SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today, Thumbtack announces the future of its platform, focused on enabling the future of work for millions of local services professionals across the U.S. The company is unveiling an entirely new suite of automated features that empower pros to manage, scale and market their businesses. This starts with Instant Match, which matches customers and pros in real time, sending estimates on behalf of professionals automatically, while they work on other jobs.
“Instant Match is the first critical step toward making it as easy to shop for local services as it is to buy anything else online. It allows us to offer instant access to hundreds of thousands of professionals who can complete any job, nationwide,” said Marco Zappacosta, co-founder and CEO of Thumbtack. “We’re creating the tools and infrastructure needed to help these local professionals grow their business at the speed and scale of the web and compete in today’s mobile and e-commerce landscape.”
Thumbtack has built the largest local services data set in the U.S., with eight years of data across 250,000 pros, 25 million customer requests and more than 1,000 different categories, including direct insight into what jobs pros are interested, available and qualified for and at what price. Leveraging this data and predictive models, Thumbtack has effectively created an inventory system for local services that can automatically match a customer with a specific need to a qualified pro for the job.
Thumbtack already powers the businesses of local professionals across the U.S. by connecting them to customers who have a job they need done. However, until now, that required pros to manually review and respond to each job request, a time-consuming process that was challenging in today’s on-demand mobile world, where speed of response often meant the difference between winning or losing a job.
According to Zappacosta, “Forty percent of Thumbtack pros work alone, without the advantages of front office assistance or infrastructure built into a medium or large company. Instant Match levels the playing field by doing a lot of the manual work on behalf of our pros, using technology, which empowers small businesses to grow.”
Today, Instant Match is available in more than 50 categories, with 11 categories available nationwide, including: DJ, home inspection, limousine and chauffeur, massage therapy, motivational speaking, personal training, photo booth rental, wedding coordination, wedding officiant, piano lessons and house cleaning. Instant Match will be enabled across all categories on Thumbtack in 2018.
Instant Match for Professionals
Local professionals want to focus on their craft and grow their business, but often lack the back-office systems or a sales team to find and land jobs. Instant Match removes this challenge by gathering a comprehensive set of preferences, skills, pricing, budget and availability from the pro. By capturing the specific details and the many subtle nuances of their trade, Thumbtack sends the professional’s price estimate, tailored profile and availability instantly to the customer in need of their specific talent. The professional only pays when interested customers reply.
The dynamic tool provides a better way for pros to manage their business from a single dashboard, including marketing their work, fine-tuning their preferences and managing the right number of customers. Additionally, for the first time, pros will receive competitive insights based on Thumbtack’s data to help them price and find opportunities to expand their business, whether that’s looking at the impact of expanding where they work or offering additional services.
“From the beginning, Thumbtack has tripled if not quadrupled my business. I started my photobooth company from scratch on Instant Match and now I'm working as a DJ/photo booth operator full-time. The DJ I worked for when I first started turning in high school now works for me. The growth Thumbtack has afforded me has been just amazing. Now I feel like I have an assistant working on this for me, which frees my time to work on things that will help me actually close jobs. It’s like I have an admin taking care of the quoting for me,” Joel Scott, photo booth rental and DJ company, New Jersey.
Instant Match for Customers
For the first time, customers can now shop for local services they need as quickly and easily as they shop for anything online. With Instant Match, customers submit a request and receive up to five qualified estimates in real-time for free. Each customer sees custom results based on their job -- specifically based on budget, location, schedule and other special needs outlined in their request. To help customers identify the exact right pro to complete their job, Thumbtack provides details regarding how many qualified professionals are in their area, price estimates, in addition to reviews, designations and images of work.
About Thumbtack
Powering the businesses of over 250,000 local professionals per quarter, Thumbtack is one of the largest local services companies in the U.S., offering over 1,000 categories, with a working professional in every county in the U.S. Thumbtack helped customers complete millions of jobs -- from a plumbing, to catering, to personal training to math tutoring -- which generated over $1 billion in earnings to professionals in 2016. Founded in 2009 and headquartered in San Francisco, Thumbtack is backed by Sequoia Capital, Google Capital, Tiger Global Management, Javelin Investment Partners and Baillie Gifford. For more information, visit www.thumbtack.com.
For more information, contact: thumbtack@thehatchagency.com