Thumbtack scaled by fixing how jobs got done, not just acquiring customers. Early growth came from organic SEO, then paid search. Now they're spending on connected TV, linear TV, and audio to reach mass market.
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Because of course, you know, you're at a massive sense of scale here today with Thumbtack, you know, so what have been some of the pivotal moments for growth and maybe some of the strategies that have, you know, really allowed you to kind of break through?
One quote that I think about, because I think there's real truth in it, was said to me by one of our investors, this guy Michael Dearing. And we're talking about sort of growth tactics and trying all this stuff. And he said, hey, let me tell you, You know, I've been around a lot of companies and the reality is most of them never strike oil. And those that do don't often strike it twice. And so when you find something that works, the kind of first thing is to really go kind of mine that seam. And if you look back at kind of what has driven Thumbtack's growth over the years, I think there's this sort of underlying fulfillment improvement, which is core to driving retention and loyalty, which just fuels all your growth channels and it's kind of the evergreen growth driver. And then in terms of like customer acquisition, which I think people usually mean, you know, it went from, you know, zero, like just having a pro acquisition strategy to being SEO driven. And SEO was probably the core consumer strategy for not quite a decade, but, you know, 6, 7 years. And then What sort of got built on top of that was paid search, which, you know, not surprisingly is sort of very related and sort of a skill that you can sort of add on top. And then, you know, today, so only in the last, call it 3, 4 years, again, as I think the experience has gotten better and better, do you see us really leveraging kind of more mass market channels like connected TV, linear TV, audio, et cetera. But for the first like 10 years of the business, it was first organic search and then paid search. And that gave us the volume to sort of build a strong enough experience and probate to then ultimately attract people directly and sort of retain them into kind of a more true owned and operated segment. But took a long time.
