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by the own data that these platforms publish what they show is year after year the fraction of workers on the right sharing or we are doing it for fewer hours and a smaller fraction of it is doing it on a full-time basis so the way to think about these on-demand platforms in particular is as the best source of secondary income ever invented
I think uber lyft post maids you know thumbtack have created some sort of a safety net for this gig economy job and those people are now choosing to not take jobs at Starbucks or Target or Walmart that are shift based
the economics when it's a commodity its price race to the bottom and that makes it brutal and like you know they even found a way through it but it's a huge challenge
I think uber taught people the wrong lesson everything became the uber Forex and it's sort of this like oh it just should be on-demand you click and then it's done it's magical and that over-applied a user experience to categories where that was not appropriate
what uber and lyft are doing is getting you a car now it happens require a driver to get you from A to B but the point is that it's transporting you it's a capital asset this is why the experience is a commodity you don't choose the driver you want you say pick me up here I'm going there done and they just send you somebody
when I invested him the two more success will come and save us in thumbtack and uber you know they were nine million or ten million
look what Shopify did right again that's products not services but still like just unleashed this incredible potential that was out there
I think uber lyft post maids you know thumbtack have created some sort of a safety net for this gig economy job ... but we need to be careful not to take that too far and pretend that these are the jobs that we want our future economy to be made up of primarily and in fact at some point they're gonna automate the drivers away
I would argue that what uber and lyft are doing is getting you a car now it happens require a driver to get you from A to B but the point is that it's transporting you it's a capital asset this is why the experience is a commodity you don't choose the driver you want you say pick me up here I'm going there done and they just send you somebody
over the first five years of the company it's less than our annual we spent less than our annual rent now
I worry about founders today because of how much noise there is around the expectations of how quickly things should happen... in 2009 2010 our goal was to just build a great product and survive as long as it took to get it to really click and take off and there was much less of this like sort of like FOMO and pressure and I don't think we could have figured it out if we were starting today
I would I bet it breaks down by age yeah and there's price some cutoff I my guess is it's in the 30s yeah maybe early 40s now we're you know like you'll use the phone to call mom but everybody else gets a text
because at the end of the day were a chat product you connect with pros to have a conversation to schedule to sort of work with and chatting on your phone is super natural
originally you know we started with a website and then it had to be sort of mobile optimized but then about sort of two three years ago which in some sense was late yeah to the party we realized that you know mobile was where all of our best customers were going that's where our best engagement was
the big frontier for us is getting really detailed availability... but availability and getting sort of real-time availability is sort of the next frontier for us such that we can turn it into a sort of an instant book experience
security is the most important thing and if we don't do that nothing else really matters
on thumbtack the average pro's learning more than 50 bucks an hour so it's a middle-class living
the scary part and something that we as a platform after work harder on is providing more security because the biggest challenge with these gig jobs is they are not certain
if you only charge a percent of the job when it's done you have two big problems one is policing... secondly again it goes back to the same issue when the pro knows they only get charged when they win the job... you have a terrible customer experience
what I'm not sure about is whether our business model will be a transactional one so today we charge per lead
we will we will close the loop all on thumbtack it's already sort of like in some sub cases being tested live
I think in some ways we still haven't fully cracked it you know exactly what you charge for what do you give back where do you really take your margin how do you price really really hard things to get right
we tried originally to not have that happen to not have them pay and what would happen is they would kind of like spray-and-pray they'd respond to everybody
in our case the fee makes the experience better because the pros self qualify by virtue of paying
the biggest asset that exists in the world is human talent and the time we have to express it and that is something that I still think is that day not even one day zero of being liberated and that is something we're working on but it's bigger than just us
there is a question of when are you really creating value and are you aligning your fee to that value creation so for example something like some tax we charge for the first match
marketplaces have this beauty that they are positive sum nobody loses when you find and hire a pro on thumbtack you in the Pro wins and we win and that's a great business to be in
it was a narrative violation because historically what we had said to ourselves is our magic sauce what makes us unique is that these are human crafted... people's first reaction was like well doesn't this just make us a list
our biggest competitor is word of mouth... life in our sector it is just really really hard to make that match because it's so specific we're more like a dating service than we are ecommerce
we eliminated the entire step of a pro being in the loop to generate these quotes... we can instantly show you the list of not just two three four but twenty thirty forty... the only way we become the Amazon for services
it actually wasn't due to growth rates growth was pretty strong it was due to actually that quotes per request metric so this had been our North Star we had thrown a ton of engineering and product work and marketing and we never could move it
you might actually buy asking that sixth seventh and eighth question are you supplying the paint or are they supplying the paint I remember was one of the questions when I went through this and if you get if you are not serious about it if you're just looking for pricing because you might be painting next year or you're curious you're gonna drop off so you get rid of the looky-loos it's self qualifies and it actually turns into product marketing
the more questions we ask the customer the more quotes we could give them and despite the fact that conversion rate would dip a little not surprisingly you ask customers more questions some Robert some more are gonna fall off actually less than you would think in our case but not zero got it but when you looked at the value to pros who then had richer data and context to respond to they loved it
for us early on it was getting each customer 3 plus quotes and what that told us was when we got you more than three quotes we knew you had a great experience your MPs was super high your repeat rate was high
thumbtack has always been about accomplishment it's about getting done you have a problem you got a need you come to us you get it done similarly for these pros they're trying to grow they're trying to get that done so accomplishment and that is really important
I worry about founders today because of how much noise there is around the expectations of how quickly things should happen
over the first five years of the company it's less than our annual rent now
I would I bet it breaks down by age yeah and there's price some cutoff I my guess is it's in the 30s yeah maybe early 40s now we're you know like you'll use the phone to call mom but everybody else gets a text
we realized that you know mobile was where all of our best customers were going that's where our best engagement was
availability and getting sort of real-time availability is sort of the next frontier for us such that we can turn it into a sort of an instant book experience
we've done this for about two-thirds of our categories and now we will keep working through and not surprising there's the long tail of stuff like appliance repair that's like an infinite grind to get right but that's also differentiation and defense ability for us to do that work
all the prices come from our pros we don't set prices which also helps us not have any of the worker classification issues that some other platforms have because it's their brand it's their hours it's their prices
the solution was we had to automate this whole process for these pros so instead of them reading and responding they would tell us here the customers I want here's where I travel here's how much I charge here's what I'm available and then we can instantly reveal that to customers such that they don't have to wait for quotes to come back we can instantly generate them sort of search results but not just names and numbers truly actionable results that are tailored to them
the amount of work that it took our pros to read review and respond to every request was so much that they could never respond all the demand we had which meant that our customers didn't get enough options back