Martha Stewart built a career around helping people care for their homes. Her latest idea is to put that work in an app.
Stewart, who made her name building a media and merchandising empire around cooking, entertaining, and homekeeping, launched Hint in July with co-founders Yih-Han Ma and Kyle Rush. The home intelligence app uses AI to help manage home maintenance and provide homeowners with what they need to know.
“I wanted to do—I called it a home organizer. I thought, ‘Well, we can use the computer for this,’” Stewart said on Wednesday at the Fast Company Innovation Festival in New York. “When I started, nobody was even designing magazines on a computer, but I thought this would be a big time saver for everyone if we could figure out all our utilities, how to take care of the home, what about our roofs, what about the paint job on the house. All of these things, how can I organize this?”
Decades later, AI has made that idea considerably easier to build.
The company started with $10 million in seed money from investors and recently launched its app on iOS, with plans to launch on the Google Play Store soon. Hint tracks what a homeowner needs using data layers and proprietary technology to stitch a home’s data together. Data is not sold, shared, or used to train models.
In practice, that means taking the scattered information homeowners typically keep in manuals, inboxes, folders, and their own heads and putting it in one place. Hint users can enter the serial numbers of their home appliances into the app and receive information on how to care for them. Stewart said that once a serial number is entered, “you can throw away those manuals.”
Stewart was joined onstage by Hint co-founder and CEO Yih-Han Ma and investor Brian Kelly, founder of travel website The Points Guy.
The larger pitch is that Hint can make homeownership less intimidating, particularly for people buying their first homes. Ma said Hint can help people feel more confident about approaching homeownership. He explained that the app’s core users are millennial first-time home buyers, though it can also help people who are aging in place. “People are staying in their homes longer and there’s a whole generation of people that are helping their parents take care of homes and helping them stay on top of decisions as well,” Ma said. “And so you could see a very broad ultimate use case, but we’re very focused on people getting into homes.”
Hint’s ambitions extend beyond helping homeowners remember when to service the furnace. The company also wants to create a record of how a home has been maintained and improved over time.
Kelly believes Hint will allow people to sell their homes for more. “Whenever you sell a home, if you have a gain, you have to list your improvements. So Hint tracks and helps with maintenance and making sure you’re taking care of your home,” he said. “But long term, the value of Hint is making sure your biggest investments are tracked and that you can show it. And when you go to sell your home, I believe that Hint Homes will sell for more.”
