So I Tried Thumbtack

Share

I will try to keep this short, though if you’ve read this blog, you know that’s difficult for me.

I teach college online, I’m learning options trading, and I’m trying to pay off my debt (mostly my student loans), and so I took some free skills quizzes online to find something I would be good at that I could do to make some extra money.  Everyone says Uber, but I talk to myself way too much when I’m driving, and I talk to other drivers, too, and I fear that my outbursts might cause my Uber driver ratings to go way down. 

Most of the online aptitude quizzes I took online pointed to some sort of coordinator position, like a volunteer coordinator, event coordinator, planner, event management, etc.  So I got to thinking and was reminded that I used to love planning parties and events.  I even spent a few years as a parent volunteer coordinator for a ballet school when my kids were younger and danced there. 

Enter Thumbtack.

My daughter had a Thumbtack listing and suggested it was a good way to get started because people posting on Thumbtack were usually on a budget and I knew Ii would be charging the “I’m just starting out” rate anyway.  I made a little webpage with my basic prices and then figured I would quote my prices at a discount on Thumbtack anyway.  I reached out to a few people I had planned parties for before and got two reviews, and I posted photos from some of the events I’d planned.


Here’s the scoop on Thumbtack, in case you don’t know.  Thumbtack brings together people who need things done and companies, freelancers, or business-minded folks who get a chance to bid on the job.  The catch is that as a professional providing the quote for services, you pay for the opportunity to bid on the job.  You pay for the lead.  The customer asking for the quotes see that the quotes from professionals are free.  Free!  That’s awesome for them, but what they don’t know (at least I don’t think most of them do) is that on the professional end the opportunity to bid costs at least $1.67 and more recently for me upwards of $30.  I know, in the grand scheme of life, a few bucks isn’t much, but the catch is that anyone can create a Thumbtack job without creating an account and they can “fish” for prices for just about anything.  As the professional, I had no idea which were real requests or which were fishing requests and Thumbtack does nothing to stop this, they just collect the money for the bids. 


I opened my Thumbtack account in early July of this year (2017) and a week or two after I’d gotten the hang of what requests were coming in, I started quoting jobs.  If you are the first professional to quote it can be as inexpensive at $1.67, but Thumbtack only allows a maximum of five quotes.  If you are quoter number five, then the cost is $8.35 for the category I was in, wedding planning.  I found out other categories are much, much more expensive.  More on this later.

After a month of quoting planning jobs and hearing nothing back, I was beginning to wonder.  I was frustrated and getting a lot of emails and notifications from the Thumbtack app on my phone.  I quoted a job on August 20 and quickly realized the pain of getting involved in this quote process with someone who is not serious about hiring anyone, but instead just wants to fish out prices; and who also has no idea that the professionals pay for the “opportunity” to quote the job. 

I bid on a wedding planning job for someone named “Alex.”  She posted that she needed “day-of wedding planning” and 4 hours of help on the day of her event for the wedding, reception and rehearsal party (this should have been my first clue).  She also stated that her budget was between $600 and $800.  I have a whole “day-of” outline on my website listed for $1000.  As part of my plan to get new customers, I quoted Alex $750 for the job.  She replied the next day that it was “out of her price range,” which surprised me because she listed her budget as between $600 and $800.  Maybe it was that I’d already sent off about 20 quotes and heard nothing back and spent about $30 in the process, but Alex’s dismissal of my quote that was within her price range pissed me off a little. 

So I replied to her, and it went badly.  Here is a screen capture of our conversation. 

 

The gist of it was I should not have replied, but beyond that, it was clear that this girl had no idea that I had paid $8 to send her that quote to do a $750 job. Thumbtack does have a “Less than $600” option, and the customer can specify their budget so Alex could have entered $650 or $599 or whatever she wanted, but instead, she mislabeled her job and then declined my bid. I tried, at first, to just be nice and say “thanks, but my quote was within your stated price range.”  She said my comment was rude.  I think her stating the wrong budget was rude, so I contacted Thumbtack to try and get my money back.  I did not hear anything from them about that.  Yes, I should not have called her April (not sure why I did that), but her reply that I am a terrible business owner and that she was going to track me down and leave terrible reviews (for work I never did for her) is cranky, childish and over the top. And clearly, this girl has never EVER made a mistake in her entire life. Kudos to her.

The more I think about this one, the more I realize she was probably fishing on prices and had no intention of hiring anyone, but maybe wanted to know how much to pay her friend or sister or cousin to help her plan her wedding.

After this Alex experience I stopped bidding on planning jobs and moved into a field, I know more about, web design and development.  I set up my profile for this profession, and since I didn’t need a website I just waited for potential jobs to come in. 

 And come in they did, but Thumbtack outdid themselves!  These jobs are a minimum of $30 to quote, and this is for the first quoter.  Each of these jobs costs a lot more for the lead, and the job descriptions are so vague and sparse, and easily 90% of them have no budget.  So I’m supposed to pay $30 to quote a website job with no set amount of web pages, no stated budget, some additional services (maybe) and with no specific timeline.

Yikes!  How do I even know what to bid?  What if I bid $1000 and it turns out the business or person wants a shopping cart with 1000 products?  What a mess! 

The only one benefiting from all this is Thumbtack.  Thumbtack just pockets all the quote money.  A pretty sweet gig for them.  The more popular and in demand the job, the more they charge. 

After all this, I’m researching Thumbtack even more and finding out the negative side.  So many frustrated people.

I’m going to leave my profile there for a week or two more and use up the remaining credits I paid for on quotes, and then I’m canceling my Thumbtack account and going back to getting freelance web work the old-fashioned way – on Craigslist.  I can put a listing on Craigslist for free and wade through the same number of emails Thumbtack sends out, but at least I don’t have to pay to contact people.  When Craigslist seems like a better option, you know Thumbtack is not good.  


Share

Comments are closed.