Marco Zappacosta Q&A On The Future For Thumbtack

Hi, Marco.

Thanks so much for coming on here and chatting with all of us. I've been following Thumbtack for years and years and just really admire your endurance and evolution. I'm curious what comes next for Thumbtack? What's on the horizon? You mentioned like this, there's a lot of vertical marketplaces that are going deeper and deeper into the process itself. Like Is Thumbtack going to get deeper into the booking process with payments, scheduling, and all that? Or is it more like scaling up liquidity, getting Thumbtack more as like a brand awareness on the demand side? Like, where are you headed?

So I'd say we have 2 big kind of strategic investments. One is continuing this forever work on the fulfillment experience and Making Thumbtack more reliable, more consistent at helping you find the right pro for whatever you need done. And instead of going category by category, you should think of us as going kind of step by step. And so, you know, the request for quote was kind of the 1.0. The 2.0 of this became this instant match, instant quote system. And there what we did very deliberately was to go look at what the pro was doing in their heads in terms of sort of matching criteria. The obvious thing is like, do I travel there? Do I do that type of job? Does my sort of cost line up with their budget expectations? Do I work on that day, etc.? And we tried to sort of get pros to pre-answer all of those with the exception of availability data, which we saw as its own sort of big bear that we left aside. And so the sort of Thumbtack 2.0 from a fulfillment standpoint was this Instant quote system, but then the customer sort of was introduced to the pro, and then they scheduled the job in the chat. Like it was not no longer supported experience. And so what's coming now, sort of our 3.0 experience, is instead of brokering introductions, Femtech is going to broker bookings, bookings for the job sort of itself, or maybe for an on-site estimate to get you a firm quote, but ultimately a scheduled next step. For all of our categories. And, you know, we're probably about 20-25% of the way there in terms of sort of facilitating these at scale. And not surprisingly, it is hard to sort of raise the bar on when a customer can contact a pro, right? You're requiring more of them. That is going to hurt conversion. That's going to filter some customers out. And so there's sort of a cost there. The flip side is You know, 75% of our messages and in the old model were about scheduling. We knew this was the missing piece to bring people together. And so you need to see offsetting increase in sort of conversion and higher rate, sort of bottom of funnel type of metrics. And, and we do. And it's sort of very higher rate positive, you know, in particular to the pro side. And that's compelling to us. So there's more work to do to kind of finish rolling that out. But over the course of the next kind of 2 to 6 quarters, you'll see it sort of really go to 100%. And at that point, Thumbtack kind of will no longer sell introductions, right? It'll just sell bookings. And then we're kind of not done. We will keep building on top of that. You can think of, you know, the 4.0 era really being about the dollars and cents of it. Payments, financing, insurance, Really all of that, which I think requires having the booking as an enabler. You know, we do facilitate payments today. We have that for some fraction of it. But once you have bookings, then you can really close the loop. And I'm excited about that. And I think, you know, you kind of can't shortchange it. I think we're the furthest down the funnel in this experience, especially sort of horizontally as we are, um, but you kind of have to grind through a lot of work to make it happen.