Whocanhelp.com flips the phone book the bird
The WhoCanHelp.com platform was developed by an entrepreneur in Missoula, Montana, who, the story goes, needed to fix a leaky pipe in his house. He felt that any one of a number of unemployed plumbers would have been happy to do it - if there was a marketplace to reach them.
Launched in May 2010, the platform provides a home services marketplace that is free to consumers to post jobs - and free to vendors, who get instant alerts, to respond with bids. Both vendors and customers are rated. The company makes its money from display advertising sales, limiting inventory to three ads per category.
The company has been selling display advertising since November, 2010, employing a former real estate agent who worked part time. He sold just under $20,000 in new display advertising contracts, averaging $1,267, since then. So, without a media partner, that's tracking $50,000 first year, with one part-time rep. Most of WhoCanHelp's first local advertisers have been companies shifting their budget from yellow pages, such as attorneys and auto repair shops.
So will these display ads compete with vendors who are bidding in the marketplace? So far so good; some bidders also advertise, and all advertisers have bidding accounts. Click-through rates on display ads are about .5% to one percent, about average, given the sample size is still small.
The first media partner, Hagadone Newspapers, owns 19 newspaper sites in Idaho, Montana, Washington and Wisconsin, and has launched WhoCanHelp in sites across Western Montana. The co-brand promo features WhoCanHelp's mascot Toucan, a bird with a cartoon-sized bill, affectionately named "Woucanthetoucan." The bird appears in leaderboards across Western Montana proclaiming "its time to flip your phone book the bird."
The marketplace itself (see images to the right, click to enlarge) is delightfully simple; users enter the job to be done, then service providers are alerted by text and email. A brief scan of the Montana listings includes items like "Repair Amana oven controls" and "Fix zippers in two coats" with zero bids, as well as traditional categories such as automotive and moving which get a number of responses.
We wish we could see the actual quotes, which are private, just to get a feel for the marketplace in action, but apparently research shows that a closed bid process provides more thoughtful pricing. Scott Lester, Director, Advertising and Marketing says that key to launching has been partnerships with Chambers of Commerce.
We like that this model is "post-a-project-and-wait-for-services," unlike its closest start-up competitor in the space, ServiceAlley, which is more of an extensive directory with a modified pay-per-lead model. It's unknown how the two would compete in the same marketplace, or which would provide more revenues long run. We asked Lester to field some additional questions:
In the markets where you have launched I think you said you had 3000 registered users, is that correct?
As of our staff meeting on Friday we had 3155 user accounts. The vast majority of them are between Washington State and Montana. That is because we launched with the Bellevue Chamber of Commerce and the Vancouver Chamber of Commerce last fall...so things have been growing out there.
How do you get the ball going, ie get the first group of users to play?
We have a customer service team that makes sure that every post sees action. They make sure it is well indexed so it shows up in searches, and finally they call service providers in the area and encourage them to go in and bid. It actually works very well. For example we just launched in NW Montana with the Hagadone newspapers in the last couple weeks and now almost every post has offers. The customer service manager has been saying for weeks now that he does very little to support posts in our home market (Missoula) because the service providers are on the platform. We initially got the ball rolling in ever market with a small marketing push and grass roots efforts with our Chamber of Commerce partners. Posts drive everything. If we can get posts, offers and advertising follows thereafter.
How many markets did the newspaper group launch to start with?
This partnership is brand new and our only up and running partnership currently. The Hagadone News Group has contracted to cover 4 counties in Montana and a population of about 200,000. They own the daily newspaper (Daily Inter Lake) in the heart of Flathead County and then 5 weekly newspapers in outlying communities. The marketing launched about two weeks ago. The launch has been very successful, generating about half the traffic as our home market...overnight. We have 3-6 month "adoption" period where the media drives traffic to the site. At some point in there that we feel the traffic is self sustaining, the media turns down the marketing and then sends ad reps out to sell ads on the platform. All our media partners will have the right to renew their agreements with us indefinitely...meaning they can always own the franchise to advertising on our site in their markets.
What is the pace of user sign ups?
Our account base grows, on average, at about 21% a month. So if I have 1000 users this month I will likely have 1210 users next month.
Tell me about the ownership and who is the contact for media alliances?
I am the one who sets up the media alliances here at WhoCanHelp.com. We have 27 investors that own our company. Carl Hicks is our CEO. He's a former army ranger Colonel and just a great guy. The guy who founded the company and now our Chief Technical Officer is Darrel Stone. He is a 32 year old self taught software engineer. This is his 3rd successful startup.
Who are the main categories for advertisers?
We started out with auto repair and plumbing but we quickly transitioned into all kinds of different areas within our 240 categories. We've sold out some of our real estate categories and attorney categories have been popular as well.
Who are the main categories for advertisers?
We started out with auto repair and plumbing but we quickly transitioned into all kinds of different areas within our 240 categories. We've sold out some of our real estate categories and attorney categories have been popular as well.
It looks like people post a lot of really oddball requests (fix
zippers in two coats) that don't always get results, while others
(moving) in more traditional categories do. Do you see this as
becoming more of a Craigslist style anything goes marketplace?
As long as it is a service request we consider it a legitimate post. Posts trying to sell something or that are explicit or inappropriate get deleted. The one grey area to that is job requests. Technically it is a service request, but it's also advertising. The way we deal with those is we allow them unless we have a media partner that doesn't want the job requests because of cannibalism--in which case we delete them.
We've had oddball posts such as "I need to borrow an Axe to dig out a stump" to "need sheep shearing." If people want to waste their time trying to get something for nothing we don't care, as long as it's a legitimate service request. That being said, why we see that in our new markets as people try it out, we rarely see that anymore in our home market. Finally, the guy got his sheep sheared.
The author, Alisa Cromer is publisher of a variety of online media, including LocalMediaInsider and MediaExecsTech, developed while on a fellowship with the Reynolds Journalism Institute and which has evolved into a leading marketing company for media technology start-ups. In 2017 she founded Worldstir.com, an online magazine, to showcases perspectives from around the world on new topic each month, translated from and to the top five languages in the world.
Keywords
whocanhelp, directory, marketplace, missoula, montana, hagaone
