Role: Cofounder, Lead Developer, User Experience Lead
Company: Thumbtack.com-A marketplace for local services. Thumbtack helps you find handymen, dog walkers, house cleaners, and even kite flying lessons. Founded in 2008, Thumbtack serves 150,000 service providers and is growing at 20% per month.
When: 2008-2010
From the very beginning, we knew that the user experience would make or break our business. Our business model was based on removing friction from the process of hiring service providers.
From day one, I was the sole developer for the site, and I worked closely with an outside firm that provided graphic design. I designed the sign-up pathway and also the negotiation pathway between buyers and sellers, two critical areas of our product.
Over two years, I hired and managed a team of six. I moved from a developer role into a project management role with a focus on making the site more usable and optimizing the conversion rates of key pathways.
My team developed:
- An architecture to support over 150,000 service professionals and hundreds of thousands of pictures, videos, and contacts, with 20% monthly traffic growth.
- An admin site that provided statistics, data mining, communication, and workflow tools to marketing and customer service, including over 100 staff overseas.
- An SEO strategy that resulted in a 20x increase in organic search traffic in the span of one year.
- A social media campaign including Facebook connect, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
- A mailing infrastructure supporting tens of thousands of daily e-mails.
Notable Investors
- Scott Banister and Cyan Banister: Founder of IronPort, Founder of Zivity
- Vance Bjorn: Founder & CTO of DigitalPersona
- Mark Britto: Founder & CEO of Boku; Former SVP, Worldwide Sales & Services of Amazon
- Jason Calacanis: Founder of WebBlogs & Mahalo
- Yan-David Erlich: Founder & CEO of ChoiceVendor
- Mark Goines: Former SVP of Consumer at Intuit; Former board member of Mint
- Denis Grosz: Founder of Conjecture
- Auren Hoffman: Founder & CEO of RapLeaf
- Ali Partovi and Hadi Partovi: Co-founder of LinkExchange, Co-founder of iLike
- Joshua Schachter: Founder of Delicious
