15 months of building a service business from the front seat of my Uber. Here's what actually worked and what I wasted months on.

Started April 2025. Launched February 2026. First revenue came in on Feb 18.

The business is doorstep device repair around Metro Vancouver — I drive to you and fix the laptop or phone at your desk instead of taking it away for a week. Simple enough idea. The interesting part is that I had no money for marketing and no time, so everything had to be built rather than bought.

Where the building happened: waiting for ride requests. You get 15–25 minutes of dead time in a
parking lot between pings, several times a shift. Laptop on the passenger seat, phone as hotspot.
That's 1,112 commits.

What I got wrong, and it cost me months. I decided the way to compete with established shops was scale, so I built a generator that produced a page for every city × service × device combination. 8,923 of them. Each with real pricing pulled from a live wholesale catalog. I was extremely proud of
this.

Three months of data says those pages produce about 8% of my clicks. Six blog posts I wrote by hand — plain "how much does this cost" articles — produce 68%. One of them took an afternoon and out-earns the entire generator.

The lesson I'd hand anyone starting a local service business: volume is not a moat, and answering the actual question is. People don't search "screen repair Burnaby." They search "how much does it cost to replace a screen." I built an index when I should have written answers.

What worked, unglamorously:
- Being the only one who says the price out loud. Every competitor hides it behind a phone call. I show a value tier and a premium tier with the part quality named. That single decision drives more trust than anything else I've done.
- Automating myself out of the phone. Quotes, booking, rescheduling, invoices, warranty certificates — all automatic. One person cannot answer a phone and be under a laptop at the same time.
- Not renting a storefront. Retail rent here would eat the entire margin.

Where I'm still stuck: 221,000 search impressions in 90 days and nowhere near the booking volume
that implies. My traffic problem is mostly solved; my conversion problem is barely started. I average
position 8, which is the dead zone — visible enough to be counted, not visible enough to be clicked.

If you've run a local service business: what actually moved your close rate? I'm most interested in
what worked offline, because I suspect I've over-indexed on the part I find fun (building) and
under-indexed on the part I don't (talking to humans).