Contractor Directory BuildZoom (YC W13) Raises $1.4 Million Seed Round
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
I wish these guys the best of luck. We often get asked if we are worried about this company or that company that seems to be positioning as a direct competitor, and the answer is no. In fact, the best advice we ever got was from a competitor.
The market is so big that there's room for a lot of players to make a lot of money. Though, ultimately, we think that the market will be led by one major player (In the same way that eBay is where you go to buy used things and Amazon is where you go to buy new things), which is the reason we have consistently chosen not to narrow our scope either geographically or by vertical.
It's also interesting that they chose to seed the database from contractor records. We thought about doing this, but wanted to be able to say that every service provider on our site was real. Not sure what we would've done if we had to do it over again, but it appears they've had some success (25,000).
The hardest part is yet to come, though. We've been at this for five years, and the biggest take away is that it's not really about getting service providers or getting consumers - the important part is what happens in the middle. That's what we've spent the most time working on.
I do question the premise of the services market as whole being a "winner-take-all" space. I do believe this becomes more viable in a more narrowly defined segment of the overall local services market.
I think the marketplace examples of a "winner-take-all" (e.g. eBay and Amazon) are a bit questionable (it isn't the first time I've heard this perspective).
When I want to buy something used (for example), I have probably turned to Craigslist just as many times as I've turned to eBay. When it comes to new items, I always look at Amazon but the overall query covers a much broader space, which will include more specialized e-commerce sites.