In 2012, Umang Dua and I founded Handy to solve a simple problem: to make it easy to buy and sell home services. Since then, we’ve been fortunate to be part of an incredible journey, one that saw Handy raise over $100 million, hire one of the most talented teams I’ve ever been a part of, support millions of bookings, help tens of thousands of pros earn money, and sign partnerships with the biggest retailers in the world.

All along that journey, we found one of the key pillars to our success was our product. Handy started out with a small team operating out of an apartment, manually connecting customers and pros with hundreds of phone calls. Today, we employ sophisticated scheduling and routing algorithms that power millions of bookings, along with a lovingly designed app that makes it simple for customers to book a pro, wherever and whenever they need one. By creating a convenient, consistent product experience, we were able to compete and win in the highly competitive, fragmented market of everyday home services.

Last October marked another important milestone when we joined the world-class team at ANGI Homeservices after they acquired Handy. ANGI Homeservices is a clear leader in the overall $400 billion home services industry, with their 12 brands, including HomeAdvisor and Angie’s List, defining the market in terms of scale and expertise.

Since Handy joined ANGI, I’ve learned so much from the leadership team there, especially CEO Brandon Ridenour who, as Chief Product Officer during the time of the Handy acquisition, worked closely alongside the Handy team during the due diligence process. Over the course of the last year, we’ve found that we share a vision for the future of home services and the digital tools that should help consumers seamlessly connect with quality service pros.

This is why over the summer I took on the role of Chief Product Officer of ANGI Homeservices. In this role, I have an unprecedented opportunity to use the lessons that we learned at Handy to help steer the future of a $400 billion market. Consumers all around the world use our brands to help with over 20 million projects each year. As Chief Product Officer, I have the incredible opportunity to build amazing experiences for millions of customers and pros through our brands and products.

Over the coming months, we intend to focus on building products that create deeper relationships between those brands, consumers, and pros — features that reduce friction in booking and scheduling. Most importantly, we are going to focus on making products that delight customers and lead to higher customer satisfaction and more repeat usage.

In addition to my role as Chief Product Officer of ANGI Homeservices, I intend to stay on as CEO of Handy. Leveraging Handy’s technology and network will be a key part of how we build the best experience possible across the ANGI Homeservices’ brands.

We’ve spent the whole summer heads down with the product and engineering teams working on changing the product experience at HomeAdvisor as a first step. I’m incredibly excited about what we have in store.

Can brands like Casper, B8ta and Warby Parker help?

In life, most people regularly face the challenge of how to avoid spreading themselves too thin. Businesses face this challenge in the form of breadth vs depth. How broad does a business need to go to reach enough customers and make its economics work? On the other hand, how deep does a business need to go in any one area or vertical to make its customers exceptionally happy?

Right now, retailers are wrestling with the question of breadth of products vs. depth of knowledge and customer support. The broader a retailer goes in terms of product selection and variety, the less support and expertise they can offer in any one vertical. Amazon has obviously gone the broadest of all, with a goal of offering every product under the sun. However, they have not stopped there. They are attempting to provide reviews, support and — crucially — installation and customer services for more and more products.

As the economy continues to strengthen, we are seeing disposable incomes rise. This increase in consumer affluence brings higher expectations, which in turn drives the growth of more speciality retailers and direct-to-consumer brands. As disposable income grows, consumers are willing to spend more on everyday items while demanding higher levels of service. We’re seeing the continued rise of brands like Casper in sleep, Away in luggage and Warby Parker in eyewear. We’re also seeing all of these brands move from online to offline.

As Amazon pushes the boundaries of customer expectations in terms of personalization, service and support, other broad-reach retailers are competing by gaining depth in key areas, either through partnerships or acquisitions.Walmart, for example, recently acquired Bonobos to develop a deeper product line in menswear. The Bonobos product set is very different to the menswear offering previously sold by Walmart. Similarly, Target has taken a point of view that sleep and bed-related items are an important category where they needed the expertise of Casper to compete. As a result, we’ve seen Target invest in Casper and gain exclusive access to their catalogue of sleep items for a period of time.

An interesting store-in-store model has also emerged for categories that require more expertise and in-person selling. On the customer side of the equation, this means that these categories require more education and service. One of the best examples of this trend if the recent announcement of a partnership between Lowe’s and B8ta, to help Lowe’s sell smart home products and electronics. These products need more support than the average item sold at Lowe’s, so it makes sense for the retailer to partner with B8ta to offer a great buying experience.

The in-store experience offered by B8ta enables the consumer to enjoy a real out-of-the-box trial of every product, since each is merchandized on a display with no packaging. The B8ta model is also unique in that the company has no incentive to push any particular product — B8ta’s revenue is driven by rent from product display rather than commissions or product placement. This seamless buying experience continues as the customer walks out of the store with a product in hand. Instead of spending time and energy going through a frustrating installation and setup, customers can now skip right to enjoying the full product experience via installation or assembly provided by Handy. We’re excited to partner with B8ta to offer this service in their new retail model.

If consumers continue to push for higher service models, retailers will need more partnerships or acquisitions to compete with a deep service offering, even in a broad set of categories.

Disclosure: The author is the CEO of Handy. Handy has commercial relationships with retailers in home goods and electronics, including B8ta. The author also has equity positions in major retailers.

Do retailers need to be broad or deep to survive? was originally published in GoBeyond.AI: AI Agents and Automation Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I was recently at a conference where a speaker asked the audience: put your hand up if you have a “smart home”. Very slowly three out of five hundred hands went up. The speaker expected this response, obviously this was his routine. Apparently nobody thinks they have a smart home. So, why is there so much hype. Why is Amazon pushing the Echo so hard? Why is Google pushing the Google Home so hard? Why is Samsung pushing Bixby? Why does McKinsey have a Connected Home practice?

Then the speaker asked: “hands up if you have an Amazon Echo… or a Google Home… or a Nest Cam… or a Sonos speaker, or an August Smart Lock, or a Philips Hue light bulb?” In 30 seconds four hundred of the five hundred hands in the audience were in the air.

Largely people don’t identify as buying abstract things they don’t understand. People aren’t buying smart homes, but they are buying specific technology driven solutions or experiences. Unless they are early adopters, people don’t buy technology for the sake of technology, they buy it to solve a problem or to have an experience. The smart products people are buying are the thin end of the wedge. But what’s at the other end of that wedge?

It helps to imagine a future state to see who has the most to lose. Imagine a world where you’re in your kitchen making Sunday dinner and you run out of aluminum foil. You say “Housebot, order more aluminum foil”, and magically the voice activated box in the corner of your kitchen orders whatever foil you ordered last time. If this happens for foil, paper towels, olive oil, milk, butter, eggs and the hundreds of household products that are replacement purchases then a very large shift in power will have occurred. Retailers will have lost, Google will have lost, Amazon will have lost, and whoever controls the voice activated search box will have won.

The search bar will have become the voice activated bot in the corner of your room, the “buy button” will be your voice, and the shopping aisle for all replenishment items will be your kitchen. This is scary for retailers and the dominant player in search today — Google. The race is on to do everything possible to win the battle of the voice activated bots. The race is on to get you to put a Google Home or an Amazon Echo in your home.

For consumable retailers and search giants the goal is not to make money from selling you smart home products as an end result in itself, but to own the voice activated box in the corner of your home. One of the ways to do that is to show you the value of all the things you can connect to it — locks, speakers, cameras etc. That’s why Google and Amazon are not just pushing the Echo or the Google Home, but instead they are using the practical use case of lights, speakers and locks to encourage you into the smart home eco system. They are the thin end of the wedge.

It’s still unclear if marketshare of the voice activated box will follow the same marketshare dynamics as the search bar — where Google today has 90%+ of the search market. What is clear is that Amazon is leading the charge today with Echo having more market share than Google Home, Samsung’s Bixby, or Microsoft’s Cortana, and Apple has yet to release a smart hub product.

For hardware retailers like Home Depot and Lowe’s there is a different game at play. Unlike Google who makes money from monetizing intention and search, or supermarkets who primarily make money from selling consumable goods, Home Depot and Lowe’s make money from selling hardware and hard goods. As homes get smarter they get more complicated to manage. It’s relatively easy for most customers to buy one smart home product, e.g. a Sonos speaker and install it. However people aren’t going to stop there. People are going to add more and more smart home products and then expect them to interact in a consistent way. After the smart speaker, people will buy smart lights, thermostats, cameras, locks and more. It gets complicated fast when you’ve got dozens of wifi devices connected to your router.

Some of the biggest categories for hardware retailers are: roofing, flooring, HVAC, kitchen and bathroom. As homes get smarter retailers selling these categories will experience disruption. Roofing, flooring, kitchen and bathroom installs will increasingly need smart temperature and humidity management systems, security system integration and more. If home improvement retailers get left behind in the push to smart home then their core business of roofing, flooring, kitchen and bathroom will be destroyed as they lose the competency to sell the customer the home products they need. The more the search companies and supermarket retailers compete to accelerate smart home adoption the faster Home Depot and Lowes need to run to keep up or someone else will emerge to serve their customers with smart home improvement solutions.

Some of the big questions that remain unanswered include, how will the voice control markets breakdown between Google, Amazon and others? How will Apple enter the eco system? And what are the limitations on what products will be ordered by talking to the box in your kitchen?

Irrespective of these big questions, “smart home” as a term may not be working for consumers, but the individual products are selling rapidly and for supermarkets, retailers and search companies the stakes are huge.

Smart home has the potential to destroy the search bar.

It’s an exciting time to be in retail.

~

Disclosure: The author is the CEO of Handy. Handy has commercial relationships with major retailers in home goods and electronics. The author also has equity positions in major retailers.

Does Anybody Have a Smart Home? was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For you and me, it’s the golden age of online retail. The retail experience is the best it’s ever been. It’s more convenient, the prices are lower, and the service levels are the highest they’ve ever been. It’s a magical time to be a consumer. And it’s about to get even better.

As the battle for fast, free delivery of consumer goods to your doorstep draws toward a close, the next battle is just starting up and it will happen inside your front door. This is the battle to setup, install and assemble all the home goods and electronics you’ll ever buy. And Amazon is already playing to win.

There are three big trends that are driving the change in where the battle is being fought:

1 — Expectations have shifted — more people expect to be able to buy complete solutions and experiences — they want instant gratification not brown cardboard boxes.

Customer expectations are only going in one direction — and it isn’t down. The same customers who have become accustomed to 15-minute Dominos pizza delivery, an Uber in 5 minutes, and every movie / song they’ve every dreamed of available in 5 seconds expect solutions to problems to be available immediately.

2 — Technology has finally enabled the delivery of local services at scale. Technology has made it possible for consumers to expect more services.

Mass mobile data, online payments, geo-location, remote identity verification, etc. are the trucks, distribution centers and mega stores of services. Now that the technology and infrastructure that enables distributed services is ubiquitous and the demand is here, it is inevitable that platforms providing these services will exist.

3 — Installation and manual skills are in decline — (assembly, hanging shelves, drilling, electrical).

Craftsmanship / manual skills have traditionally been learned at work, school or home. Manual manufacturing jobs are in decline, vocational training in schools has hit rock bottom, and at home a culture of replacing broken products has dominated the inclination to repair them. There are fewer and fewer places for people to learn DIY skills.

Put simply: people expect more, technology has made mass service delivery possible and people have the skills to do less and less manual work. It’s time for retailers to help setup, install and assemble everything you buy.

The flip side of the change in the battle lines is that it’s a terrifying time to be a retailer. It’s a terrifying time to be a brand. It’s a terrifying time to be in e-commerce. Toys “R” Us is in bankruptcy. One of the strongest brands of our generation, Nike, has capitulated and is officially selling on Amazon. Calvin Klein has gone a step further and is offering certain products exclusively on Amazon. More than half of every incremental e-commerce dollar spent in 2016 went to Amazon.

While the landscape has changed drastically in food, fashion and consumer goods over the last five years, the home goods, furniture, and home improvement market has been left relatively unscathed by Amazon. Judging by their stock prices, The Home Depot, Lowes and others in their category have had a relatively easy ride for the last 5 years. That’s about to change.

About a third of all the hard goods people buy needs some form of installation or assembly. TVs need to be mounted on walls, blinds need to be installed on windows, furniture needs to be assembled, lighting needs electrical work. Retailers without services that turn the boxes they sell into solutions and experiences for their customer will have a serious problem very soon. Arguably they have this problem today.

Today Amazon is pushing further into home goods and is starting to offer free installation and assembly on certain products. On certain categories, installation and assembly will become what two-day shipping was in 2005 — something retailers need to offer to their best customers as standard or they will get left behind by Amazon.

It’s a wonderful time to be a consumer. Enjoy it while it lasts.

~

Disclosure: The author is the CEO of Handy. Handy has commercial relationships with major retailers in home goods and electronics. The author also has equity positions in major retailers.

We recently had a speaker join us at Handy for one of our monthly fireside chats who shared some good advice — “Don’t conflate hard decisions with emotionally hard decisions.” This is sound counsel for anyone in life as well as in startups. But like most good advice, it’s easier to offer than to follow. Especially when it means letting go of good people who helped us on our goal of trying to build something great.

Over the course of building Handy, we’ve made both of these types of decisions. Hard decisions are the ones with two right answers, but different possible outcomes for the organization — where additional analysis or due diligence today will not provide more certainty about which answer is more right. Emotionally hard decisions are those with one right answer that you know will lead to the best outcome for the platform. They are also the ones that, because of the immediate consequences of the decision, sit in the pit of your stomach, like a heavy weight. Confusing the two may keep you from acting, even when you know the decision is right for your organization.

Because fast-growing startups like ours are learning, growing and scaling at a faster pace than most organizations, we’ve learned this lesson sooner rather than later, and we are glad we have. This is how we got here.

At different inflection points in our journey, we’ve needed to test and prove new questions or assumptions about how to best move forward and get the job done. This has required Handy to evolve over time.

The first version of Handy (then Handybook) was designed to test product and market fit and answer the question: will people use our platform? We acquired customers with a street team of brand ambassadors handing out flyers, onboarded professionals in our personal apartments, and packed individual cleaning supplies from the local Target into makeshift backpacks to offer as supply kits. A team of agents “dispatched” job notifications by phone, calling and messaging back and forth between customers and professionals to arrange bookings. This was the first version of Handy. It looked nothing like the disruptive end state technology solution that inspired us (and our investors). It was not scalable, but it helped deliver the first bookings and get our idea off the ground.

From there, we gradually moved our focus on to a different question: could we execute with consistent, repeatable processes at a greater transaction volume and in new markets? In this phase of Handy’s growth, we introduced online customer acquisition channels, a more functional booking flow, automated job notifications via SMS, and a supply chain where pre-packed optional supply kits were shipped to local offices from a central warehouse. Professional onboarding sessions were now hosted by local operations associates in rented conference rooms in local shared workspaces across the country. This phase put us on the map across 28 cities.

We’re now in the next iteration of Handy and focused on being a scalable, sustainable organization. Today, we’re fortunate that hundreds of thousands of customers and professionals depend on the Handy platform to make their lives better. This means we need to be operationally and financially built to last, so we can continue to be around to help the people who use and rely on our platform. Simply put, this is the stage where we optimize Handy for enduring long-term growth, and we have spent the last year executing on a plan to get us there. Specifically, we’ve closely examined how to make two significant product functions better for our customers and professionals and for us as a platform: customer service and the onboarding of professionals.

A year ago, we had an average of four customer service interactions per booking — customers were contacting us by phone, email and chat an average of four times each time they booked a service. We have worked hard to fix this and have done so by building a better product that enables customers and professionals to do more and more on their own — things like rescheduling, canceling, rating, tipping, and other frequent requests that can be resolved faster when they are in the driver’s seat.

Today, we’ve successfully reduced the number of interactions to 0.3 contacts per booking. We’ve done this while answering 90% of customer queries within 100 minutes and dramatically increasing customer satisfaction. The result is that we can focus on and prioritize complicated issues, resolve them faster, and deliver better customer experiences.

When it comes to onboarding professionals, we’ve transformed a very manual process that involved more than 40 people and made it significantly more efficient by automating where it made sense. Today, the automated process includes an initial application screen, ID scanning, facial recognition, federal, state and county background checks, bank account validation, phone number validation and platform registration. By automating these functions, we are allowing more qualified professionals to register on the platform who can then offer their services to more customers. These changes also allow us to significantly improve our unit economics, setting us up for long-term sustainability.

As we’ve transformed Handy over the last three years, our priorities have changed as well and the mantra has gone from “do things that work now” to “build things that scale.” Along the way, we assembled a great team to help with each of these different stages and objectives. While building the best team possible has always been a priority, the nature of the team — the skills, the experience levels, the headcount — has had to keep pace with Handy’s evolving needs. Take a look:

The earliest part of the journey required an energetic team that was ready for anything, people willing to get their hands dirty — to hand out flyers, pack supplies, handle customer calls and so on. If we wanted to quickly test a new “feature”, but didn’t have enough engineers to build it — we’d hire people to do the manual work to make it happen, no matter how inefficient it was.

Now, fast forward to where we are today. Our aim is to optimize Handy for where we want to go over the long-term and support as many customers and professionals as possible. This means building self service functionality for customers and professionals and automating internal processes — and building a team that is best suited for this challenge. We’ve increased our engineering and product teams from 20 people a year ago to over 60 people today, and are still aggressively expanding this team to ensure we are continually improving.

Each time we reached the next stage of product development, we have needed to make changes to ensure the team matched the direction we are headed. In many cases, employees who had been at Handy from the beginning were able to learn a new skill or build specialty — going from street team member to engineer, from customer support agent to customer support manager, or from local operations associate to supply chain manager. While we tried to foster as many of these transitions as possible, it wasn’t realistic for everyone. We had to make the emotionally difficult decision to let go of people whose roles no longer existed — amazing people who were critical to building the early versions of Handy. This included several people who helped us launch our first markets outside of New York — like D.C. and San Francisco — markets we knew nothing about at the time, and it was these teammates’ hustle that helped us get a foothold into those cities and out-run our competitors. It included someone who had helped us hire the majority of the customer service and operations teams that allowed us to scale. And it included someone who helped us manually dispatch hundreds of unfilled bookings a week by working late into the night.

There is no way around it — these were some of the hardest decisions we’ve made as an organization. The backbone of Handy’s success has always been our talented people, and it is tough to say goodbye to even one team member.

At the same time, all of these decisions were necessary as we moved to a better product and more sustainable platform. Our entire team is now 125 people. Because we made those hard decisions along the way, the team today manages a platform that handles millions of bookings worth hundreds of millions of dollars of income for our tens of thousands of professionals. This commitment to the best long-term experience for customers and professionals is absolute, and unfortunately, sometimes that means making emotionally hard decisions. We’re going to continue investing in our platform to make sure we deliver on this commitment and achieve the vision we have always had for Handy: seamlessly delivering every service to every home.

We are thankful to all of the Handy teammates — past and present — who have helped Handy get to where it is today and look ahead to the future.

Umang Dua & Oisin Hanrahan

Co-Founders — Handy

Trying to turn an idea into reality is hard — it’s hard because you don’t know where to start, it’s hard because convincing people to do things they haven’t done is hard, it’s hard because you need to believe something will work when everyone tells you it won’t. It’s hard because you don’t know where the line is between brilliant and stupid, and you’re not always sure which side you’re on. When we started Handy, we thought if we could just get to certain milestones — the thousandth customer, the ten-thousandth pro using the platform, the millionth booking made — it would get easier, that scaling is simpler to do than starting. It isn’t. We’ve learned this firsthand. Starting is hard. Scaling is harder.

The first scaling challenges always catch you by surprise, they wait until 6:00am on Sunday to call you and shake you awake. They come in the form of the distraught cleaner calling your phone to say they opened a customer’s front door and their cat, Muggles, escaped. They come in the form of your platform’s communication system struggling with the volume and then accidentally misrouting phone calls and messages. They come in the form of customer service tickets rapidly coming in and you not having the capacity to handle them. While starting challenges occur quietly in a corner of an incubator, or in your garage with a few friends, scaling challenges occur publicly while you’ve got hundreds of thousands of users watching you, waiting for you, relying on you. The consequences are bigger, the nuances are more important, and more people are reporting on what your company is doing, not doing or, worse, misconstruing both. The companies we respect the most, the ones we turn to for learning and inspiration have all had moments of scaling that challenged them to their core.

When we started Handy over 3 years ago we had challenges that we thought were our hardest. We didn’t know where our first customers would come from, we didn’t know how to decide which of the ten pros should be given access to the platform out of two hundred applicants, we didn’t know what price to charge, we didn’t know what to do when a cleaner didn’t show up to a job. But every instance of a problem was individually fixable, very fixable. It took but a phone call, or for us to ask a pro if they were interested in working a few extra hours, or for one of us to personally go and take care of a job. And then, we started to scale.

As Handy rapidly scaled from a dozen jobs a week to hundreds, to thousands, to tens of thousands, the scaling challenges came at us fast. And unlike the early days of Handy, where it was possible to fix each instance of a problem by dedicating all of our resources, it took us some time to realize that wasn’t possible at scale. At scale, it’s not possible to fix the instance. That’s fighting a losing battle. You actually have to fix the underlying problem at its root. This causes a seismic shift within the org when you realize you cannot fix each instance, and instead you have to fix each underlying problem. The obvious question to ask then is “why doesn’t a company work on all it’s problems before it begins to scale?” The challenge here is many times you don’t actually know what your scaling problems are till you reach that scale. The other seismic shift, is the realization that you can’t fix all the underlying problems at the same time. There’s a very important sequencing that occurs in terms of how to deal with the underlying problems that develop at a local services marketplace as you scale. And admittedly, we haven’t always gotten the sequencing right. Sometimes, we focused on fixing the wrong problems first.

Today, to help us better understand which problems to prioritize and where to focus our resources to deliver the best customer experience possible at our current scale, we use a simple pyramid:

1. The base level of the pyramid starts with trust — without trust nothing else matters. If your customers don’t trust you, they won’t use your service. If people didn’t trust the cleaners and handymen using the Handy platform to enter their homes, nothing else would matter. Through deep background checks, insurance, and a comprehensive customer rating system, the Handy platform has built trust with our consumers such that when a consumer comes to Handy they trust us enough to make a booking on the platform. One out of every two people that do a search on Handy make a booking — it wasn’t always like this. It has taken enormous effort to build to the current level of trust that exists with our consumers.

2. The second level in the pyramid is reliable logistics. To us, this means that whatever service is being delivered, it must consistently show up on time. We’ve spent the last three years building a platform that attempts to get 100% of pros to their customers at the right time. The biggest fail point at this level is the percentage of the time that a pro simply cancels their job at the last minute and the customer doesn’t get the service they requested. In our biggest cities, a year ago this was over 12%, today that number in New York is less than 2%. This means that for 98% of the bookings, the pro arrives for their customer at the scheduled time. That’s still not good enough. Our challenge today is to shrink that 2% to 0.2%.

3. Third is service delivery. At Handy, this means the quality of the service itself once the pro is at a customer’s home. Service delivery is one of the most subjective and hardest parts of local services, and improving it involves everything from the method for registering service professionals, to customer and pro rating systems, reliable feedback loops and educating the customer to ensure their expectations are properly aligned with the service that will be delivered. We maniacally focus on the percentage of 5 star cleanings that occur through the Handy platform — a year ago that was 60%, today over 70% of bookings are rated 5 stars and over 85% are rated 4 and 5 stars. We continue to focus on how to get to a world where 100% of bookings are rated 5 stars.

4. The fourth is incident resolution. As with many things in life, with local service delivery there is a probability of something going wrong. Unlike with goods, the incident rate for services is higher — there are more variables that could go wrong than in getting a package from A to B. As a result, it is important to have fast and effective incident resolution to deal with unexpected issues across logistics, service delivery and trust.

5. Fifth is service personalization. Imagine a world where your customers trust you, and the pros using the platform consistently show up on time and deliver a service your customers are happy with. The next step is to focus on personalization — how can individuals take an experience and make it theirs. We think about personalization not in the form of what standard items a person does inside your home, e.g. clean the kitchen vs clean the bathroom, but instead how they can personalize the experience at a level where it is obviously unique to you. This might include things like picking up cleaning items for you or stocking up on a few paper goods like paper towels, or using a specific scented cleaning product that your pro knows you like.

6. The last step, or the pinnacle of local service delivery is to do the unexpected — to deliver something amazing to customers that they didn’t even know they wanted. From leaving scented candles at our first customers’ homes and folding their towels into animal shapes, to the kittens delivered by Uber, we know what these “surprise and delight” moments can feel like. We hope to get here at scale.

Delivering Local Services at Scale

At Handy, we use the framework above to identify priorities in the stack of things to work on. Scaling is a never ending process of revisiting the same challenges at different volume points and learning from each and every one so that we get better and better. A few times over the last three years, scaling has caused Handy to slip down the stack and has required us to reevaluate parts of the platform that handle logistics or issue resolutions. There have even been a few days over the last year when our marketplace simply grew too quickly and the system that processes jobs broke down — this had meaningful downstream effects in the flow that causes tickets per job to go up and subsequently overwhelmed our customer service center. This pushes you all the way back down the stack to the problem of reliable logistics. There have even been times when we inadvertently tested the trust of some our customers as we moved our business to a recurring only model on web and an on-demand model on mobile. Although, we knew this was the right thing for most of our customers, we should have re-focused our efforts on communicating more and rebuilding the trust of the customers for whom it wasn’t, instead of continuing to focus on logistics at the time.

Today at Handy we’ve expanded our focus to steps 3 and 4 — consistently offering a high quality service and providing rapid resolution to user questions — these were problems we solved at ten thousand bookings, yet here we are revisiting them again at two million bookings with a more sophisticated team dedicated to addressing each one of them more effectively than before. At the end of the day, what we’ve learned the most about the challenges of scaling is that it never stops. At every moment in Handy’s history we can look back 3 months and say “I can’t believe that’s what we were doing 3 months ago, I can’t believe those were our challenges then”. We also know that while every moment feels like the most challenging moment, in 3 more months we’ll look back and say the same thing. They’ll be more challenging, the stakes will be higher and thankfully we’ll know that much more about how to solve them.

Umang Dua & Oisin Hanrahan

Co-Founders - Handy

P.S. In case you were wondering, we found Muggles and returned him safely to his owner.

Thanks to Paddy Cosgrave, Rebecca Greene, Philip Hanrahan, Scott Hilleboe, Spencer Lazar, Ken Little, Melody McCloskey, Pat Phelan, Alex Taussig and David Tisch who read drafts of this article and helped make it better.

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Starting a marketplace is hard. Scaling a marketplace is harder. was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.