New Feature: Add Audio Tracks to Your Thumbtack Listing

by Sander | May 26, 2011 at 10:52 am

Three weeks ago we spoke with a voice-over artist who was referred to Thumbtack by a friend.

He checked out our site, liked what he saw, and almost signed up.

There was one problem, though. He had no way to showcase his primary skill: his voice.

He called our offices and we spoke with him. He told us he’d love to list on Thumbtack, but that his listing wouldn’t serve much of a purpose unless he could upload audio samples of his work.

He wasn’t the only person we’ve heard this from. This feature has been requested not only by voice-over artists, but also by musicians, language tutors and guitar teachers.

Our engineering team took these suggestions to heart and is proud to roll out a new feature today: the ability to upload audio tracks of your work to your Thumbtack listing.

Managing audio files should be pretty simple – log in to your account, go to your Dashboard, click on “Manage video & audio”, and use our tool to add audio files. We currently accept files from SoundCloud and MP3, MP4/AAC, and WAV files that are linked from another site.

Hopefully this new feature will be… (pun alert)… music to your ears!

4 Comments

Bigger and Better: Thumbtack Celebrates New Milestones

by Sander | May 10, 2011 at 2:52 pm

Thumbtack is getting bigger and better, and we’d like to share some of the details with you.

First, we recently celebrated our 250,0Let's Celebrate00th connection – that is, Thumbtack has connected 250,000 buyers and sellers since launch in December 2009. Hopefully you’re one of the people who has been connected to a trusted merchant or a great customer.

This number is increasing rapidly. We celebrated our 250,000th connection at the end of March – today it is closer to 450,000, with 50,000 connections made just last week. We are thrilled to be bringing business to so many local professionals.

Second, we recently reached 100,000 active merchants on Thumbtack. And that number is growing quickly – as of today we hit 130,000! A new local business is signing up on our site every three minutes.

Finally, we reached a particularly important milestone in our quest to create the safest marketplace for local services in the world. Last year, Thumbtack ran more than 100,000 background checks, license checks, and other identity verifications intended to ensure a safe marketplace. We also kicked out more than 5,000 service providers that did not meet our community standards.

In celebration of these milestones, let’s raise a toast… to you! We wouldn’t be able to reach these milestones without the help of our awesome Thumbtack community – you are the ones who have trusted us to find a photographer for your wedding, get you a bit of new work in a down economy, or navigate how to best market yourself online.

We draw our inspiration and energy from you. We love receiving messages from you about how Thumbtack has been helpful to you in finding a trusted merchant or in finding new business. Reading these messages is the best part of our day. Keep sending us your stories of how Thumbtack has been a part of your life – we welcome the good, the bad, and everything in between.

We have a lot of cool new features in development that we think will make Thumbtack even better. We are always thinking about how to improve our company and our website.

But today, we are looking behind us and celebrating the progress we’ve made – progress we couldn’t have imagined 18 months ago!

p.s. Check out the infographic on the left of all the crazy things that have happened since we launched. Woohoo!!

(And remember to follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook.)

3 Comments

New Feature: Track Visitors to Your Thumbtack Profile

by Sander | April 27, 2011 at 11:39 am

You asked, we answered.

Starting today you can now track the number and source of visitors to your Thumbtack profile.

Want to know how many people have visited your profile over the last month, or over the last three months? You can now see that information.

Want to know how many of your visitors come from search engines, from landing pages, or from Craigslist ads? That information’s available too.

Included in your new traffic report is the number of leads we have sent you in the last month and over the last three months. We also show the number of messages that customers have sent directly to your profile.

If you’re seeing a lot of traffic to your profile – great! You keep doing what you’re doing, and we’ll keep doing what we’re doing.

Not seeing a lot of traffic yet? We’d suggest taking advantage of the marketing tools we provide to you, like sharing your listing on other websites and in social media, collecting more points so you appear higher on landing pages and in search results, and using our tool that allows you to post to Craigslist in one click.

You can find your listing’s report by logging in to your account and going here: http://www.thumbtack.com/profile/reports

Enjoy!

5 Comments

New Feature: Refer Friends, Get Points, More Leads

by Sander | April 13, 2011 at 8:09 am

This week we added a feature to our site that will hopefully give credit to the best marketers we have – you!

We frequently hear the question: “I’ve found your site helpful, and I want to refer some friends. I’m happy to refer them for free… but do I get anything if I refer my friends to sign up on your site?” Previously the answer was: We’d love for you to refer your friends, but unfortunately at this time we can’t offer you anything for referring your friends to our site.

This was an unsatisfying answer for everyone. So we have now added a Thumbtack Referral Program.

Now we can answer: Yes! You can get something! You can get points – and the more points you get, the more leads you’re likely to get!

That’s right, we now offer points for signing up your friends on our site. The more friends you refer to sign up on Thumbtack – the more points you get, the higher you’ll rank, and the more leads you’re likely to get.

You can access the Thumbtack Referral Program by logging in to your account and going here: http://www.thumbtack.com/profile/referrals

Some rules:

  1. To receive points for referrals, your friend must either A. sign up using the link provided in your account here, or B. log in to their account, go here, and enter the email address associated with your account in the “Referred by” box.
  2. The only way to receive points for past referrals is for your friend to log in to their account, go here, and enter the email address associated with your account in the “Referred by” box.
  3. You can’t receive referral points if your friend’s listing is removed from our site.

We hope this new program will finally give credit to those who deserve it – you, our Thumbtack ambassadors!

1 Comment

Raising money as a first-time entrepreneur

by Thumbtack | July 23, 2010 at 5:21 pm

We recently closed an angel round a couple of weeks ago, and I thought that I’d share my thoughts on the process.

As a first-time entrepreneur, you will initially be judged by proxy. The main criteria people will use to evaluate you and your business is what other people think about you and your business. Frustrating? Sure. But the people you are most interested in pitching are the ones with the least time to spare–which is why Ron Conway only meets people on referral. Getting the first bit of outside validation is the most difficult part of the entire fundraising process. (Note: signing up advisors doesn’t count as outside validation.)

We went to a lot of meet-ups, presented at various start-up competitions, and took every meeting we could get, but by far the best resource we found to jump-start the process was Open Angel Forum. They do an incredible job vetting the applicants, and the angels that come are earnestly engaged and actively looking to make investments. It was here that we got our first commitments, from Joshua Schachter, Cyan & Scott Banister, and Jason Calacanis–all of whom we’re grateful to have on board!

With this validation in hand, we turned to Venture Hack’s AngelList. There is no better way to get into the inboxes of quality investors–truly, they’re all on AngelList. But as they stress on their application, already having the buy-in of respected players is really important.

I honestly don’t know how we would have raised our round without OAF and AngelList.

As for actually pitching angels, here are my take-aways:

  1. Show product. This is especially true if you’re a consumer-facing product. The first concern for potential investors is can this person get quality product out the door? Don’t use a PowerPoint presentation. Spend whatever face time you have walking through the product you’ve built and the vision for where you’ll take it.
  2. Tell a story. Describe a problem or inefficiency in today’s world and how you’re fixing it. Sell people on your version of the future.
  3. Write your own term sheet. You have a lawyer already, right?  Great.  Get them to write you a plain-vanilla term sheet that has all the normal rights and provision. The people you are pitching have seen hundreds of these–this isn’t a place to be innovative. It turns out that you don’t need a lead for an angel round.
  4. Expect it to take longer than you think. Then be patient when it takes even longer.
32 Comments

The Value of Advisors

by Thumbtack | July 20, 2010 at 9:59 pm

When we were first getting started, I kept wondering about the value of advisors.  Every company proudly displays their advisors somewhere in their about us (and so do we).  But I couldn’t quite understand what, exactly, advisors brought to the table.  Were they primarily intended as a signaling mechanism?  For introductions?  For domain experience?  After a couple of years, I have a tentative answer.

One thing is for sure:  the signaling aspect isn’t worth very much.  Future investors will judge you on your metrics, opportunity and team, not who you’ve convinced to sign a piece a paper in exchange for some equity–regardless of their byline.

However, the introductions and domain experience that advisors bring to the table can be game-changing.  And helpful introductions are really an outgrowth of genuine domain experience.

To give an example, Denis Grosz has been invaluable in helping us devise and execute an SEO strategy.  It’s not that there isn’t a ton of SEO information already out there–there’s more than you could ever process.  The issue is that it’s incredibly hard to evaluate what’s important to focus on and what’s not.  And there’s also the fact that SEO is a zero-sum game.  The people at the top of the SERPs have no interest in giving away their insights to their competitors.  Having Denis as an advisor helps us surmount the inherent selection bias that exists whenever you get advice on topics like SEO:  people who really know don’t share, and people who share don’t really know.

Recruiting advisors who have relevant domain experience and giving them a vested interest in your future is the best way to get long-term, valuable and actionable advice.  Equity is an incredible way to align incentives.

5 Comments

Thumbtack: Providing customer satisfaction since 2154

by Thumbtack | May 17, 2010 at 7:41 pm

We’re used to seeing long-tail requests over here, but last week we had a request that surprised even us:

I am looking for a professional makeup artist to transform me and my friends into the blue Na’vi people from Avatar for the morning of the bay to breakers race. I’m guessing this will involve some sort of airbrush.

Bay to Breakers is a hallowed San Francisco tradition–think early morning drinking, metallic spandex, tutus and nudity and you’ll get a pretty good idea. Our user wanted to go as a character from Avatar–so without the budget for stereoscopic technology, he did the next best thing and posted his request on Thumbtack. He got a few bids, and ended up going with Oui, Three Queens Productions. Evan, the artist behind Oui, Three Queens, specializes in fantasy bodyart and did not disappoint.

Update: A follow-up from the Na’vi:

I wasn’t quite sure who to turn to when I needed to be painted blue in my apartment at 6am, so I posted on Thumbtack and within hours, I had a professional, well priced bid in my inbox. Communicating with the service provider was a breeze since Thumbtack’s messaging system is set up to synch with my email– allowing me to be in touch with the service providers without giving away my personal email contact info. Because thumbtack verifies all of its service providers, I received zero spam or “sketchball” emails that I might receive on other classified sites. The makeup artists went above and beyond expectations, and a fantastic time was had by all.

Thumbtack Na'vi

2 Comments

Classifieds, re-imagined

by Thumbtack | April 20, 2010 at 1:32 am

The Type Directors Club asked a group of designers to create posters based off of classified ads.

You’re not going to find these on a nearby telephone pole:

pretty classified
See the original classified here.

(via Kottke)

0 Comments

The Secular Trend We're Riding

by Thumbtack | April 6, 2010 at 3:01 am

Paul Krugman:

So here is a speculation: The time may come when most tax lawyers are replaced by expert systems software, but human beings are still needed–and well paid–for such truly difficult occupations as gardening, house cleaning, and the thousands of other services that will receive an ever-growing share of our expenditure as mere consumer goods become steadily cheaper.

From Technology’s Revenge, an article about technological change and income inequality.

0 Comments

The Hard Problem

by Thumbtack | March 9, 2010 at 2:25 am

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.

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