Is the process of matching cleaners so different from lets say matching handymen? Or is this more about markteting to the right audience or maybe not overwhelm the user?
Hey guys, Rohan here Founder and CEO of BIZZBY, we run a mobile-first on-demand services model.
We don't give users choices simply allocate the best (algorithmically based on factors we are tweaking regularly like, hours online, job acceptance rates, reputation score, jobs completed and proximity to job etc.) within seconds where the professional also accepts in real-time.
End result is that within 10 seconds you're done and 60 mins later that professional turns up. No thinking.
Our supply base is vetted and curated not a random neighbour.
This model is very different to the open aggregation type marketplaces. The secret source is heavy on the supply logistics / operations and on boarding as well as scaling with quality at a reasonable rate side.
The more mobile the world goes, anything that takes longer than a phone call or more than a few seconds is a waste of time.
Why shouldn't something like this become the hiring platform of the future? Hire for missions, not for job positions. Get a presentation of what the person can do, not the job positions he has had. It's done.
Kind of surprising it took so long to figure out and optimize. As an outsider it always kind of smelled to me like their marketplace was flawed, even back several years ago when I first saw it.
Auction takes too long / is too heavy. The whole point of a convenience app is that it is supposed to be "just take care of this for me", not "let's spend time figuring out the bid/accept process".
You could see the listings sitting around in the marketplace for extended periods of time if you browse a bit. And I never used it because I didn't like that I had to guess how much the job was worth. It was clear that something in the model was broken
Zaarly... Taskrabbit... can anyone get this notion of "bid for the right TO service" done properly? or are we all just reduced to having to FIND our contractor, on our own.....
I wonder how much work is actually involved with running such businesses that cater to peer economies. Airbnb, Uber, and Lyft, their site is a simple web app. I see more and more startups with simple web apps that is catered around a business model that involves being a marketplace or automating some process.
What's happening behind the scenes to such startups? Is it a group of marketers?
Say I create an Airbnb clone, what now? Or say I create Uber app, what's the next step? Does the chicken or the egg come first?
Cofounder of thumbtack here - left in 2010, which basically directly competes with taskrabbit now.
I can understand how you would be skeptical that there's much going on behind the scenes, but you have to understand that this is mostly on purpose. It SHOULD look simple from the outside.
But underneath, we're vetting, categorizing, and matching. How do you fill a request for house painting with a database of perhaps 100 house painters that are qualified? You don't want too many bids, but you want enough to give the customer a decent choice. How many leads to you send out to get, say, three bids?
It's all algorithms, and we've been working heads down on it for years and are getting pretty good at it. Not easy, though.
I've always thought it sounds extremely complicated. I've worked in vision / product / design on peer-to-peer social ecommerce marketplaces and getting the supply / demand right for an organicly viable marketplace like etsy or ebay is mind bendingly difficult.
Every which way we cut it, we had to control the supply side more and more and that means having staff to find them, qualify them, pair them etc
