Thumbtack launched as a horizontal marketplace across many service categories and geographies rather than starting narrow. The founders discuss why breadth helped build supply and liquidity, comparing their approach to eBay and Amazon's early strategies versus the constraints of single-category marketplaces.
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Thumbtack is notable for starting off more broad, you know, whereas today it might be, you know, a little bit more common for marketplaces to go more narrow and, you know, constrain kind of categories and geo in order to build liquidity. So, you know, what led to your initial approach of going more broad across kind of categories and even geos at the time? And what were some of the kind of learnings from doing so?
Yeah. And so I think the original, there was sort of a practical motivation and maybe a philosophical motivation. The practical one is, you know, Thumbtack covers hundreds of different categories and occupations. We do so all across the country, or we aspire to do it everywhere. The thought of building these up kind of one by one seemed insane or too hard or just too slow. And on the sort of more philosophical front, we looked at what had happened in e-commerce where, you know, really you had these giant winners that were very horizontal, whether eBay or Amazon, you tended to have kind of like industry-wide solutions, not sort of category-specific solutions. And when we looked at our categories, we saw a lot of similarities. And what I think people kind of lose in the lesson of like, oh, go narrow is it's not about, you know, narrow or broad. It's about the sort of right aggregation such that the customer knows what to expect from this offering and it makes sense to them. And on the flip side, having the breadth from a supply building perspective. And I think one thing that really highlights this, do you guys remember the spawn of Craigslist graph? Maybe somebody can throw it in the chat. There's one from like way back in the day and it has like the zillion companies trying to sort of eat at Craigslist. And, you know, they're all pointed at the fine-grained level of each of these. And what's interesting when you look at the one that was published more recently of the winners, it's all, the winners are all at the header level, right? It is like Airbnb for all of it. You see the winners ending up much more at the kind of like category domain level rather than the sort of very specific subtype. And I think what people fail to appreciate is marketplaces are primarily about creating liquidity and creating liquidity is sometimes aided by being broader, right? Like because we were broader, we could leverage our efforts across more categories. We could actually acquire and attract more pros in any one category than any of our domain sort of competitors. And these competitors had an advantage often in terms of user experience of like how sort of crafted the experience was for that category. But they typically lacked quite significantly when it came to providing liquidity, which is the ultimate determinant of, you know, loyalty, retention, monetization, satisfaction, and therefore a losing proposition.
