Ruck is the Superman of construction.
When home builders are on tight deadlines but find themselves in need of extra equipment or tools, Ruck makes the Home Depot run for them — so the builders can stay engaged with their projects and on-site.
Beyond Utah, Ruck also delivers in areas of Nevada and Arizona.
Lee Chang, Shaun Merritt and the Ruck team are constructing this startup with a foundation of humility, blue-collar authenticity and reliability.
Ruck it.
Lee: I grew up doing summer jobs like roofing, painting and plumbing. At one point, I was helping a friend finish his basement — and his electrician and framer canceled on him. This was around Covid time, so the supply chain was down. We were going to multiple stores to find all the electrical stuff I needed, and my friend and I were joking around, saying, “Dude, we should just do a DoorDash for construction materials.” The next day, I thought, “Wait … that’s a genius idea.”
When Ruck first started, it was specifically for handymen and smaller construction professionals to be able to get work done faster. We realized that model wasn’t very sustainable; when you’re doing a $100 repair as a handyman, paying someone $25 to deliver something eats significantly at your margin.
I brought Shaun on as a consultant, and we found that 80% of our revenue was coming from 20% of orders from custom home builders, where we’d grab their lumber packages, for example. We would ask, “Are you willing to pay $200 to have this delivered?” They’d say, “Yeah, and give the guy a $50 tip.” When they’re building million-dollar homes, it’s more important for them to get the job done on time. That’s when we started moving over to the big stuff.
Shaun: As a do-it-yourself-er at that point working on my basement with my wife, I understood the value of the company, because I was taking forever to get the things I needed to and start on the project again. Now, the Ruck process is as simple as texting us with what you need, and we typically get deliveries to clients within the next 2-3 hours.
Lee: When we first launched, I coded a simple mobile app, and adoption was really poor. This is where Ruck really started identifying its mission. There’s a huge divide between blue and white collar industries. White collar is software first, but the blue collar world is hardware first. If you try to drive anything other than the most basic forms of technology, you start losing them because that’s not what their world is about. We stuck to text communication very quickly.
Shaun:
We did just release our driver app, and we’re very proud of it. We’ve got the information on there that’s the standard DoorDash model, where they can look at deliveries that need to be done and choose which job to do.
Lee:
Our long-term vision for Ruck is not just to be a delivery company. The future value we want to drive is to bring e-commerce into construction in a very organic, blue collar-led experience. Long-term, our business model is going to be like Amazon for construction.
Shaun: It’s exciting to be part of something that is adding value for somebody trying to get a project done — quickly, and with their guys staying on-site. Being able to source those materials for them is great, because they don’t have to waste their time on running to Home Depot for equipment. Let us worry about that.
In the blue collar world, when it comes to credibility, they’ll look at your hands and ask, ‘Do you actually do the work yourselves?’” says COO Shaun Merritt. “Sometimes, the start of a relationships with them is to show we can get the work done for them right there.