Marco Zappacosta explains how Thumbtack prevents customers and pros from taking their relationship off-platform. The company built a "Your Team" product for repeat customers, made payments seamless on-platform, and charges pros upfront based on lifetime value to keep transactions from leaking elsewhere.
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Actually, I had a question here. Shailen sent me a message as far as it's related to this, you know, with the new, you know, the new Thumbtack. How do you think about, you know, preventing marketplace disintermediation or leakage?
So I think you need to be more specific as to sort of what you're referring to. So disintermediation in the sense of us not keeping all of the future interaction between pro and customer on Thumbtack, is a real like cost and/or opportunity because it represents sort of us being less useful than we could be, just generally having less visibility. And so we're really focused and actually a big section of what we launched inside of this new home care experience is called Your Team. And the idea there is that you should collect your team of pros and then that should be kind of the first port of call, right? You want that handyman back, that pressure washer back, the roofer back. We should make that as easy and as seamless as possible all the way up into including repaying that pro or scheduled payments if it's a cleaner. And we want to be that full Rolodex for you. So that's like the product and kind of brand aspiration. But from a monetization standpoint, actually, we don't mind charging upfront. We think we can get kind of full value for the LTV that we're driving. Because ultimately pros are giving us their willingness to pay. And as they earn more from these customers, what we've observed is they increase their willingness to pay. And it's no different than Google and Facebook. Like we all as marketers on these platforms express our willingness to pay in terms of the LTV that these clicks and whatever are gonna drive us. And our pros are doing the same thing. So we can earn it upfront and capture it upfront. And that actually helps us not sort of disincentivize future interaction, which we will not charge for and really just want to build a great kind of ecosystem for both sides to sort of continue to work together and create efficiency there.
