Thumbtack is a website designed to help workplaces and individuals hire experienced folks easily. Thing is, Thumbtack is not good at its job. Thumbtack was a great idea and it sucks.
So why does Thumbtack suck?
Thumbtack posts jobs such as “plumber needed to replace sink.” OK, that isn’t so difficult, right? And yet … how can a plumber make an estimate on replacing a sink without actually speaking to the customer? Thumbtack has a device for this. You ask the customer questions, he or she answers, and so forth. These days I believe you have 48 hours to complete a dialogue with someone looking for a service before the “order” is no longer available to you. That’s fine. It’s also great that Thumbtack was trying to connect writers and other communications professionals to potential customers. I threw $35 at it to see how it worked or, in this case, didn’t work. Problem is … the customer doesn’t answer the questions. OR, which is worse, Thumbtack decides not to pass your questions to the prospective customer. Once I even tried to help a prospective customer who had posted for a “copywriter” but really wanted a “copyright person.” I was quickly slapped on the hand by Thumbtack “officials” (whose age, I am guessing was about 19). Here’s what I wrote to the prospective client:
Hey, Dave (name has been changed). Thanks for posting. From what I can tell what you need is someone to help you copyright your music. Bravo! The person I usually recommend may actually not be available right now. So I recommend googling intellectual property attorneys (thumbtack won’t let me include an actual link).
Hope this helps you, Dave, and best with your music!
The strange, quite ungrammatical response I got back from Thumbtack was this:
Hi Susan, A public question that you asked did not meet our guidelines because it was not a question, asked the client if they are willing to do things a certain way, and Did not address the client’s specific needs.. Your question was not sent to the client.
And, after I followed up, the response was this:
Hi Susan,
Thanks for getting in touch with Thumbtack.
Please allow me a moment to explain a bit more about our guidelines on public questions.
We acknowledge the fact that sometimes the information on the request is incomplete. We launched the Public Questions feature to allow you to ask the client more information to determine if you’re qualified for the job and help you come up with an accurate quote.
In addition to meeting these goals, we have a set of guidelines to help us maintain a fair marketplace for our community of Service Pros and a positive experience for our clients. You can view them here:http://www.thumbtack.com/public-questions/about. Additionally, you can find more information about Thumbtack and how it works on our website: http://www.thumbtack.com/pros/how-thumbtack-works.
I assure you we are doing our best to continue to improve Thumbtack to fit both your needs and the client’s needs. Please let us know if you have questions or suggestions on how we can improve. What you have to say is very important to us as you are a valued service professional on our site.
Thanks for reaching out to us, Jaqueline
Next (April 8, 2014) I wrote to Thumbtack about a student who was looking for someone to write a paper for her.
Elise C. wants someone to write her graduate paper. Not edit it. Write it, from what I can tell. This seems unethical … both on her part and on the part of anyone who bids on it.
Funny, your team “took me down” once for trying to help someone who was actually looking for copyrighting services, not copywriting services.
So I’m not sure who is at the helm here. But I thought you should consider this.
The response was:
Melissa Owens (Thumbtack Support)
Apr 09 22:23
Hi Susan,
Thank you for getting in touch with us! My name is Melissa, one of the Customer Support Advocates here at Thumbtack and I truly appreciate you telling us that you had receive a lead request that was not appropriate on what you do. My apologies for what happened and please allow me to somehow straighten things out.
First of all, I admire that you stood up based on what you believed in. I personally agree that the request that you receive was not right since I believe that for a person to learn, he/she needs to take personal responsibility to improve his/her self despite the challenges and difficulties of the things he/she need to do or accomplish.
With what happened, I sincerely apologize. Unfortunately, sometimes we ask questions on the request form that our system does not use to filter leads and for the time being, we cannot filter your leads more granularly than the service subcategories that are associated with your category.
You can find the service subcategories by going to your Dashboard and clicking on the “Adjust leads” button. From there you will be able to see what subcategories that are associated with your service.
The option that I can offer you now is to encourage you to you to self-filter. You should only bid on leads that you think will turn into viable clients and leads that will meet your expectations and principles, and this may mean not bidding on a few leads.
I know how had it is to write a graduate paper but I personally believe that writing you own paper will test how much you’ve grown as a person and as a student. Again, I am proud that we have someone like you, Susan because this shows that you’re not only focused on doing the right thing but you’re concerned on your fellow Service professionals as well. I salute you for that!
Thanks so much for using Thumbtack, Susan and please let us know if you have any other questions or concerns.
By the way, you might receive a system generated e-mail to rate the services that I have given you. Please remember that you will be rating me and the assistance I provided to you. The choices will be: Bad (Not satisfied), and Good (I’m satisfied).
Please feel free to choose what your heart says. Any feedback or comments for my service/assistance will be greatly appreciated.
I wish you great success and I hope you’ll have a lovely day!
Take care, Susan! 🙂
Best regards, ~Melissa Owens Thumbtack Customer Advocate
Nearly all of my other issues over the course of four months were requests like these:
- Looking for a video. We know exactly what we want. How much? (lots of these)
- Want a writer for a book (no mention of subject matter or pages)
Most of the time my specific questions (and we weren’t allowed very many) went unanswered. So, this is a service that I don’t think will ever rank very high until good people are hired to handle the traffic and better estimate forms and strategies are created. Wouldn’t be SUCH a problem if Thumbtack were free, but it’s not. Customers post for free, and the rest of us are expected to pay using points (usually three) when responding to an ad. Don’t.
I have to say that after two years, not one Thumbtack lead has even contacted me. I am amused now that there are people that use TT to find a vendor. These are people that are purposefully seeking the worst/cheapest contractor that they can find. I’m done wasting time even reading the spec.
Doug, I’m with you. If TT can’t come up with a more sophisticated bidding system, it’s not for me. I do feel sorry for some of folks who mistakenly get untrained or bad vendors.
Agree with you a thousand percent. I used to use TT for my daily household tasks. but now i use instabell.com
They send someone out for free to get me an in person quote. All the guys are vetted and very reliable. Never had a bad experience through instabell. Also, the follow through is great. they make sure my experience exceed my expectations.
Kudos to instabell. their tech is not as “hot” as thumbtack. but the results are far better.
You can also text or call in requests 415-941-8090
the best part- they always send you someone super local
Thank you, Gio, for your response. I’ll check out Instabell.
I’ve been with Thumbtack for about 1.5 years and I was hired over 50 times, so it worked for me. With that said Thumbtack just recently broke their quoting system and will essentially put the brakes on how much I use their service and get hired through it.
They are now forcing pros at least in the computer repair field and most of the sub-categories in that field to give flat rate quotes. They removed the hourly rate option. Most of my quotes in the past have been hourly rate and it has worked very well for me. Many requests from customers are very vague and you can’t give a flat estimate on it, and many clients can’t or won’t answer questions if you want more detail… that’s where the hourly rate works well. Most jobs take me 1 to 2 hours and I’m not pressured to rush through a job because I charged a flat rate. I’m very thorough and good at what I do and customers appreciate it. I’m not looking for clients who want to nickel and dime everything. I charge a fair hourly rate and perform high quality work.
A lot people in my field will try to undercut the next guy and charge a low flat rate, so in return they try to rush through their jobs because if anything goes over 2 hours they feel like they’re wasting their time and/or losing money, so in many cases their quality of work goes down the toilet.
In essence by Thumbtack removing the hourly rate option and forcing pros to flat rate jobs TT will influence the prices on jobs and force a under-cutting scenario and in return they will attract low quality inexperienced pros and nickel and dime clients from the Craigslist crowd. I see nothing good coming from this. I spoke candidly to the people on the TT San Francisco team about this decision to remove the hourly rate option and I walked away thinking that essentially TT has a young group of people making bad decisions that will be negatively affecting business owners. I have no other way of putting it.
Their excuse for getting rid of the hourly rate option is “potential clients were confused having flat rate and hourly rated quotes coming in”. I call BS. Call up 5 local repair shops in your area in any field, some will charge flat rate, some will charge by the hour, some charge both. If you’re “confused” by that I don’t know how you function in life. In reality I think the pros who only charge flat rate starting crying that they weren’t getting hired enough and stopped buying credits which equals less money for TT. So TT decided to do some hand holding and force everybody to flat rate. Out of the 50+ jobs I have done in 1.5 years via TT not one client complained about the quotes being confusing.
So I’m a good example of somebody who used TT successfully in the past and it worked for me. Now all of that pretty much ended because a guy with a 4 year degree in business who’s probably not even 25 years old doesn’t know what he’s doing on the TT team made a bad decision…and won’t admit it.
Joe, thanks for writing, and in such great detail. Your points are excellent and well taken.
One point you make that really resonates is about the age issue. Most programmers are young, especially those that keep up with emerging code.
It’s not unlike the early days of the web, when geeks ruled and really resented design and usability, skills they knew nothing about.
Perhaps this struggle will go similarly — badly for a while, until more good companies emerge to take their place.
Are there other places you can work through? Maybe check out listings on linkedin?
I had a Thumbtack account for a few months last year. The first thing that annoyed me was that people would supposedly review my quotes, but not respond. What annoyed me more was the fact that you have to buy credits in order to even submit a quote. So, I’m basically paying money to get ignored.
I think I only got one response out of the many quotes I sent. He was initially interested, then completely flaked. I’ll never use Thumbtack again…complete waste of money.
Photography is as difficult as video to bid on. So many variables. Let me know if you find a better online service, BG.
Thumbtack is really getting outrageous, they charging $58.00 when someone responds to your quote. The person just asked my email address and I was charged. Other thing is this instant match stuff they offer. I was charged $43.00 for this and never heard from the person. I wonder if these quote on quote contacts are real. ?????
No kidding! I had no idea they were getting that pricey.
You’re probably better off finding clients another way — a giveaway contest, a FB ad — any other way.
BG, what field did you advertise in? I didn’t mind so much the fact that I had to “pay to play,” but that none of the important information was available, even on questioning. It was Thumbtack that limited the questioning, not the client.
Susan, sorry for the late reply, but it was photography.
Thumbtack is the bottom feeder cheapest junk lead pusher out there. Lots of junk leads for too much money with no information about your potential customer. I get all contact details and great information from Gigmasters, wedding wire and the knot. Thumbtack officially ejected!
Jeff
Exactly, Jeff. Thanks for mentioning some of the competition.
Just ran across this. Nothing has changed in the last six months. Today I got an e-mail from Thumbtack at 2:24pm and at 2:35pm was was barred from submitting a quote because, supposedly, 5 others had already bid on the job. Hmm.
PR, I didn’t realize Thumbtack had a limit to bidding. That seems like a very low one — what if no one within the responding five is qualified to do the job? Then TT has added a delay to the process of connecting jobs and professionals. And, those five people may not have been qualified to do the job because the information given in the “ad” was not complete. Then TT is charging five professionals who made a mistake — that has to be against the law.
I’ve just given up on Thumbtack myself. I’ve applied to one or two gigs a week for the last few months. 90% never respond and the rest only respond to explain something in more detail about the job, then don’t respond again after I explain how I could get it done. I’ve been hired 3 times, and all 3 times, the job was mysteriously canceled before I could even get started (Thumbtack doesn’t give refunds for those so they’re still getting paid when I don’t).
I’ve complained numerous times to their customer service that they need to do a better job of vetting the leads they send out when 90% of them are not serious enough to respond at all to the professional. And it’s difficult for me to know how to make a bid when my lead is “need video editing” with no mention of what kind of video, what aspects of editing are needed (audio, color correction, animation, etc.), how long the raw footage is (editing 3 minutes of their kid’s photos put to music is a lot faster than an hour long project), etc. It’s also difficult being limited to 1,000 characters in my bid to know what aspects of my skills to emphasize. If they don’t want any extra graphics added, it’s pointless to waste time explaining in my bid what I can do with them.
The leads are so vague that I don’t know how to estimate a price other than guess based off of their budget (which isn’t always available). I encourage them to explain in more detail what they’re looking for so I can make a better pitch about how I can give them what they want. I offer to discuss a fixed price or hourly rate with them once they give me more details about the job and vow to work within their budget, but as I said, 90% don’t respond, which means they’re not serious about hiring someone. Thumbtack customer service apologizes that they are careful to vet them properly and they’re sorry that “a few somehow slip through that shouldn’t.” 90% is a lot more than a few. Only one client interacted back and forth enough that I understood why I wasn’t what he was looking for. The rest just dismiss me without even looking at my work. I include a link to my online demo reel and I can tell when it gets viewed. Resumes mean nothing in my business. It’s all about the demo reel, yet only a handful of people from Thumbtack even look at it, so I can’t pretend this website has any credibility anymore.
I suggested that Thumbtack refund any credits if the client doesn’t actually hire anyone. The fact that they won’t shows they don’t care if clients walk away without hiring anyone. Thumbtack gets paid, so who cares if anyone else is? All this while they keep upping the price to bid. Last I checked, there was a lead that cost 12 credits and the budget listed for the project in the lead was “under $125.” Why would I spend nearly $20 with only the CHANCE to make up to $125?
Jeff, the depth of your response tells me that you’re a careful and thorough communicator. ThumbTack doesn’t care about that, unfortunately. I remember writing to them about someone who’d contacted me about “copyrighting” … this person actually needed a different kind of professional. ThumbTack slapped my hand for trying to help this person.
Your point is well taken about refunding credits when the potential client doesn’t hire anyone. ThumbTack is so disjointed and so unprofessional.
I am sorry you’ve had these experiences. Please let me know if you find better ones.
Do you edit videos full time? Do you also shoot?
I’m interested in your credentials, should you care to send them to me.
All my best (and thanks again for sharing your story with me and so many others),
Susan
Thumbtack sucks! It’s a bunch of cheapskates trying to get something for nothing & problem is the contractors are way under bidding to get the jobs. That thus means you get under qualified contractors rushing through jobs doing shitty work!
As soon as my final “lead” has expired, I am completely deleting my Thumbtack account. Not ONE job in over three years, and Thumbtack couldn’t care less. I DJ weddings, and I charged $300 to do a “general” wedding…in 1990. I have complained to Thumbtack multiple times about their need to educate their “job seekers” about realistic price quotes. In 2016, I am not hauling $15,000 worth of equipment out to dj a wedding and spending an 18 hour day for a $300 gig, but that is all I ever receive from Thumbtack. Thanks for the chance to vent. I wouldn’t recommend Thumbtack to anyone, ever.
You’re welcome! Be sure to write about Thumbtack on the Better Business Bureau web site and review sites.
Thanks. I was just trying to figure out if I needed to be a BBB business member in order to lodge a complaint against another business.
No, you shouldn’t have to. Anyone can lodge a complaint against a business.
Following is a short conversation I had with a Thumbtack customer. I had asked him why he didn’t respond to me about a website quote I gave him.
In reverse chronological order::
customer xyz:
I wish Thumbtack would make it more apparent that this costs money for the Pros, as I came on this website just expecting to see predefined example quotes. Again, I can’t apologize enough for causing this issue.
31 minutes ago
Thumbtack Pro xyz
Thanks for the honest response XYZ.
You are just ONE reason that Thumbtack is not worth the time and money for a website designer.
Many customers are just fishing – or worse.
Regards,
Thumbtack Pro xyz
an hour ago
Customer xyz
Sorry for the decline, I was simply testing Thumbtack to see how the system worked. I didn’t realize it cost so much for Pros to offer quotes! Your presentation was just fine, so no worries. I’m actually looking into doing freelance webdesign and was wondering what the range of prices and services was in the nearby area. (And also demoing Thumbtack a bit to see how things worked on this site.)
Apologies again for the cost. I had no idea it would cause this much of an issue.
3 hours ago
Thumbtack Pro xyz
Are you still interested in discussing your website needs ?
If you didn’t choose me, I’d be interested to know why so I can improve my presentation in the future.
In case you weren’t aware, it does cost the Thumbtack Pro $24 just to get a shot at giving you a quote.
Just sayin’
Thanks in advance.
Thumbtack Pro xyz
Patrick,
“Looking into” web design! HAHA.
Susan
I signed up for Thumbtack maybe four months ago. I experience many of the same issues. They are refunding my money left and right because customers are getting on there, asking for quotes and not responding.
The problem I have is of the roughly 100 or so responses I’ve sent, I’ve received work from four….one of which was like a $20k job. So it’s kind of difficult to cancel knowing big jobs are out there. I wish they would revamp it to where leads were actually responded to. Or a ‘request professional call me’ option. Getting them on the phone is 90% of the battle. You can sell from there.
Thanks for writing, Nick. Yes, there is something really wrong with their model.
There’s no buy-in from the potential clients for my business (video, film, and web). It would be great if TT would at least make clients complete an on-line RFP. Bidding on apples and apples would be nice.
There are pros and cons. I’m in the Graphic Design field. It’s very true in the category as well that at least 80% of the clients aren’t ready to be seeking a designer and view quotes and don’t repsond. I try not bid on jobs that don’t have much detail but those are often the only ones worth the risk (of losing credits). There is nothing protecting Pros from indecivise/bad clients.
I recently had one client that hired me, I uploaded the first drafts, after which I usually request a desposit to finalize. I asked them a few more questions after beinf hired, they responded. I uploaded 4 logos, no response. They just wanted a circle and text. Nothing amazing.
There needs to be a balance of risk and loss for client and Pro.
TT is the best of this crowdsourcing apps I’ve come across but it’s still far from perfect. I’ve been hired several times over the past 3 months because I can show my previous work is high quality. The few times it’s actually looked at I probably get a response 2/5 times and hired 1/5 times keeping in mind 80% of my quotes are never looked and the 2/5 is just those that view and respond but most half of them disappear after the reach out to me first, usually letting me know it’s between me and another person or they don’t even let me know but they just stop responding. Zero communication skills. They just ghost out.
Clients should have to pay to post to make a commitment to their seriousliness and then be refunded if they can’t find someone they want to work with. Clients should have to give a more detail description.
I don’t have a problem with the 5 limit. Especially since they can just repost it again.
They’ve recently removed the free 10 credits for new members and it will most likely take more than 30 credit to get $200. I paid $30 for 20+10 credits after I made $500 off of one job. I can only feel justified using money I get from TT to buy morw credits. It’s basically a working gamble.
I spent all 30 of those credits and have not gotten on gig from them, just a few flakes.