Yeah that's pretty close to what I was thinking. Or the Taskrabbit as mentioned by jonathanjaeger.
I noticed you are a technical co-founder at Thumbtack. I had an idea for a similar service that helps people with particular skills make themselves available for hire to their neighbours. Were there many business or technical challenges trying to reach so many localities across many different types of services?
Although I feel like we have been successful, there have been so many business and technical challenges that I'm quite sure that we would not try this one again if we had to go back knowing what we do now.
It's a two-sided marketplace, which means we had the chicken and egg problem and the network problem. To add on to it, we had to figure out how to build trust using a medium (Internet) that has been traditionally untrusted.
We had to figure out how to scale customer service for a business where we quickly found out that people expect good customer service. The Google model for support wasn't working.
Further, the field is littered with the corpses of, sometimes well-funded, ventures that have failed in the same space.
And finally, our initial marketing plan involved boots on the ground, kind of like a political campaign (all the founders met in DC on a political campaign). That one failed quickly.
The latest, hardest part is scaling the matching engine without using humans. Not sure I'm at liberty to say exactly how we solved that.
Thank you for that. I really appreciate the insight. I think in my mental "simulation" of this type of business I anticipated most of the issues you mention, but I'm sure there are tons of other details you've run into on a daily basis.
Playing around with Thumbtack it's really cool how the taxonomy is sort of intelligent and fluid so if you type in SEO you will get digital marketers or if you misspell "babysighting" you still get babysitters in your area. And then the quote request forms are customized for each and every service type. I'm sure this alone involved a TON of work and experimentation.
