GetRoute

Ricardo Regalado didn't set out to build software. Seven years before launching GetRoute, he started Rosalado, a commercial cleaning company that grew to $10 million in annual revenue across 10 states with 307 employees. But as he managed his own cleaning business—handling walkthroughs, bidding, proposals, invoicing, and everything in between—he saw a massive problem: the entire $600+ billion commercial cleaning industry was operating on pen, paper, and Excel spreadsheets. "The walkthrough is the foundation of everything," Ricardo explains. "You go on-site, take notes, take photos with your phone, come back to the office, and manually upload it all to Excel to calculate pricing." The industry was fragmented, with 930,000 companies in the U.S., 90% operating under $1M in revenue. These small mom-and-pop shops were underbidding, losing customers, and failing because they lacked the tools and data to price correctly.

Ricardo decided to solve this for his own business first. He invested $700,000 of his cleaning company's cash flow into building GetRoute, assembling a lean team of five: a co-founder and chief product officer (Joe Grotto), three engineers (including a full-stack and front-end developer), a designer, and one business development person. The first version was focused and simple: a walkthrough and bidding tool that digitized the pen-and-paper process. Users could capture photos, measurements, and notes in-app, which would sync to a web platform so the office team could work on proposals while the field team was across the country. "Instead of capturing notes and taking photos with your camera phone and all that being done again in the office, you have an app now that captures the photos, square feet measurements, all the hot points, and it's all in the app itself."

Ricardo didn't spend big money on customer acquisition. Instead, he built community and created content. He launched a podcast called "Cleaning the Cocktails," attended industry convention shows, and most crucially, created and nurtured Facebook groups. His "Commercial Cleaning Mastermind Group" grew to 20,000 members. He'd post feature demonstrations, real-life usage videos, and released a series of 24 ebooks throughout the year—"The Eight Steps of Performing a Walkthrough to Sale," "The Five Areas and How to Look for a Contract," and more. His CAC was around $320 per customer, with a 6-7 month payback period on the $50/month starter plan. The podcast averaged 600-800 downloads per week—all targeted cleaning professionals.

What worked was pure value-add marketing. Ricardo gave before asking for anything in return. He positioned GetRoute not as a sales tool but as part of the solution to helping small cleaners succeed. The content resonated because it came from someone who'd actually built a $10M cleaning business and understood their pain. What didn't work was being a "luxury" product—Ricardo's own words. With 8-12% monthly churn, he realized GetRoute was solving only one part of the problem. Cleaners could bid better, but they still needed invoicing, CRM, client location management, and workforce management. "We're just a sales tool today," he admitted. "Our goal is taking it from the proposal to the next step of billing."

Launched in 2020, GetRoute hit 212 paying customers generating roughly $10,500 in monthly revenue by the time of this interview (about 12 months post-launch). Ricardo had accepted $50k in angel investment from two Chicago-based advisors (Eddie Lu and Chris Doich) on a SAFE note capped at $4 million. He deliberately avoided the VC route early on, learning that pre-revenue fundraising was a distraction. Instead, he focused on reaching the MRR benchmarks "Chicago Midwest wants you to be at" before raising institutional capital. The plan: expand GetRoute from a walkthrough-to-proposal tool into a full suite—invoicing, CRM, client management, workforce tools. Ricardo's vision was ambitious but grounded: empower the 610,000 commercial cleaning companies in the U.S. to compete, price correctly, and scale. "If I can help these small business owners start to creep up on 250K revenue, 500K revenue, million dollars in revenue, they deserve that," he said. "Because the bigger companies take all of the pie."