The Story of...
The Business Question (The Flawed System):
How do we build an app that sells more home-maintenance contractor leads to new homeowners?
The Zanago Shift
The Human Question:
Why are first-time homeowners completely abandoned and left to drown in hidden costs the second the mortgage transaction closes?
What if homeowners had a transparent, intelligent system to organize their largest financial asset, anticipate hidden costs, and protect themselves against systemic financial ruin?
The Strategic Barrier:
The real estate industry is designed to celebrate the transaction, but it completely ignores the lifecycle of ownership.
Crucial data — like repair history, warranties, deeds, and permits — is siloed, lost, or intentionally obscured. The system leaves homeowners entirely responsible for managing complex assets without any structural support.
What We Do
HXD in Action
01
The Human Impact:
The "American Dream" quickly becomes a financial trap. For first-time homeowners, unexpected costs can top $12,000 in the first year alone, and a mere $400 unexpected expense is enough to trigger a mortgage default.
Furthermore, with average home tenures doubling to 11.9 years, the compounding stress of disorganized records and hidden repairs disproportionately penalizes historically excluded buyers.
(This is a systemic failure our founders, Arlene and Louis Byrd, experienced firsthand as 2x wronged homeowners facing real estate discrimination and financial stress).
02
Budget Management
Mapping the Friction:
We conducted a transdisciplinary audit of the homeownership lifecycle.
We mapped the Policy (historical redlining and systemic disinvestment that forces marginalized buyers to inherit homes with decades of deferred maintenance),
the Market (PropTech heavily funds the buying transaction but abandons the buyer during ownership),
and the toxic Narrative (the myth that homeownership is inherently safe and "easy").
The friction wasn't just a lack of contractors; it was a systemic trap where historically excluded buyers were left to blindly navigate toxic assets.
03
The Humans Centered
First-time and historically excluded homeowners seeking equitable transparency and control over their largest financial asset.
04
The System Redesigned
We architected and launched Kataba — an augmented home assistant and personal asset management system.
It featured a secure digital ledger for property records, an investment tracker, and "Oya," an AI-driven maintenance insight engine.
05
Strategic Sunset
Kataba was built as a proprietary venture experiment to force transparency into the homeownership lifecycle.
The systemic thesis was heavily validated—gaining recognition from the Brookings Institution, Business Journal, and AfroTech as a pioneering model for housing equity.
After successfully proving our hypothesis and mapping the deep data roadblocks entrenched in the legacy real estate industry, we strategically sunsetted the Kataba platform.
The insights gathered from architecting this system now directly inform how we advise civic and prop-tech clients on navigating complex industry friction.
