Quotivo - Lead Generation Marketplace for Home Energy Renovation

Project Overview

Project Overview

Quotivo (quotivo.it) is a two-sided marketplace for Italy’s home energy-efficiency market, aligned with the EU “Case Green 2030” directive. Homeowners submit a free quote request for window and fixture replacement (“infissi e serramenti”); the platform verifies every request by SMS, matches it against the coverage areas and specializations of registered installer companies, and sells the verified contact to a maximum of three local firms. What is traditionally a manual lead-brokering business — collecting requests, screening quality, and phoning installers one by one — runs here as a fully automated pipeline: capture, verification, matching, pricing, payment, and follow-up all happen without operator intervention.

Industry

Home Improvement

Development Time

12+ months

Client Location

Cyprus

Service

Custom Web Application

Challenges

Development Challenges

Building a marketplace that sells the same perishable inventory (a homeowner’s contact) to competing buyers, in real time, with real money on the line, raised challenges well beyond a standard web app:

Fair, automatic lead distribution

Every new lead had to be matched against hundreds of vendors’ provinces, materials, and questionnaire filters, distributed round-robin so no vendor is starved, and hard-capped at three buyers per lead — including vendors on “autopilot” whose credits are spent automatically.

Bulletproof credit accounting over Stripe webhooks

Plan credits, pay-as-you-go credits, renewals, prorated upgrades/downgrades, and auto top-ups all grant credits through asynchronous webhook events. Every grant had to be idempotent (keyed to Stripe invoice IDs) so retries and edge cases never double-credit or drop a purchase.

Guaranteeing lead quality at scale

Twilio SMS one-time-password verification on every request, 30-day duplicate detection on inbound API leads, fake-lead flagging, and a dispute flow that refunds vendors the exact credits they spent on a bad contact.

Italian VAT and billing compliance

Reverse-charge handling for valid EU VAT IDs, a standard VAT rate for everyone else, and Stripe-hosted invoices that stand up to Italian accounting requirements.

Timezone-correct business analytics

All reporting is framed in Europe/Rome while data is stored in UTC; KPIs such as fill rate only count leads that have “matured” past their selling window, so month-end reports don’t undercount fresh inventory.

Taming legacy data

Leads arrive from the website, an embeddable widget, and GoHighLevel with inconsistent legacy formats; window counts and phone numbers are normalized into one canonical model that drives pricing everywhere.

Our Solution

Our Solution

A fully automated lead marketplace

From SMS-verified capture through matching, tiered pricing, and sale, with no manual brokering in the loop.

Credit-based monetization with subscription tiers

Leads priced by project size (0.5 to 2 credits, up to 8 for exclusive unlocks), with Pro/Premium plans that lower credit prices and grant earlier lead access.

A vendor workspace that proves ROI

CRM pipeline, contract tracking, and performance analytics benchmarked against peers, so installers can see exactly what the platform earns them.

An admin back office that runs the business

live KPIs, quality control, refunds, region controls, and automated monthly business-intelligence reporting.

Features
Key Features

Key Features

Verified Lead Capture

  • Multi-step quote request form with dynamic, per-category questionnaires
  • Twilio SMS one-time-password verification on every submission
  • Embeddable form variant for partner websites
  • Inbound lead API (GoHighLevel) with phone normalization and 30-day duplicate detection

Autopilot Lead Distribution

  • Round-robin matching on province, materials, and questionnaire answers
  • Hard cap of three buyers per lead, with real-time email alerts to matches
  • Auto-purchase for vendors with autopilot enabled and sufficient credits
  • Plan-based early access: leads unlock after 30 / 15 / 0 minutes by tier, with live countdown timers

Credit & Subscription Monetization

  • Project-size pricing: 0.5 credits for small jobs up to 2 for the “Grande Intervento” premium tier (10+ windows); exclusive unlocks up to 8 credits
  • Pro (€297/mo) and Premium (€497/mo) plans with cheaper credits (€15 → €14 → €13)
  • Automatic top-up when a vendor runs dry; referral program awarding free credits
  • Full credit ledger: purchases, subscription allotments with rollover, usage, refunds, rewards

Vendor Dashboard & CRM

  • New-contact feed, unlocked-contact workspace, and a 15-stage sales pipeline from “called” to “contract signed”
  • Contract value tracking and a monthly top-10 leaderboard of closers
  • Performance analytics: ROI, customer acquisition cost, conversion rate, average contract value — benchmarked against peer companies in the same region
  • Self-service profile, filters, invoices, and account management with guided onboarding tour

Payments & Billing

  • Stripe Checkout for credit packs and subscriptions, with prorated upgrades/downgrades
  • Italian VAT handling including reverse-charge for valid EU VAT IDs
  • Idempotent, webhook-driven credit granting keyed to Stripe invoices
  • Stripe-hosted invoices downloadable from the dashboard

Admin Back Office & Automated Reporting

  • KPI dashboard: fill rate, conversion, average slots sold, revenue mix
  • Excel lead exports, fake-lead flagging, reported-lead refunds, region whitelisting
  • Secure admin login with mandatory SMS two-factor authentication
  • Automated lifecycle emails: five-step vendor nurturing drip, verification reminders, and a monthly business-intelligence report to the founders
Our Approach

Our Approach

Marketplace Platform Development Blueprint

The project ran on an Agile cadence with short iterative sprints, continuous client collaboration, and over 840 commits shipped across a year of active development — with staging and production releases automated end to end.

Concept & Inception (Discovery)

Mapped the two-sided business model, lead pricing rules, and the Italian market’s compliance requirements.

Design & Architecture

Data-driven questionnaire and matching engine designed so new service verticals launch without code changes.

Development & Implementation

Feature delivery in vertical slices: capture → distribution → monetization → analytics.

Continuous Testing & QA

A Pest 4 suite of 46 automated test files, including browser tests, covering every business-critical flow (webhook credit granting, tiered pricing, fill-rate reporting).

Review, Demo & Retrospective

Sprint reviews against real staging data with the client.

Operations & Continuous Improvement

GitLab CI/CD auto-deploys, Sentry error tracking, Mixpanel product analytics, and runtime-tunable business settings.

Business Impact

Business Impact

Turning Manual Lead Brokering into a Self-Running, Revenue-Generating Marketplace

The platform now operates as a self-sustaining marketplace where supply and demand grow without added headcount — every request verified, matched, and monetized automatically.

10,000+ homeowners served and 1,600+ installer companies onboarded01

10,000+ homeowners served and 1,600+ installer companies onboarded, with a 4.8/5 Trustpilot rating.

Quotes delivered within 24 hours02

Instantly for Premium-plan vendors — versus days of manual matching.

Zero-touch monetization03

Leads are priced and sold automatically, including auto-purchase for autopilot vendors, eliminating manual brokering entirely.

Layered recurring revenue04

Pay-per-contact credits (€13–15), monthly subscriptions (€297–497), premium-priced large projects, exclusive leads, and an additional-services upsell catalog.

Summary

Summary

Quotivo shows how a traditional, labor-intensive lead-brokering business can be rebuilt as a fully automated two-sided marketplace. A Laravel-based platform now handles the entire value chain — SMS-verified lead capture, intelligent distribution, tiered credit monetization, Stripe billing with Italian VAT compliance, and self-optimizing growth loops like nurturing drips and referrals — while giving installers hard ROI numbers and the founders a monthly, automated view of the business. The data-driven architecture means new service verticals (solar, heat pumps, insulation) can launch with configuration alone, positioning the client to scale across Italy’s entire home energy-renovation market.

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