial can fundamentally change the way people think about taking care of their homes. We all have to do the same things to properly maintain our homes. When we do it on our own there’s the pain in the rear end factor. DwellSocial lets us do all the things we need to do together.” -Northbrook resident Allen Shulman on DwellSocial, a home-maintenance company he and two co-founders started. painters, plumbers, remodelers and other home maintenance specialists — acquired Bright- Nest. Shulman stayed on as an employee for four years “learning about the business and trying to help consumers.” “I realized in 2017 that even though Angie’s List and all of its competitors were out there people still weren’t taking better care of their homes,” he said. “They only went to Angie’s List when something went wrong. I decided to start DwellSocial because I understood the power of recommendations from people we know and trust. We needed to drop the pain in the rear factor to the point where people couldn’t help being a good home owner. “That’s when I met Mike and realized he was the perfect partner.” The Highland Park entrepreneur is both an architect and a software developer. Cerna said his first major Internet endeavor came in 2006 when he was co-founder of thepoint.com, a social collective empowerment site. “It had lots of facets, like getting new parks in neighborhoods,” the Chicagoland native said. “It rose and fell and in 2008 I pivoted to Groupon (as one of its founding fathers) and it exploded (in popularity). After Groupon, I worked on several other projects with my friend, Jim Sayegh (a Chicago real estate developer). We started glosser.com, doing something similar to BrightNest but with a different angle. It was about what you can do to show off your home. “Most people show their assets on Linked In and Facebook but they almost never show off their home which is their biggest financial asset. There was a problem with photography rights so we abandoned that effort. Right after that I was thinking about what would be next and someone introduced me to Allen.” Tomas was the next to join the DwellSocial management team. “I worked with her at Angie’s List and she was a rock star,” Shulman said. “Her expertise is working with the best contractors in the country and based on that experience she helped Mike and I formulate the DwellSocial concept. We raised $780,000, mostly from local firms. About four months ago we hired another computer technology engineer, Joe Harrow, of Chicago, who had worked with Mike as one of the leaders at Groupon. “Then, we hired a part-time employee out of Denver, John Feustel, who was at Groupon early, and went from being an engineer to being a programmer.” Although there currently are only four full-timers and one part-timer at DwellSocial, Shulman and Cerna believe they’re on the cusp of something big. “The web-site that we have has the power to revolutionize an entire segment of the Internet,” Shulman said. “The company that acquired Angie’s List released a survey about a year ago that said 90 percent of all professional referrals are still done off line. “We’re looking to raise $1.5 million to $2 million so that in the course of the next year we can expand from the North Shore to the Chicago metropolitan area at which point we’ll likely get the attention of a lot of investors and be able to go nationwide and worldwide. The power of this concept works anywhere people live together.”
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