FlipMate – Our story

How we ended up here

FlipMate grew out of years of hands-on work: property preservation, moving, real estate, and eventually full-time furniture flipping. It was not planned as a startup. It started as a practical attempt to do a very physical job in a smarter way.

Why furniture made sense

Long before there was software, there was a basic pattern:

• People will often spend more on a sofa or sectional than almost anything else in their home.
• The main seating in a living space is the first thing you notice and the last thing people want to compromise on.
• When it looks right, feels right, and meets the budget, it moves quickly.

For John, that was a concrete, repeatable opportunity: a way to earn solid money in a category with steady demand, with the flexibility to control his schedule and still leave room for other pursuits. That is what pulled him into treating sofas, sectionals, and other high-value pieces as a serious flipping lane, just like many other flippers in this space.

What came before flipping

Before focusing on furniture, John spent years in property preservation—clearing out foreclosed and distressed homes, hauling debris, cutting back overgrowth, and getting properties ready for whatever came next.

Inside those houses, the same things showed up again and again:

• Quality furniture mixed in with true junk
• Well-made pieces abandoned or underpriced simply because they were hard to move
• Sofas and sectionals with plenty of life left in them, sitting next to items that really did belong in the dumpster

Later, as a real estate broker, he saw the same pattern from the seller’s side. When people needed to get a home ready for market, they often chose speed over value. Good furniture went cheaply—or free—because it was one more problem to deal with.

Taken together, those experiences made something very clear: certain kinds of furniture sit at a useful intersection of value, demand, and availability. With enough discipline around buying, cleaning, and pricing, they could form the backbone of a stable flipping operation.

Learning the business with Matt

John’s first serious push into full-time flipping came after he met Matt on a moving job they had both picked up through an app called Dolly. They worked well together, teamed up, and started experimenting:

• Different brands, from mid-tier to higher-end
• Different price points and buyer expectations
• Different levels of effort in cleaning, touch-ups, and repairs

Over time, they figured out what worked in their particular market and with their capacity: the types of pieces and brands that consistently justified the effort it took to move, clean, photograph, and list them properly.

Eventually, John and Matt split their businesses and went in different directions. Matt is not involved in FlipMate. But that period—working side by side, comparing results, and operating in a scene where multiple flippers were watching the same listings—shaped a lot of how John thinks about flipping, competition, and process.

Hitting the ceiling of manual searching

As flipping grew more popular, especially during COVID, competition increased and the ceiling on manual searching became obvious. Like most serious flippers, John used every workaround he could think of:

• Constantly refreshing Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist, and OfferUp
• Custom URLs to work around broken or inconsistent sorting
• Browser configurations with a small forest of preloaded tabs
• Phone shortcuts that opened those tabs on a schedule throughout the day

These tricks helped, but only up to a point. There are hard limits to:

• How often one person can refresh
• How many platforms can be watched properly
• How much attention can be spent filtering out junk while still running the rest of the business

It was not about being emotional over missed flips. It was recognizing that manual effort alone would not hold up as more people entered the space and good listings moved faster.

From flipper to tool-builder

To push past those limits, John started building tools to extend what a single flipper could reasonably do. The early versions were rough:

• Basic scraping to pull listings into one place
• Simple filters to remove obvious “no” items
• Structured views that made it faster to scan what might actually be worth pursuing

Even in that early stage, they made day-to-day work noticeably better:

• Less time spent on repetitive checking
• Faster access to listings that fit basic criteria
• More room to think about buying decisions and logistics instead of pure monitoring

Over time, the tools got more capable. They moved from “helpful scripts” into a proper sourcing and operations system. At some point it became clear that these tools were not just useful for one business. Flippers in other markets were wrestling with the same problems, on the same platforms, with the same limited number of hours in the day. That is when the foundation for FlipMate was effectively in place.

Partnering with Kevin

While John was buried in code and scraping experiments, Kevin was running his own flipping operation. Kevin’s strengths are in operations and execution:

• Clean, consistent workflows for intake, evaluation, cleaning, and listing
• Honest, accurate representation of each piece
• A practical sense for when something is worth the time investment and when it is better to walk away

Where John naturally thinks in terms of systems and automation, Kevin naturally thinks in terms of day-to-day constraints: storage, transport, timing, buyer expectations, and per-piece profitability.

When they decided to work together, they combined John’s ability to design and build tools with Kevin’s experience running a disciplined operation in the real world. That combination is what became FlipMate: tools and systems designed by active flippers, for flippers, informed by both data and the realities of the work.

How we think about flipping and tools

In their own flipping work, John and Kevin tend to:

• Prefer pieces that are already in excellent or near-new condition
• Treat cleaning, extraction, and stain removal as the most common, predictable tasks
• Reserve extensive structural or upholstery repairs for rare cases where the upside clearly justifies the time

They also know that no single approach fits every flipper or every market. Some people make their money on high-volume mid-tier brands. Others lean into higher-end, lower-volume strategies. Many mix approaches and adjust as conditions change. FlipMate is built with that variety in mind. It is not meant to lock anyone into one “approved” strategy. It is meant to:

• Help flippers see more of the listings that fit their model
• Reduce repetitive workload
• Make it easier to adjust based on what actually works where they are

How we think about alignment

As similar services started to appear, many focused on subscription-based alerts. Those can be useful, but John and Kevin have always been cautious about models where the main incentive is to simply grow subscriber counts, even if it means more people competing over the same finite set of opportunities. The guiding idea behind FlipMate is straightforward:

FlipMate should do well when the flippers using it are doing well.

That principle influences how they think about product decisions, potential pricing structures, and what they are willing to build into the platform.

Where FlipMate is today

Today, John and Kevin:

• Still run their own flipping operation
• Adjust their approach as local conditions and marketplaces change
• Use the same tools internally that they are developing into FlipMate
• Refine those tools based on what actually helps in practice, not just what sounds good in theory

FlipMate is the result of that ongoing process: years of property preservation, moving work, real estate, and flipping, combined with a growing toolkit designed to make that work more sustainable and effective.