It also has a pretty maligned reputation.  According to the Consumer Federation of America, the remodeling industry receives the third most complaints after the auto and credit industries.

There are several characteristics of the remodeling industry that foster this situation:

Problem 1: It’s hard to get under the hood – Houses are tricky machines.  There’s a lot of stuff that happens behind walls, above ceilings and under floors.  Unlike a car, there isn’t a hood that you can pop open very easily.  Sometimes, opening the hood requires you to break down a wall.

A contractor is required to both diagnose and treat an illness to your house.  This represents an inherent problem that haunts a lot of black box industries: the severity of a problem and income from services rendered are directly correlated.  Consequently, you get inflated estimates and feature creep in remodeling projects.  Consumers don’t always have the knowledge to push back on these things.

At the same time, consumers often can have ridiculous expectations due to their lack of understanding.   One of the most frequent complaints from homeowners is not that a job is done poorly; just that it’s not completed on time.  This is probably the homeowner’s fault more often than the contractor’s fault.  Any software engineer who has ever had missed a deadline because of feature creep (thanks to an over zealous product manager or marketing executive) can probably empathize with this point.

Problem 2: Contracting businesses are fluid – Its harder for brick & mortar businesses to escape the consequences of bad service: they have a physical location; standard operating hours; and full-time employees.  Contractors on the other hand, are fluid.  Their office location changes on a daily basis; work erratic schedules; and tend to work with other contractors and sub-contractors.  If they get a bad reputation in one area, they can move to a new area and start a new company with relative ease.

Problem 3: Fewer transactions per service provider – While a brick & mortar may serve hundreds of customers in a given day; contractors may serve one or two clients in a given month.  The wisdom of crowds can’t prevail when there is no crowd.

Problem 4:  Regulatory shortcomings - Contracting is largely regulated on the state level.  Some states (like California) have relatively stringent regulatory frameworks; other states (e.g. New Hampshire), are far more flexible.  One issue that all states face, is inconsistent consumer understanding of the regulatory protections they have put in place.

In California for example, any project that totals $500 or more in total costs requires a license.  Licensed contractors must demonstrate at least four years of experience/education in the trade for which they are licensed, be fingerprinted, have an FBI background check, and be bonded.  Furthermore, when paying a contractor in California, it is actually illegal for them to ask for or accept a down payment of more than 10 percent of the total contract price or $1,000 (whichever is less).

California actually has a pretty solid regulatory framework in place.  As with most great ideas however, the actual application tends to be where the problem resides.

Problem 5: Workflow issues – Remodeling projects can be complex and lengthy.  A lot of problems crop up during a project, even when both the homeowner and contractor have pure intentions.  There are a variety of external variables that can throw a project off-schedule (e.g. weather, unknown issues, etc.) although many complications can be avoided by setting appropriate expectations at the beginning of a project and communicating throughout its execution.

We are attempting to address these core issues through technology:

Solution 1: Helping homeowners get under the hood –  There is an unlimited ocean of knowledge within this industry that is buried in the collective minds of contractors.  Generally speaking, contractors don’t tend to be proactive in collaborating and sharing this knowledge in the public domain.  There is no Wikipedia for remodeling and a quick look at the remodeling sections of Q&A forums like Quora and Stack Exchange reveal sparse participation.  By proactively incentivizing contractors to share their knowledge, we’re building an encyclopedia of remodeling information to help homeowners get under the hood.

Solution 2: Bringing structure to the industry - We have created a permanent record of each service provider in the United States that at a minimum, will contain their license and contact information.  We are partnering with a wide variety of consumer protection agencies and regulatory authorities to enhance the central database while also crowdsourcing feedback from both consumers and contractors.

Solution 3: Moving beyond five-star reviews – In a low-transaction industry like contracting, a true rating system needs to consider a much broader array of variables than five-star consumer reviews.  We’ve developed a scoring algorithm that considers every contractor’s work history, license status, record with consumer advocacy groups, etc.  This allows us to create a much more realistic assessment of their work.

Solution 4: Building the regulatory framework into the system – People don’t like reading regulatory documents on government Websites.  We build those rules into our system automatically so they don’t have to.  In addition to being a major factor in our scoring algorithm,  we are also building regulatory considerations into the user experience that accompanies market interactions.

Solution 5: Workflow support - By streamlining certain administrative functions (e.g. structuring contracting agreements, payment schedules, etc.) on our site and tapping our database to establish benchmarks for work completion and cost, we’re able to set proper expectations before a project begins and eliminate loose ends during a project’s execution.

Ultimately, when it comes to enormous, fragmented industries with serious intrinsic shortcomings, there are no silver bullets.  Instead of waiting for one, we’re strapping on a bandolier of lead bullets and diving in.  If you want to help, hit me up.

The post Why the remodeling industry needs to be remodeled appeared first on Stuff I think.

What gets tricky is that “online marketplace” comes with certain associations and assumptions, based on existing online marketplaces.  Online marketplaces are differentiated by several variables:

Commodity type

1. Some online marketplaces deal in physical products (e.g. Amazon, eBay)
2. Virtual commodities like information or currency (e.g. Angie’s List; PayPal)
3. Services (e.g. oDesk).

Marketplace participants 

1. Buyers & sellers (e.g. Amazon) – People tend to be either buyers or sellers.
2. Peer-to-peer (e.g. PayPal) – People tend to be both buyers & sellers.

Based on these two variables, different online marketplaces will exhibit different characteristics:

1. Distribution – How the commodity is delivered.
2. Scarcity – Whether or not the commodity is limited.
3. Financial – How revenue is generated.
4. Time – How long it takes to deliver the commodity.

The aforementioned variables will also determine:

1. How a network effect is created
2. Whether a monopoly is possible
3. The role the online marketplace will play in the actual market.

To test the framework, let’s consider PayPal:

1. Commodity type = currency.
2. Marketplace participants = peer-to-peer.
3. Distribution – since the marketplace deals in a virtual commodity, distribution happens entirely online.
4. Scarcity – commodity in the marketplace is not limited; the limit is based on the currency owned by peers in the network.
5. Financial – revenue is generated by taking a percentage of the currency being traded.
6. Time – close to immediate.
7. Network effect – created when enough peers are in the marketplace to make the action more convenient than alternatives.
8. How a monopoly is achieved – probably through brand & network effect.
9. Role – to broker the transaction.

PayPal is a relatively simple marketplace to map.  In the future, I’ll try to apply the framework to other types of marketplaces.

The post How to think about online marketplaces appeared first on Stuff I think.

According to Thiel, a company must have some combination of these variables to own a market:

1. Brand
2. Scale cost advantages
3. Network effects
4. Proprietary technology

Great companies like Apple, have all of these things.  According to Thiel (chronicled by Blake Masters):

1. By building both the hardware and the software, it basically owns the entire value chain.
2. With legions of people working at Foxconn, it has serious scale cost advantages.
3. Countless developers building on Apple platform and millions of repeat customers interacting with the Apple ecosystem provide the network effects that lock people in.
4. Apple’s brand is not only some combination of all of these, but also something extra that’s hard to define.

The suggested path for getting there seems to be:

1. Choose a focused market with a clear expansion path.
2. Create a monopoly within the focused market and gradually expand outward.

Choosing the right market is important.  According to Thiel, disrupting an existing market requires some truly competitive advantage (such as developing a product that is an order of magnitude better than anything available).

Google disrupted the search market by creating a product that was >10x better than the existing alternatives.  This seems clear to me.  What seems less clear is how Google has achieved a monopoly.

You could argue that Google has been able to secure a ubiquitous brand and maybe to a certain extent, proprietary technology.  The question is, how they have leveraged a network effect.  Search seems to be a relatively individual act.

One might argue that Google’s vast amount of user data provides them with greater insight that can be used to refine their algorithm however this seems to be a little weak.

In a 2008 NYT article, Steve Lohr writes,

Economists and analysts point out that Google does indeed have network advantages that present formidable obstacles to rivals. The “experience effects,” they say, of users and advertisers familiar with Google’s services make them less likely to switch.

This also seems to be pretty weak in terms of justifying how Google has benefited from the network effect.  In fact, I’d argue that the “experience effect” is simply a dressed-up way of saying, “Google works better.”

People keep using Google because it is better than the alternatives, not because of a network effect.

I believe that the reason economists, analysts and investors like “the network effect” is because it makes it easier to quantify how a monopoly can be created.

UX is more abstract, more difficult to quantify.

It’s also scary to think that once a business gets rolling, it has to keep innovating UX to maintain a competitive advantage.  It’s more comforting to rely on the network effect to sustain momentum at scale.

I think it would be stupid to argue against the concept of a network effect.  In peer-to-peer markets (e.g. PayPal) or online marketplaces with a limited commodity (e.g. eBay), the network effect is a very real and powerful thing.

In information marketplaces where the company doesn’t own the information (e.g. Google), I’d argue that UX is a more important variable than the network effect.

The post In some online markets, monopolies are created through UX appeared first on Stuff I think.

This week, I’m going to use the wheel to contextualize contemporary marketing applications.

I see things generally breaking down like this:

The point is that different marketing applications help the wheel at different times:

• Awareness – The key here is that you are attempting to reach people who aren’t already in your direct network and bring them into your network.  PR, SEO and advertising are the main tools here.
• Engagement – Once a prospect has been brought into the network, the engagement process is usually supported through direct sales (enabled through a CRM) and some marketing platform.  Most marketing platforms seem to combine automated elements with planned elements.
• Action – The action phase is normally preempted by sales although marketing’s influence is still felt here.
• Evaluation – Post-action, a customer is normally influenced by a combination of automated metrics (facilitated normally by product); post-conversion sales interactions; and services/support (this is normally in a different department).  The majority of this interaction still takes place on a CRM.

A few thoughts on all this:

• Product hasn’t been addressed but with engagement tactics like free trials and freemium versions, product is an integral player throughout the entire process.
• Most marketing platforms I’ve taken a look at seem to focus primarily on the engagement & action stages but neglect the first stage – awareness.  In other words, they are pretty good at moving prospects through the cycle but tend to not be great at getting prospects into the cycle.
• No one really talks about it but spam is still pretty effective.  I created “e-mail” as a category above but that references “e-mail marketing” to the actual list that you obtained in accordance with best practices.  Spam would be more focused around the “awareness” phase.
• I’m still trying to wrap my head around the landing pages functionality that most marketing ASPs offer.  Are these really any better than just creating pages through your own CMS?
• One of the main challenges that all of these marketing suites face, is control of the Website.  I still haven’t seen any killer approaches to helping clients improve the marketing capabilities of their own Websites.  I’m all ears if anyone has any suggestions.  I do think there is probably a pretty significant marketing opportunity for a service that can link content management systems pretty seamlessly – a meta CRM, so to speak.
• I have a feeling that as you get further on down the wheel, your data and operations get a lot more co-mingled with the platform you are using.  This probably lowers churn rates considerably (and also decreases close rates I would imagine).

The post How different applications influence the marketing wheel appeared first on Stuff I think.

HubSpot’s founder Brian Halligan is credited with coining the term “inbound marketing,” which seems to have gained relatively widespread adoption (at least within the marketing sector).

According to Halligan, “Inbound Marketing is marketing focused on getting found by customers.”

So, inbound marketing is just search engine optimization, right?  After all, the major difference between today and yesterday (when “outbound marketing” was the taste du jour) is that more people are using search engines to find products and services.

According to Halligan, it consists of three components:

(1) Content – Content creation is the core of any Inbound Marketing campaign. It is the information or tool that attracts potential customers to your site or your business.

(2) Search Engine Optimization – Search engine optimization makes it easier for potential customers to find your content. It is the practice of building your site and inbound links to your site to maximize your ranking in search engines, where most of your customers begin their buying process.

(3) Social Media – Social media amplifies the impact of your content. When your content is distributed across and discussed on networks of personal relationships, it becomes more authentic and nuanced, and is more likely to draw qualified customers to your site.

So according to Halligan, inbound marketing is based on content, SEO and social media.  It sort of makes sense although I’m still not convinced it is anything different than a holistic approach to SEO.

To see if I could gather a little more clarity around how inbound marketing is any different than SEO, I gathered the following definitions:

This is a process by which you build and distribute valuable content that enables new customers to find out about your business without direct involvement on your part. – Aj Kumar, Entrepreneur.com

This seems pretty similar to “SEO” (on a side note, isn’t creating and distributing valuable content is the very definition of “direct involvement”?)

Inbound marketing is about helping yourself get found by people who have made the choice to learn a little bit more about your industry. Permission marketing is based on content that attracts and nurtures prospects, as opposed to commercials, spam, billboards or phone calls that interrupt them. - Isaiah Adams, Inbound Marketing Blog

The definition of “inbound marketing” seems tantamount to SEO.  I’m not entirely sure about the second point: it seems as though “permission marketing” is synonymous with “interesting content.”

Inbound marketing involves getting found by your potential customers through search. – Some person on the WordStream blog

I sort of liked how this guy actually just admitted that inbound marketing is SEO.

After spending some time reading a variety of perspectives on “inbound marketing,” here are some things I think:

1. There is a lot of preoccupation with channels (e.g. social, direct mail, etc.) in the various representations of “inbound marketing.”  I think some of this is due to the fact that Halligan’s original definition used channels to distinguish between “inbound marketing” and “outbound marketing” and most of the other representations are just variations of his original definition.  That being said, there is plenty of spam on search engines and social media just like there is plenty of good content on TV and print.  Getting dogmatic about channels always seemed a little close minded to me.
2. Inbound marketing isn’t that different than holistic SEO; it just sound better.  SEO sounds technical and conjures images of a nerdy guy modifying title tags; inbound marketing makes me think about a sharply dressed executive with a creative team, thinking about how to change perceptions.  That being said, there isn’t much difference.  Good SEO is about structuring things properly, creating good content, building authority and getting cheap traffic.
3. The most difficult things about inbound marketing are, in order of difficulty: 1. Creating good content; 2. Getting people to write about your content (and link to it); and 3. Engaging on social media without being annoying and spammy.  Consequently, a solution would focus on solving those problems but most inbound marketing solutions seem to primarily focus on facilitating activity (not optimizing it).
4. In Tom Taulli’s Forbes article, Hubspot Nabs $35 Million to Revolutionize Marketing” (I think the word “revolutionize” is a little reckless), Halligan talks about how they were inspired by Apple: “Apple realized that the best approach was to make a device that was simple for mere mortals.”  I think that’s pretty important because Apple differentiated from existing products based on design; they didn’t necessarily introduce a completely new product into the market.  Similarly, HubSpot’s differentiator seems to be their design (and educational overlay throughout the UI).  The idea that they are actually enabling an entirely unique and new form of marketing just seems a little overblown to me.

What do you think?

The post What is inbound marketing? Just a sexier version of SEO? appeared first on Stuff I think.

More recently, I’ve been looking more carefully at the marketing ASP space and trying to fit the pieces together.  After trying to contextualize marketing ASPs against the classic marketing funnel, it started to become apparent that it just doesn’t work.

That’s not really anything new: most pundits have been talking about the death of the classic marketing funnel for years.  What I haven’t seen are any great suggestions for a new model.

Brian Haven from Forrester has attempted to solve the problem by adding a maze and some arrows to the funnel:

Seth Godin has approached the topic in a post that seems to primarily focus on keyword purchasing strategies, although it does illustrate the problem with bucketing “prospects” and “customers.”  Adam Cohen from Fleishman Hillard and David Rogers have both added another layer to the funnel.  

Something about the last diagram stuck out and eventually, I realized it wasn’t the additional layer that added value to the model; it was the arrow, which rendered the entire concept of a “funnel” sort of irrelevant.  Following a similar logic, Steven Noble from Forrester offers what I think is the most reasonable model:

Not wanting to pay the $500 for the Forrester report, I was happy to find an explanation for the model on Forbes.  The funny thing about the actual break-down is it still seems funnel-ish to me: it offers a very linear view of a consumer’s journey: a consumer encounters a brand; thinks about the purchase; makes the purchase; and then engages with the vendor.

In my view, a more realistic model of how today’s consumer purchases is best represented in a circular manner; not a linear one and the various steps actually are circular.  In a nutshell, I basically think that consumption is experimentation.

Awareness - Initially, a consumer has a certain perspective of their market need and the various brands & products that are available to them.  Awareness is created when marketing efforts put a brand on their radar.  This can either be through their own efforts (e.g. referral, search) or through the efforts of the brand (e.g. advertising, direct mail).

Engagement – In this phase, the customer actually engages with the specific brand by either learning more about it, getting referrals, testing a demo or chatting with a sales rep.  This is when they get their feet wet and really start thinking about whether or not they want to take the next step.

Action - This is where the consumer actually puts their money down.

Evaluation – This is where the consumer considers the value the brand provides.  Based on their changed perspective, they will either continue to go through the cycle with the same brand / product or switch to a new one.

The fundamental problem I have with the funnel concept is that it would lead you to believe that once a consumer purchases your product, they are a customer.  That just isn’t true.  Consumers are perpetually evaluating and re-evaluating their purchasing decisions. I believe that by starting to think about purchasing as experimentation will have very positive consequences for the way marketers think about both prospects and customers.

The post The marketing wheel – purchasing as experimentation appeared first on Stuff I think.

First, I used US Census data (2007) to establish the number of businesses in the US, along with total revenue, plotted on the following graph of # of firms versus total sales/receipts.

Then, I applied estimates for marketing expenditures as a percentage of total revenue from two sources: the CMO Survey (February 2012) and Borrell Associates (2009) data.  The CMO Survey has pretty good data on companies with annual revenues of around $25M and up; while Borrell has pretty good estimates for SMBs.  The calculation gave me the following graph (# of firms versus aggregate marketing expenditures).

The spike obviously stuck out to me.  Part of the reason that spike is there is due to the US Census breakdown.  They lump companies that have between 100 to 499 employees into one category and then switch to increments of 250 for the next two gradations.  The spike is also apparent in the previous graph (although not pronounced).

The other thing to note though, is that according to the CMO Survey, companies that earn between $26 – $100 million spend a higher percentage of their overall revenue on marketing than larger companies, which does seem to make sense – companies at this stage are likely spending more on marketing than smaller companies (which are preoccupied with staying afloat) and larger, more established companies.

At any rate, using the model, I came up with a total count of about $1.8 trillion spent in a given year on marketing, in the US, which seems ludicrous and it’s probably due to some inflated numbers coming out of the CMO marketing survey.

Decreasing marketing expenditures as a percentage of revenue for companies between $100 – $499 million, from 14.7% to 10% (the August 2012 responses); and marketing expenditures as a percentage of revenue for companies over $1B down to 2%.

Here’s what I think is probably a more realistic estimate of marketing budget (as a pct of total revenue) versus company size.

This estimate would get the aggregate marketing budget closer to $1.3 trillion or so, which seems a bit more realistic.

The post How much is spent on marketing each year, in the US? appeared first on Stuff I think.

After about a year of being preoccupied with this, I’ve come to a few realizations:

When dealing with SMBs, churn is a fact of life 

According to Borrell, the churn rates for local SEM resellers like Yodle, who are primarily selling into the SMB market, can range from 50% to 90%.  First-hand experience with other SMB marketing services (including BuildZoom) shows that as you move downstream in the market, churn rates simply increase.

This is partially due to the simple economic reality of small businesses.  About two-thirds of businesses with employees survive at least two years and about half survive at least five years.

The vast majority of start-ups are considered small businesses and start-ups just aren’t that likely to survive.  Their natural mortality rate has a material impact on the churn rate for SaaS products that serve the SMB segment.

For lower cost SaaS applications, credit card expiration may be a greater source of churn than customer dissatisfaction 

This sounds nuts, but when it comes to customers with an ARPU below $200 or so, credit card expiration or cancellation probably results in just as much churn than customer dissatisfaction.  If you’re offering a service and are modeling an ARPU at this level, you need to get your billing platform tight.  There are a ton of SMBs out there that either don’t know or would siply rather let a $9 charge hit their credit card every month than spend the time to cancel (even if they aren’t using the service).  Banking on customer ignorance or laziness isn’t really a great business strategy but it’s worth considering when you are thinking about SMB churn.

Your most challenging competitor is free 

The high mortality rate for start-ups is an indicator of general financial turbulence within the segment.  Just because a start-up stays afloat, doesn’t mean the won’t have to make cuts in order to do so.  The discretionary nature of most SaaS applications means when times are tough, they are going to be one of the first cuts.  What’s more, the increasing availability of ad-driven, freemium or just flat out free applications means that SMBs seemingly always have a free alternative when it comes to performing certain functions.  If you’re paying $99 per month for a CRM (for example) and are having trouble making payroll, a lot of SMB decision makers would rather roll up their sleeves and start using Excel (or Google Apps) to manage customer relations as opposed to dolling out paycuts.  It’s absolutely imperative that whatever product you are offering, you can clearly differentiate from the free alternatives.

LTV / CAC is a more important metric than churn 

Churn is clearly important.  It’s hard to acquire a customer and when they leave, it not only a financial blow; but also an emotional one.    Most people consider churn an indictment of their product or customer service but the actual finances don’t always justify this perspective.   Consider Yodle versus Constant Contact.  The LTV of a customer acquired by Yodle may be $6,000 over 6 months while a Constant Contact customer’s LTV might be around $480 over 24 months (these numbers are purely speculative).  If it costs Yodle $300 to acquire a customer with $3,000 in COGS over their lifetime, that means that Yodle ends up with about $2,700 from the customer.  Meanwhile, Constant Contact might spend $200 to acquire a customer with a negligible COGS and end up with $280.  Constant Contact might have a far better annual churn rate but make less money at the end of the day.

This is an over-simplification that doesn’t account for the impact of brand perception, customer referrals, upsells, etc., but the point is that a high churn rate doesn’t always have to be a terrible thing – particularly when you’re talking about an SMB market with considerable track and a steady flow of newcomers.

Think about customer churn as customers “taking breaks” 

There are shorter sales cycles with SMBs because there is an implicit assumption that if something doesn’t work, they will simply cancel in a couple months.  SMBs are far more experimental in nature than their larger counterparts but just because they leave, it doesn’t mean they can’t be persuaded to come back – as long as their experience with you was at least average in nature.  This customer mindset should be accounted for in marketing, sales and packaging.  Although its not a marketing app, ShoeDazzle has a really cool packaging model that lets customers opt-out of certain months.  This approach is extremely applicable to businesses who can be more greatly impacted by seasonality than mid or large-market organizations.   Think about customers who churn as customers who are simply “taking a break,” and execute accordingly: you’ll find churn becomes far more palatable.

The post Dealing with churn when selling SaaS to SMBs appeared first on Stuff I think.

In the financial publishing business, it’s a common practice to create profile pages for publicly traded companies so investors can easily get all the information they need at a glance.   The profile pages are populated with a bunch of information – SEC filings, key employees, the stock price and news about the company (to name just a few of the content types).   Here’s an example of the news showing up on Vocus’ profile page in the business section of SFGate (powered by FinancialContent).

The piece of data that makes all this possible is the company’s ticker symbol – a unique identifier that allows financial publishers to reconcile content about an entity, with that entity.  If the article has a ticker symbol, it makes it pretty simple for the publisher to reconcile it with a profile page.

Some publishers have begun looking at ways to reconcile content with a profile page through inference.  Google Finance for example, algorithmically determines which stories should be reconciled with a profile page, albeit using the ticker as a major variable.  AOL (Daily Finance) is another publisher that algorithmically reconciles content with entities (via Relegence, a 2006 acquisition).

Big Data offers some interesting prospects for financial publishers moving forward.  If someone were able to offer a macro-level perspective of conversational trends about a public company on Twitter for example, that would seem to be something that investors would want to see on a profile page.  I’d also think that analysis of a company’s shipping records via a trade intelligence solution like ImportGenius, would be a value add to public company pages.

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I have to admit that despite working on BuildZoom for the past couple years, I hadn’t seen HouseFix pop-up very much.  This, combined with the somewhat light TechCrunch article (shouldn’t they have more of an insider scoop?) makes it hard to perform a very meaty autopsy of the start-up.

A couple thoughts:

1. Empson points to their attempt to differentiate by “creating a social context by which people could find peer reviews, i.e. recommendations they could trust, knowing they came from their neighbors.”  In theory, this is a fantastic vision – after all, companies have been trying for years to simulate the act of talking with your neighbors across the fence to get advice – although I suppose it does beg the question, why not just knock on your neighbor’s door and get advice?

Regardless, the primary challenge here is that it’s hard enough to create a network effect in low-transactional verticals (like home improvement).  A quick glance at the dearth of reviews on big players like CitySearch or Google Local/Places/+ (which has gone through more incarnations than Madonna) reveal just how difficult it is.  So if you are planning to go one level deeper into the social graph in a space where any review is hard to acquire, it’s going to be a long road.  In fact, the only local player who has really done this to any extent is Angie’s List, and they have been at it for over a decade.

2. The fact that I haven’t seen them pop-up other than through TechCrunch articles forwarded to me by friends is also a little disconcerting because I’m looking at local search results all day long.  I can almost recite the players I expect to see – ServiceMagic, Angie’s List, ThumbTack, CitySearch.  When it comes to looking at local search results, I’m like Norm from Cheers so when I hear about a company that I’ve never seen appear once, I find it disconcerting.  It’s entirely possible they just neglected the search angle entirely, which is a big no-no in local.

3. If you’re going to go for a UX play, there are other verticals where you might be better off.  Home improvement contractors (bless them) are too busy running their business and building houses to experiment with new platforms.  The only way you’re going to get adoption in this vertical is if A. They hear about you from people they trust; B. You sell to them directly; or C. They think there is a job and revenue waiting for them.  Contractors don’t really care if you launch at TechCrunch Disrupt.

At any rate, from what I remember, they had a pretty slick design and some admirable ideas but execution is hard.  I’d love to hear more about why they closed shop if anyone knows anything.

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