This post goes into greater detail on the actual product, TroopMarket that we are building for web, desktop, iOS and Android. We would like to highlight some key differences with existing products. We think these together create an entirely different category of product than anything that exists today.
1. Search with #tags. No hard coded categories.
If you are looking for a service, you need to find it. There are two approaches here: Yahoo (with fixed categories / a fixed taxonomy) and Google / Twitter / Instagram / Stack Overflow (no fixed categories / hashtags + metadata used to qualify content).
We use the second approach. We show featured hashtags, and when you drill down on any hashtag we show related tags (which come from the data, not a fixed taxonomy). This has several HUGE advantages. It allows users to effectively create their own categories (as 1 billion people do every day on Instagram), it allows much deeper granularity (#lawyer #litigation #ca), and finally it allows you better discoverability (click on one tag, find other related tags etc..). As a side benefit, it also works in all languages from day 1. (#logiciel #informatique)
2. Focus on Flat rate services
Second, we focus our marketplace on Flat rate services — not per hour jobs. All of services are delivered over chat, which makes time fuzzy anyways, and we think there is great value, especially on the high end for services like legal incorporation at a fixed price, initial consultations, etc.
You can still effectively have per hour work — it just makes more sense to us if it packaged in blocks. 8 hours of QA for example, pre-paid (and put in escrow) upfront.
3. Real People, True Identities
If you are buying 100 (almost certainly fake) Twitter followers, you don’t care who the person selling them is. But if you are buying legal advice, professional marketing services, or management consulting the actual identity of the person you are buying from in important. That means for a coder, you can verify the user’s GitHub account. For a lawyer, or financial services professional, you will want to dig deeper into their LinkedIn.
Traditional Marketplaces don’t want you to see the identity of the people providing the services, because they are (correctly) afraid that you will transact “off market” and save the large 20%+ commissions they charge on each transaction. TroopMarket flips the switch. Because we are based on pre-paid crypto, we can work on a rock bottom 5% commission. Which means we can not only expose the identity of our service providers, we can make it mandatory.
4. A World-Class Chat Platform for Collaboration
The primary mode of communication of our era has become chat. We use it in our personal lives (text messages, Skype, WeChat, What’s app), and we use it at work (Slack).
Our view of outsourced work is primarily chat-based. This means that we support real-time presence, desktop notifications, IOS and Android push notifications. It also means that links, videos, and images are cleanly integrated into the overall UX — exactly like you would expect.
In the future, we plan on adding boards as well (think Trello, or our existing product Troopwork), but chat comes first.
5. Escrow and Dispute Resolution
TroopMarket is based on the idea of pre-payment with tokens (our WorkCoin), and escrowing of these tokens for the duration of the job. We view this as a critical missing piece of the crypto-payment ecosystem.
It is easy enough to “talk” about escrow and arbitration, but actually getting it to work fast and cheaply is another thing entirely. Coding smart contracts is a low level, error prone task. It is not something an app developer is likely to really do. Even more tricky is interfacing with a live bank of arbitrators, passing the job data to and from efficiently, and doing all of this in as close to real time as possible.
