How do you find a quality and reasonably priced home service pro? The #1 source is your friends. HelpHive provides a convenient way for you to access a personalized list of recommended home service pros … provided by your friends. And as you share your home pro recommendations, you build up your friends’ own personalized list of recommended home pros.

And if you’re a home services business, you’re interested in getting more calls from homeowners who are referred to you by your existing customers. These customers will be higher quality than those responding to typical advertising.

We’re excited to be able to offer this new service.  Let us know what you think and how we can do better.

Thanks!

Dave & Karim
HelpHive Founders

————————————————————–

If you are interested in the story of how HelpHive came to be …

It all began out of frustration

We’re both homeowners and we’ve hired our fair share of home service professionals over the years for lawn care, home cleaning, treating moss on our roof, repairing a backed up toilet system (and the water damage resulting), refinishing hardwood floors, installing a sprinkler system, various handyman repairs, installing new windows, repairing our furnace, building a deck, removing trees and on and on.

We both needed some help with home projects (one deck extension and some handyman-type things) and went online to try and find a quality professional.  We started at Google and quickly discovered that this wasn’t going to be easy.  Here’s what we found:

1. Google was (and is) terrible at differentiating between spammy directories who have bare-bones business listings to serve their own search engine traffic purposes and not to help people like us find good information on businesses.
2. Only the providers with deep pockets were able to afford to buy their way onto Google’s first page of results and you know who’s ultimately paying for those advertising spends
3. Google results are generally overrun with ads, not information.  This is what Google is encouraging and they’re getting what they encourage.
4. When we did find the website for a home services business, they ranged for inadequately basic to corporate slick, but they were all missing something “buyers” like us are looking for — independent feedback.
5. There were a few independent sites out there which sought to give you business reviews, but the biggest one for home services, Angie’s List requires you (the consumer) to pay a subscription fee.  While not philosophically against this model (we built an online digital media subscription business of > 1M subscribers at RealNetworks in just under 2 years), this is clearly not the right model for this segment.
6. Then we found a few sites that wanted to find a service professional for you.  One of the popular ones required you to spend 20+ minutes entering a mini request for proposal describing the work you wanted done … over the top for most homeowners like us.  Oh, and then they sell your information to multiple telemarketers who auto-dial your phone until you answer.  Not very pleasant.
7. And we tried out Craig’s List (which we use often for buying/selling stuff) and found out that it didn’t have a lot of home services listed … and more importantly they were missing one of the biggies when you’re hiring service providers … information on their reputation.

So, what were our other options?

Well, we could spam all of our friends for recommendations.  We realized that this was something that might work once or twice, but soon we would be ignored … and possibly even shunned!  It just isn’t a sustainable approach to constantly be bugging your friends for these kind of things.

We looked at the amazing growth of our own online friend/social networks enabled by new Internet services and mobile devices.  We thought, wow, shouldn’t there be a way to get more benefit out of our friend networks than simply sharing photos, posting personal trivia and exchanging virtual snowballs?

So, we started doing some research and, lo and behold, we found out that we weren’t all that unique … recent market research shows that more than 60% of consumers are now looking primarily online to find and hire local service professionals.  So, there’s a reason those yellow pages are piling up in dumpster … hopefully the recycling ones!

Then we started to interview home service professionals

Here are some of the most common things we heard:

• “Yellow pages are producing fewer and fewer leads for me … they used to be my main lead source.”
• “I’ve tried some of the online advertising services and I’m not satisfied with the results … they over promise and they aren’t cheap!”
• “I know I need to go online because that’s where my customers are … but it’s so confusing and hard to know who I can trust to really help me out.”
• “I have a varying need for leads and promotions that adjusts seasonally and with other factors, so I need a flexible model.”

Out of this, HelpHive was conceived and birthed

We didn’t mention that we have had a lot of experience building new Internet businesses from scratch to very large scale.  We’ve been pioneers in bringing audio and video services to the Internet in face of big monopolies in traditional media, consumer electronics, patent pools and operating systems.  We like to innovate and aren’t afraid to challenge the status quo and ask questions which the incumbents aren’t asking.  But most importantly to innovate in bringing value to our customers.

We are continually updating HelpHive.com based on customer feedback, so please let us know what you think!