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Comment by monster_group | Hacker News Reader

Lack of reliable service from plumbers, HVAC, appliance repair people. There are many people available but the quality and consistency of service is highly variable and chances of getting ripped off are high if you don't do your due diligence. I wish there was more standardization in these services where I don't have to worry about getting ripped off and can expect a decent quality of service without spending too much time on looking up vendors, reading reviews etc. If I want get a leaky washer fixed I don't want to spend my entire weekend to try to figure out if it can be DIY or not. I should just be able to call a reliable service, pay a reasonable price and get if fixed.

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So many of these contractors have zero comms skills or infra because they focus on the work and not basic customer relations.

My personal frustration: (0) have someone answer the phone, (1) tell me when are you coming, and (2) be there. I suspect they all have a family member with QB and an answering machine as their whole back office.

Someone should set up simple SaaS to do automated appointment slots, schedule updates to customers, and billing. Charge $1 per slot. Sign up all the contractors.

According the the footer in my receipt email the last electrician I used used Housecall Pro (https://www.housecallpro.com/) as their back office. It worked really well, I got SMS reminders about when they were on the way and even texted them a video explaining what I needed done so got an accurate estimate before anyone showed up. Now that I think about it I have no idea if the dispatcher I texted with was an employee of the electrician or this company, but I guess I don’t care.

> Someone should set up simple SaaS to do automated appointment slots, schedule updates to customers, and billing. Charge $1 per slot. Sign up all the contractors.

This is going to end up bad for the contractors. Just look how Uber Eats et al robbed restaurant owners from the profitability of their businesses.

My old business partner started a small company and built software and worked directly with small contractors to do exactly this. They seriously don’t care and don’t see a need for it.

The real problem is a lot of these contractors and subcontractors are running micro businesses—with just a person or two involved—and it’s usually independent subs all the way down. But they don’t treat it as a business—it’s just work. It’s how they earn a living. They don’t want to be businesses. The ones who care and think of it like a business are night-and-day different.

Having worked on this the realization came that the problem isn't one that can be solved with software. There are a million solutions that in theory should work, if that were the case. The problem is a large percentage of people who work in the trades are flaky. This is not something that the SV crowd can understand. They don't want to be more efficient. They know their jobs can't ever be outsourced. They want to work when they want to work and to be at the bar or on their boat if weather permits.

penalize the flakes, give steady performers a boost?

after some point, no flakes on the platform.

Exhibit A

Larry David’s new season of Curb Your Enthusiasm has an episode where he highlights exactly this problem and comes up with a way to fix it. He calls it House Husband where someone who knows a little about everything can come and check to see if the repair being offered is legit.

I feel like you didn’t take the message of that episode to heart

I just didn’t think it was necessary to spoil all of the episode. You definitely get what you pay for.

Have a friend who works in managing properties or insurance. Call your house insurance agent and ask who they would call to fix a leaky pipe or whatever it may be.

Did you watch the episode through? Slight spoilers so stop reading here if you haven't watched the new season. Leon ended up causing an inconvenience for everyone as the the services he negotiated in place of his clients in the end was done poorly xD.

I did finish it. Felt that I shouldn’t give out too much information about the episode though :)

So. Much. This.

I have spent the last year sorting a number of repairs that involved plumbing, drywall, paint, and trim to walls, floors, and ceilings to repair damage. In every case, I’ve had to ask for things to be done 2 or 3 times at a minimum just to get things done right and look the way they did before the damage occurred and the work began. Not once has the job ever been done correctly the first time I’m asked to take a look and sign off on completion. I feel I’ve only been able to leverage such refusal because I’ve been able to refuse to write a check (or asked my insurance company to do the same) until the work was right. I’m always told I’m wrong when I call attention to something, and I’ve even had to track down the original builder for records and materials to prove I was correct. And that’s excluding when the workers carelessly cause more damage by doing things wrong, making shitty cuts, doing poor work on drywall mud and corners, carelessly paint edges onto opposing surfaces with different colors, or, you know, split my granite countertop in two.

It is exhausting.

Just what my nightmares are made of.

So, I worked at a startup that specifically tried to work on this issue.

It ended up failing. You know why? People were cheap. They didn’t care at all about the quality of service until after the job was done and they paid bottom dollar.

People are incredibly price sensitive. If there’s a service that is 1% cheaper, they’ll go with that even if it causes 10x as many headaches. The reason? Money is obvious but luck isn’t.

It’s only when you get into business scale of stuff that do people care about quality. For most people - they’re shopping once a year for some handyman service. In those cases, they’ll do whatever they can to get the lowest promised rate upfront. This means they’ll go with untested folks as long as they’re cheap.

Truly, I think there is a way to have both cheap and good but it’s just not in the best interests of a capitalist. If you’re good, you raise your prices as high as possible. You don’t need to compete with shitty - you’re inherently better and thus feel you can charge more. Your clients will feel the same. But I think your clients aren’t likely typical homeowners in those cases. Maybe it’s commercial.

I surely can't be the only one who isn't price sensitive at all. 3x market rate? If that means it gets done well, happily.

We are actually working on this! https://dryft.se but so far we're only in Stockholm, but expanding fast :)

I've felt that this could be a place where unions and/or guilds have a role. If I hire a union worker then the union guarantees that the person shows up and does quality work. If that doesn't happen then the union is held legally and financially responsible. In this world I would be happy to pay a premium for a union worker.

Reliable professionals for just about anything. There's a ton of stuff I'd happily leave to others at a premium price, if I could only rest assured that they'd do it properly. I simply don't know where to look.

Couldn't agree more. Services like thumbtack and yelp seem to try to get you in the direction of good contractors, but the signal to noise is incredibly high. There seem to be very few reputational penalties for poor performance.

This is a problem more generally too. Performance management of employees is often haphazard as well for very similar reasons.

Fixer is an attempt to get this kind of reliability together, I think.

https://fixer.com/

That's a good one, the crux of the issue seems to be information asymmetry.

Doesn't Angi.com solve this?

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