The Bulletin Board: the Thumbtack.com Blog

David Gelernter, in his Edge essay:

It has always been harder to find the right person than the right fact. Human experience and expertise are the most valuable resources on the Internet — if we could find them.

I would go further and say that human experience and expertise are the most valuable resources our planet has, full stop.

Last night we were fortunate enough to be invited to pitch at Open Angel Forum’s first San Francisco event.   It was awesome.

Jason and Tyler did an incredible job vetting 100+ applications — the quality of the start-ups they invited was top-notch and spanned everything from a high-tech algorithmic photo-tagging company to novel iPhone controlled toys.

The angels that got invited (they had to apply too!) were completely engaged, making for a thoughtful and spirited Q&A session.  Best of all, it was clearly a group of people that simply loves start-ups, and they seemed to be there as much for us as for themselves.  I was blown away.

I can’t recommend this event enough!

Matt Galigan of SimpleGeo had a great comment on Chris Dixon’s post on the “geo stack” the other day:

I definitely think that the price of venue data (much like the prices of apps in general) is going to be a very quick race to the bottom. There are very few “big” players in this space: InfoUSA, Acxiom, Localeze, Navteq and a few more. Each of these big guys charge an unbelievable amount of money (at least when it comes to getting developers to use it).

[...]

The truth is, anyone that has a slightly more crowdsourced (including Google) approach to this will get inherently better data. This coupled with the fact that the data itself might be free in the next few years spells potential doom for the “big guys”.

This is definitely what we’ve encountered in the local services space as well.  One problem is that these databases often don’t have key data for travel area and licensing information.  But the biggest drawback is that these directory resellers have a lot of data but no genuine connection to the business or provider behind the content.  And it’s this relationship that is so valuable for building a vibrant ecosystem.  That’s why Thumbtack is focused on crowdsourcing our information directly from those businesses — it gives us better data and a relationship with the owner.

Hunter S. Thompson calls tech support about his home entertainment system:

(contains profane language)

I’m not sure even Zappos’ epic customer service efforts could have talked him down.

(via fimoculous)

Peter Krasilovsky reports:

IAC’s ServiceMagic reported today that it saw a 51 percent boost in 4Q revenue, growing from $25.3 million in 2008 to $38.2 million in 2009. The boost was accompanied by a 21 percent growth in the number of home and trade providers that pay for its leads; and a 46 percent gain in service requests.

[...]

Profits, however, were low at $1.2 million. They were held down by increased marketing efforts, including an expanded sales force and a major advertising campaign.

Consumers are clearly searching for and sourcing local services online more and more – here’s one report pegging local searches as 1/4 of overall search volume — and ServiceMagic has done a great job capturing the home improvement slice of these leads. But who is going to aggregate the long-tail of services remains to be seen. This morning we got one more reminder as to just how big this market is when we generated a lead for this Farrier in Magnolia, Texas.

Andrew Parker of USV created a great image highlighting “The Spawn of Craigslist“:

In the comments, Andrew added:

“I’m pretty certain that 70-80% of CL’s traffic is in the Personals section. And, I’m pretty certain they’re not all heading to the ”platonic” side of personals ”

To which I responded:

I think your comment about craigslist’s traffic being dominated by personals really highlights what they are best at: connecting people. But it’s worth noting that a lot of the categories they support are more specifically about completing transactions, not just connecting people. And I think that it’s this gulf that has created so much opportunity for new start-ups.

And then expanded:

Maybe ‘completing transactions’ was the wrong phrase to use as I see exchanging money to be just one part of what’s missing. Scheduling support is another. As is vetting the quality and trustworthiness of the service provider you’re hiring. And it’s not just an issue for consumers: a common complaint we hear from our service providers about Craigslist is that they are forced to compete solely on price due to the lack of a profile system for them to accrue and project reputation.

Most of the benefits that Craigslist has over traditional, newspaper classifieds come from the platform that it is built on rather than any improvements they’ve made to classified ads as a product–negligible costs of production & publication, ease of search, and genuine anonymity are all properties of the internet as a whole. That said, improving upon the product is just part of the challenge facing start-ups trying to carve out a niche for themselves. That Craigslist provides so much value is ultimately a testament to the power of network effects–and creating a vibrant community is the other enabling factor for sparking a truly viable alternative.

Trying to carve out a niche from Craigslist is no small feat.

How are we different than other offerings? Traditionally, companies trying to create a website to cater to the service sector have modeled themselves off of directories (Yelp, Angieslist, and plenty more) or classifieds (craigslist, Oodle, and again, plenty more).  Moving these offerings online has completely changed the economics of these industries, but they haven’t improved the product from the consumer’s perspective.  Does Yelp make it any easier to schedule and book a hairdresser?  Does Craigslist feel like a more trustworthy way to find a babysitter than the local paper?  We don’t think so.

Thumbtack is moving beyond the traditional directory or classifieds model and creating a genuine marketplace for services, a place where you can evaluate the trustworthiness of a service provider as well as the quality of their service.  And we’re creating a platform that supports all elements of the transaction: searching, contacting, scheduling, and paying.

What is Thumbtack?
Thumbtack is a trusted marketplace where consumers can find, compare, and book local services.  By making it easier, more affordable, and safer than ever before to purchase services, we aim to transform a broad swath of the service sector much as eBay and Amazon have done for products.  We know this is an ambitious goal but we believe the transition to transacting services online is inevitable and imminent.

How big is the opportunity?
The local service space, though enormous, is highly fragmented, fraught with inefficiency, and largely transacted offline. Consumers spend more than $500 billion on local services every year, yet existing local service marketplaces serve either just a limited niche of services or only provide consumers with reviews or wanted ads.

How do we solve the problem?
Three main obstacles have, until recently, prevented the rise of a vibrant marketplace for local services:

• Chicken and egg problem: How do you balance consumer and provider acquisition, when each depends on the other? One company has attempted to overcome this challenge with the human matching of wanted ads.  We have that, but we’ve also spent the last year recruiting providers into our database so that we will be launching with 10,000 providers already using Thumbtack. With a few mouse clicks, users can find any type of help they need, from the ordinary (tutors, hair stylists, handymen, caterers) to the quirky (rap teachers, cartoonists, belly dancers, henna body artists). We appeal to these providers by offering them a number of business marketing tools that are useful, independent of the network effect.
• Trust: You care about the reputation of someone you’re dealing with on eBay when you purchase a used iPhone, but trust and safety are 100x more important when the person is coming into your house or taking care of your children.  Thumbtack aims to establish itself as a leading consumer and safety advocate in the local service market by automatically vetting each provider as well as offering additional consumer protection tools including identity verification, criminal background screens, professional license checks, and customer testimonials and reviews. You can see an example of the verifications a provider can get here.  (More screenshots: http://www.thumbtack.com/press).
• Quality of product: Designing a marketplace for services is far more complicated than marketplaces for products; offerings are not discrete and price discovery requires a dialogue between buyer and seller.  This makes the quality of the product extraordinarily important.  We have put over a year of work into designing our marketplace to make it flexible and sophisticated enough to accommodate a large segment of the local service marketplace.

We’re going to start posting items to this here blog about developments that are going on at Thumbtack.  We’ll also try to link to and comment on all the interesting chatter that’s happening about the intersection of the local and online worlds.