HelpHive is initially launching in the Seattle-Tacoma area listing more than 6,500 home services businesses covering more than 45 categories including home repair, maintenance, yard & landscape, cleaning and home improvement. At HelpHive, homeowners can find the best local home service providers ranging from gutter cleaners to painters to lawn care specialists to remodeling contractors
“HelpHive was conceived out of our personal frustration in finding the right home service providers” says Dave Richards, HelpHive co-founder. “With more than 60% of homeowners looking primarily online to find local providers and the phenomenal growth of online social networks, we felt there was a huge opportunity to build a better experience for consumers who want to leverage their personal networks for trusted referrals and recommendations.”
HelpHive makes it very easy to connect to your friends so that you can benefit from their referrals. You can seamlessly integrate existing friend connections in Facebook, Plaxo and more. Scenario: it’s midnight and you’re looking for that handyman for an urgent home repair and you notice that 3 of your friends have posted feedback on different local handymen. This makes your hiring decision much easier.
Homeowners can search and browse for the best service providers at their convenience, viewing details about each business including specialties, credentials and feedback provided by the community. You can rate, review and recommend businesses based on their service experience. You can also post home project-related questions (for instance, “which decking material is best?”) which your friends, other homeowners and businesses can respond to online.
Good news, you’re already listed! Most Seattle area home services businesses are already listed on HelpHive with their own web page including details about their specialties. Business owners can find and claim their business profile page or add a new profile if they’re not listed. Then businesses can extensively customize and enhance their details using easy-to-use web pages requiring no technical web publishing knowledge. Businesses can also post portfolios of previous work, including photo galleries, and invite clients to review their work to get the referral momentum flowing.
“Most home service providers spend most of their time either on the road or onsite with clients.” says Karim Meghji, HelpHive co-founder. “So, with HelpHive, we’ve enabled them to productively manage client and prospect emails and voice messages using their basic cell phones … bridging the online world with the offline reality.”
Businesses can take advantage of HelpHive’s integrated message center for managing voice and text leads from clients. Businesses can access their message center from any web browser and from any phone. For instance, they can listen on their phone to voice messages as well as have client text messages read back to them. Businesses can choose to receive notifications of new messages through email, SMS text message or a phone call to the phone number of their choice. All of this enables providers to be more responsive to customer communications and requests … which generates more referrals!
After the beta period, HelpHive plans to expand to other major USA metro areas.
For more information, contact:
Dave Richards
media@helphive.com
(206) 372-4494
About HelpHive
HelpHive, Inc. was started in 2008 to create a new generation of online marketplace services connecting homeowners with home service providers. HelpHive was founded by Dave Richards and Karim Meghji, executive entrepreneurs who have together built multiple businesses from start to over $100MM in revenues. Dave & Karim mostly recently worked together at Real Networks pioneering the development and marketing of digital media products and services including RealPlayer, RealJukebox, SuperPass, RadioPass and Rhapsody. HelpHive is headquartered in the Seattle area.