Thumbtack.com. It's a love/hate thing.

I love/hate Thumbtack.com. I'm torn in two between loving things that they provide which I either don't have time to do myself as a professional photographer or wouldn't be as effective at doing (such as SEM lead generation), and hating how disorganized and clunky their interface, apps and process was when they launched (and still is in many ways).

When I started my photography business about a year and a half ago, I did what I believe many photographers do when they start out - they dabble with a lot of different types of photography. Events, sports, weddings, portraits, pets, products, real estate - I pretty much tried it all. A few of those I did often, geared up for them, and got pretty good at. Others were just experiments, allowing me to try them out while still providing a reasonable product at a reasonable price to my clients.

Regardless of the type of photography I was working on, marketing my services and finding solid sales leads as a new business owner was always a challenge. I had a website, Facebook page, and Instagram account early on, but I knew even at launch that these tactics as a sole form of marketing would fall flat. And they have. The Field of Dreams mantra, "If you build it, they will come", apparently only works with cornfields and baseball-playing ghosts.

So this left a huge question mark in the marketing and advertising section of my business plan. I was familiar with the typical options here, having spent nearly 2 decades in a career in Information Technology, which often had me working closely with Sales, Marketing and Advertising teams. We rolled out quite a few SEM websites, ad technologies and related applications over the years. Conceptually, I knew how these things worked. However, getting your efforts to convert into sales was somehow elusive and expensive as a small business owner. The last thing I wanted to do was to sink almost all of my (dainty) revenue into SEM campaigns. I knew better.

Then one day a friend of mine who happened to be a wedding photographer mentioned a website called Thumbtack.com. She described it as a place you could go bid on photography jobs of specific types and pay only for the quotes that a potential customer actually opened. It sounded fair, reasonably cheap and pretty straightforward. I set my account up, added some basic company info, added a nice profile pic of me and off I went. One thing that struck me as odd was how easy it was to become a 'Thumbtack Pro' and start bidding on work. I mean, literally anyone with a business name, some basic contact info and enough brains to right a paragraph about their services could launch a profile as a Professional <fill in the blank> and start bidding on work 5 minutes later on Thumbtack.com. As a consumer, that very person might be one of the 5 'Professionals' that responds to your request, with the only obvious thing setting them apart from the other 'Pros' was the lack of review in their profile. Sure, there are some optional things that help make you stand out (in theory) such as a background check that you can pay them to run. But overall, it seemed easy - too easy.

I got hired a few times, building up a few reviews, and I began to specialize in headshot photography. My niche was forming and I was getting good. My hire rates were climbing, but not as fast as I'd hoped. I was still only running about a 5% hire rate for quotes. As it turns out, this wasn't all that bad. One of the problems with Thumbtack is that the consumer really has no skin in the game. It's a free service for them, and there really isn't any incentive not to just 'test the waters' and see what headshot photography for actors in Irvine, CA might cost (for example).

Thumbtack started to send out competitive reports that explained how I was doing as compared to other 'Pros' bidding these jobs in my area. I was doing pretty well, but my prices were typically lower than most of the others. I was competing largely on price, winning customers that just wanted the cheapest bid. This wasn't the customer that I wanted to attract. I knew that my product was as good or better than most of the other local headshot photographers, so I upped my pricing to be closer to my retail levels and something strange happened: I went from about 5% close rate to about 10% - 12% close rate. It turns out that the customers I'm really after want my product because it is good, not because it is cheap and those low prices might have actually scared off a few potential clients. I now regularly receive feedback that I was hired because I had the best product, not because of price. That's music to my ears. My 5 star reviews were piling up, and I began to receive strange and unexpected accolades from Thumbtack which reminded me of the AYSO soccer league I used to play in as a kid: 'Best of 2015', and 'Top Pro'.  This was great! Except that it still wasn't. But it kinda sorta was... It's confusing, so let me offer some clarification:

What Thumbtack.com is doing really well:

• Leads: they bring in lots of leads to work and appear to run effective SEM campaigns on behalf of their 'Pros'.
• Boundaries: they stay out of the way when they should by not over-controlling the communication and sales processes between customers and 'Pros'.
• Professional Differentiation: they continue to provide ways for real professionals who actually have better products than the other 'Pros' to differentiate themselves from the pack and close more sales. This is critically important for consumer quality and in my opinion will make or break their consumer brand.
• Customer service: this team gets an A+ for effort. They really are stellar. They're constantly dealing with the fall out from a number of shortcomings in other areas of the business, but they maintain awesome attitudes and great communication, even when I've given them reason to react differently. I don't know who's at the helm in customer support, but they know what they're doing.

What they're not really doing very well:

• Products / Websites / Apps: this one is all over the map. As a 'Pro' that's been on board for over a year now, it feels like it's a bunch of people that are just throwing ideas at a wall to see what sticks.
• Website: yes, it merits mention again. It's pretty bad, and pretty clunky, and they don't tend to understand that what works for one professional may not work well at all for others. For example, why would I want to schedule a '30 minute consult' as part of a headshot sales process? Yet, that can't be adjusted / modified or removed from my control panel as an option for next steps.
• Apps: yes, this one also needs another mention. The Thumbtack IOS app to this day requires that you restart it each and every time you'd like it to actually pull down fresh data (requests, quotes, hires, etc...). Given that you have to be one of the first 5 pros to provide a quote, time is of the essence. Sometimes, 5 or 10 minutes is all you have to respond before the 5 spots are full. It's also missing numerous features, such as templates. Enough said.
• Speaking of which, templates: great in concept, completely horrific in execution (and unavailable until just a few months back). Yes, I should be able to select a template response for a quote. Yes, it should auto-fill their name. No, it shouldn't ask me to save as new or update the template EVERY time I use it with no other option to exit. That's kind of the point of a template - to reuse it WITHOUT CHANGES OR UPDATES REQUIRED EACH TIME.
• Lack of features: there are many, some of them pretty basic. I could probably sit down and write up a whole list of features that I'm shocked they haven't implemented, some of which would drive tons more revenue to Thumbtack.

To be frank, I could've wrote this entire article about how bad of a product Thumbtack is from a professional's perspective. However, I've always been a net results guy when it comes to business matters. This requires that I fly up to 10,000 feet, look back down and really examine how effective something is or is not. And in this case, the net results say that I've made a lot of sales and met a lot of clients through Thumbtack. On top of that, I've paid what I consider to be a reasonable price for those wins. Sure, there are a lot of things that they could do better - some of which seem so blatantly obvious that I do wonder about they're leadership team. However, they've provided net results from my view, and there's something to be said of that.

Overall Thumbtack.com has become a key ingredient to my sales and marketing strategy as a new photographer and business owner, whether I intended them to be or not. For now, I'm actually pretty happy they exist. I hope that they continue to invest in improvements and heed the input of their top pros and consumers. This will ultimately lead to a more effective platform, and likely, quite a bit more revenue for them.