Building Thumbtack and the Extraordinary Opportunity Ahead

by Raghavendra Prabhu, Engineering Director

$700 billion. That’s the scale of the market opportunity before us at Thumbtack. But the real challenge we’re undertaking is much, much bigger. We want to change the way you hire a plumber — and the way your plumber starts and builds their business. And we’re just getting started.

Let’s say you have a party next Saturday. You need a DJ. So you ask a friend for a recommendation. But your friend lives two zip codes away and their music taste couldn’t be more opposite. Next option — you get online to see who’s out there, scrolling through page after page of listings.

Meanwhile, your perfect DJ is only a few miles away. But they’re not a professional marketer and they don’t have one on their payroll. They can’t find you. You can’t find them. You two will never meet.

Which is why I joined Thumbtack.

It’s 2018, and it’s still too hard to hire a DJ — or an electrician, tutor, dog walker, lawyer, personal trainer — because the experience of hiring a local service professional hasn’t changed in decades, even as technology zoomed ahead.

Thumbtack solves this problem by intelligently matching customers with the pros best suited for their job. By putting powerful tools in the hands of small business owners for the first time, Thumbtack takes the guesswork and time costs out of the local services equation.

A lot goes into that challenge and there’s still a lot to do. That’s why I’m here at Thumbtack now.

Where we are today. (The scale of the product.)

With thousands of service categories spanning things like home services, event planning, wellness and business services, the size of what you can find on Thumbtack is huge — our pros and customers do over $1 billion in business on Thumbtack each year. And as of September 2015 we’re valued at $1.3 billion.

More than 250,000 skilled professionals in all 50 states pay to use Thumbtack each quarter — larger than some of our competitors combined.

At the same time, we’re just getting started.

Where we’ll be a year from now. (And a year after that.)

The market for local services is huge — north of $700 billion in GMV a year in the U.S. alone. Despite being a big player in the space, Thumbtack’s market share is still comparably small. The bulk of local business done in this space is still word of mouth.

If we continue on our current trajectory and hit one percent share, that’s 5x growth. But our ambition is far greater.

We’re totally changing the way Thumbtack works with a new iteration of the product we’re calling Instant Match (announced last fall). Today, we’re able to generate quotes instantly on behalf of our pros using detailed information on their services, travel radius, pricing and more.

Customers receive quotes as soon as they come to Thumbtack and complete a request, improving their experience by an order of magnitude — and giving them the immediacy they’ve come to expect from technology. Like the experience of booking a flight on Kayak, reserving a stay on Airbnb, or one-click shopping on Amazon.

We expect Instant Match to be a gamechanger. One that’s hard to replicate, both in terms of the technology that powers it and the large, engaged pro base already onboard.

The opportunity. (And your place in it.)

Now is the time to grow. We’ve unlocked one major challenge with Instant Match, but there’s no shortage of things to do and problems to solve. Whether that’s scaling Instant Match across all Thumbtack’s nearly 1,000 categories or even greater aspirations — expanding internationally and adding major service industries like child care and auto maintenance.

The opportunities to build a generational, transformative company are few and far between. We believe we have a shot at building one of those companies at Thumbtack — and we have the early success, team and culture to do it.

Interested in learning more?

Check out open roles or get in touch at recruiting@thumbtack.com