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Comment by h2odragon | Hacker News Reader

Imagining myself approaching the contractor end: why do I need this? There's more work than I can hire people to do, right now; and this looks a lot like "commit to an open ended job, unseen, for a fixed price."

NFI what happened to it, but I recall hearing of a Lowe's "official" effort to try to assemble something like this; they theoretically have the resources to find and keep good relationships with local stables of contractors; but in practice.. no, that's not gonna happen, its gonna be a boondoggle.

But where's your "have a beer with these guys" level of trust in someone's crew? You're proxying that to the homeowners, so I'm curious what you plan to do there, especially as it grows past personal relationship scales.

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> NFI what happened to it, but I recall hearing of a Lowe's "official" effort to try to assemble something like this; they theoretically have the resources to find and keep good relationships with local stables of contractors; but in practice.. no, that's not gonna happen, its gonna be a boondoggle.

Lowe's does this. It's not a boondoggle. Works out well in many cases because they can sell for example windows and the install at once.

https://www.lowes.com/l/lowes-home-services.html

The contractors who love us are small, independent shops who are great at their craft, but not great at sales & marketing. Unlike lead-gen services, we send them jobs with defined scope and payment. We need to be really good at scoping because if we botch it, then we take liability for that rather than putting it on the contractor. We've had contractors hire more people to their team and buy additional service trucks, purely based on the volume we send them.

Scaling will be a lot of complex work but we've built systems like that in the past at UberEats, where Chris was one of the first GMs, and at Opendoor (largest homebuyer in the US).

That sounds good, and I certainly wish yall luck, there's definitely need for the service. I've heard (and seen) very little good from the existing efforts, which seem to be mostly focused on selling contractors access to database entries made up from whole cloth in foreign call centers.

(Tip for people looking at those: rural zipcodes are great canaries for fake data, "we've done work at $Neighbor's house" is a good brag, except when the house burned down 5 years ago and wasnt the one in the picture)

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