Editor’s note: The latest cohort of startups are moving on from The Startup Factory accelerator in Durham. ExitEvent Editor Laura Baverman profiles IMNEXT, one of the latest five. ExitEvent is a news partner of WRAL TechWire.

DURHAM, N.C. – Plumber John Burdin built a successful plumbing business in Oklahoma City over 12 years, with 11 trucks and $1.3 million in annual sales. But a consistent problem was downtime.

When customers weren’t calling for service, his workers and trucks sat idle, costing the company money. And no amount of online advertising or SEO seemed to do the trick. Most customers needed plumbing help in real-time. And though Google and the Yellow Pages served up dozens of options, it still took five or 10 phone calls to find a company with a free plumber. And there was no way for customers to know if they were getting the best price. What do you think?

Burdin set out to solve this problem in 2009, first launching ServiceChicken.com, an online directory that ranked service providers by their speed of response. But it wasn’t until The Startup Factory founders and mentors suggested a real-time mobile app that he found a model that made sense. His journey became a mission to build the Uber of contracting. So when a person had an emergency at home, he or she could open an app, request a service, get a price quote and quickly be matched with an available contractor. What do you think?

“It’s real-time supply and demand of services,” he told me during week one of The Startup Factory’s accelerator in Durham.What do you think?

Burdin has since graduated from the program with a company called IMNEXT. He and co-founder Kyle Askew (above, right) have an early prototype of the app and 10 companies signed up to become early testers. By launch at the end of January 2015, they expect to have 30 companies on the app and to be pairing 15 contractors with work weekly.

The full post can be read online at ExitEvent.