Noam Lovinsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…Sure. First of all, this is very much the team. It's not just things that I did. So I mean, first was turning on multiple channels of growth. Up until then, Thumbtack had tried and stopped paid channels, other organic channels like referrals, all of the typical things. And so, we just went back to first principles on a lot of that and also just kind of reformed a team around that and basically got an amazing team together. One of them, Whitney Steele is running marketing at Descript now. Another one, David Schein is running a product at HIMSS. But basically I went back to first principles on some of those growth channels and experiment on our way to much, much better results. I think that one of the things that we were doing incorrectly at Thumbtack is Thumbtack is actually a marketplace that is actually made up of thousands of marketplaces, right? Like DJs in Philadelphia is one marketplace, DJs in Atlanta is another marketplace, contractors in Sonoma is another marketplace. And then Thumbtack is obviously the container of all of those marketplaces. I think we were just bifurcating our targeting and our growth efforts a little too narrowly, assuming we had to grow in that way market by market rather than targeting more broadly, providing the more aggregate data to Google and others, and then optimizing from there. The fact that we already had really good showing in SEO and really good patriarch and SEO helped to bolster things like SEM and then eventually Facebook as well. Those were kind of the growth levers, but the core issue with the Thumbtack product was that it was just a very high friction customer experience that really left customers waiting. So the way that Thumbtack worked basically was a customer would find them through a search query, they would come in and they would answer a number of questions about the job they needed done, and then Thumbtack would say, "Okay, great, we'll get back to you in 24 hours." And this is a modern day experience, right? And then what Thumbtack would do is they would take that job and they would federate it out to as many of the pros that might match the criteria, and then the pros would pay to quote to show up as a potential provider for that job. Now, I don't want to take anything away from that team because that worked phenomenally well for a really long time. And actually it's a perfect case study in like, "|Just do the scrappy thing that works to grow." And they did that very well, but the stage and size of the business when I joined it had kind of outgrown that. And the team knew that. That's obviously a very high friction experience. The idea that the customer, they're super excited, they want to hire someone, and at that moment you'd be like, "Cool, talk to you soon," not the best experience. And the fact that you're asking your supply to put up money to even show up to customers in the first place, well, what the customers want to see is the supply. Like, "Tell me who I can hire." rience. And the fact that you're asking your supply to put up money to even show up to customers in the first place, well, what the customers want to see is the supply. Like, "Tell me who I can hire. " Also, a lot of friction on that side and also in some cases some unfair revenue on that side because if folks are paying to be seen and maybe they're looked at, but there's not really high intent, then they're not going to get the customers they want, they're going to be spending revenue, they're not going to be getting revenue back. It turns into just a bad loop obviously. So the main thing we did is to rebuild that whole loop, change the monetization model, build a system where essentially pros could provide instant quotes. Lenny, I'm sure from Airbnb, this is very familiar, the move from request to book to instant booking. It was a very similar thing in a different kind of category of service and supply obviously. But that shift and doing that shift across those thousands of marketplaces and then finding the right friction point for monetization and when and what to charge people for and all of that change, that is what really, at its core, turned the growth engine around at Thumbtack. And it's just a real testament to those founders that they believe that, saw that, and were willing to run a pill and chew glass to get to that point. I don't know the details of the business anymore. And if I did, I wouldn't speak to it. But from what I hear, things are going well, so I think that that served the company well. Yeah, as you were talking about that, that's exactly an experience Airbnb went through. I actually led that effort at Airbnb. It took three years of my life. Oh my gosh, we should talk about that one day. Yeah, I've written about it here and there, but honestly very quietly is one of the biggest transformations Airbnb went through, shifting from I'm going to go request a book to basically every book now on Airbnb is instant. And that was a very difficult and painful journey. But looking back, I don't think Airbnb would've made it if not for that. And unlike Thumbtack, we did it before things were starting to fall apart. And actually, I was going to say the lens that we used that I find really helpful here is, you should be asking yourself, "If somebody was to come into our space and disrupt us and start now to become the new Airbnb, what would they do?" Yeah, totally. And it was obvious that it'd be be make it instant, just the way it works. Welcome to Airbnb disruptor. And so, yeah.…

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