OSCAR’s CEO, João Marques: “OSCAR Turns Home Emergency Headaches Into Half-Hour Fixes”

“Ignoring the playbook worked for us: OSCAR turns week-long home emergency headaches into half-hour fixes.”

 

OSCAR is the app I wanted when my water heater broke. It’s for home services like cleaning, repairs and installations – the kinds of jobs everyone needs but no one wants to spend hours organising. The difference with OSCAR is simple. You open the app, see the price up front, tap a button, and someone shows up. No chasing quotes. No no-shows. Just instant resolution.

We launched in Portugal with a scrappy team of five and grew into the market leader in two years. From there, we expanded into Spain and, more recently, opened in London. Growth has been fast. OSCAR now has more than 800,000 signups, almost 25% penetration in Portugal, and last year alone, we grew more than 4x. We’re now close to €40M in annual sales and aiming for €60M by the end of this year. 

The team has grown with the business from those early days with just a handful of people working around the clock. We’re now more than 50 strong, spanning product, operations, growth and support. But we all share the same focus. Every team member, no matter their role, is aligned around the same metric: GMV. It keeps us sharp, fast and united on growth. 

 

 

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

 

The idea was born out of frustration. My water heater in my Lisbon flat broke. I wanted what I already had with Uber or food delivery. Instead, I found the opposite – platforms asking me to compare profiles, ask for quotes, and wait days, only for the technician to not even show up. That’s exactly what happened.

I wanted the same immediacy I already had with transport and food delivery: push a button, get a fixed price, and watch the problem disappear. The fact that home services were so far behind was crazy, and it became obvious that someone had to change that.

I quit my job, built the first version of OSCAR in a few months, raised a small seed round, and went all in. No perfect product. Just something that worked, along with the drive to grow it fast. 

 

 

Tell us about your core product or service

 

OSCAR’s promise is straightforward: a vetted home service professional at your door in under 30 minutes, for a fixed price. The customer experience is designed to be frictionless. You choose the task, confirm the time, and we take care of everything else. 

On the supply side, we do it the hard way. Instead of opening a marketplace and letting anyone join, we onboard technicians in person, city by city. It takes more effort, but it builds trust and keeps quality high. Customers see the difference. OSCAR now has over 16,000 reviews with a 4.7-star average, and more than half of all bookings are repeats. Once people try it, they keep coming back.

 

What most excites you about your industry?

 

How broken it still is! Most people are resigned to the idea that finding a plumber means waiting weeks, chasing them on the phone, and not knowing the price until the job is done. Fixing that changes daily life. And the demand is obvious in our growth. We’ve been doubling every six months, which shows just how much appetite there is for a better way. 

 

What has been the biggest challenge you’ve had to overcome?

 

At the start, it was attention. We didn’t have the money to win on ads, so we had to get creative. That meant bold, sometimes risky campaigns. Some went viral, some almost got us cancelled, but they got people talking.

Later, it was proving we could scale. Lisbon worked, but could Madrid? The first time I saw a job in Madrid get accepted, assigned, and finished in under 30 minutes, I knew it was possible. After that, growth snowballed to the point where we were opening three new cities in a single week.

 

What is your number one piece of advice to aspiring entrepreneurs?

 

Pick one number and let the whole company obsess over it. For us, that’s GMV. It keeps every decision sharp. Alignment on one metric removes the noise. 

And don’t delegate the hard stuff too early. As a founder, if you don’t understand growth, ops or support yourself, you won’t know how to judge progress or step in when things break. You don’t have to do everything forever, but you do need to learn it before handing it over.

 

What can we hope to see from OSCAR in the future?

 

Expansion! More cities, more countries, and faster launches. We’re aiming for €60M in annual sales this year and building the playbook to expand across Europe. The vision doesn’t change – push a button and your problem is solved.