Thumbtack: paying to race to the bottom
We spent roughly $1,600 on Thumbtack leads in about 3 months and could see we were losing money before we ever opened a spreadsheet.
We signed up for Thumbtack in 2021 expecting an established platform that would feed us real leads and help us get business. We were a new company and we were hoping to find jobs to do.
The first lead was a TV mount. It was exactly what we wanted.
By the second week I could see the shape of the problem. A lead would come in. We would reach out. The customer would never respond. And we had already paid for it.
That’s the part I didn’t understand going in. A lead on Thumbtack is somebody clicking that they are interested and want to reach out to a company. You are charged for that click, regardless of whether a conversation ever happens.
The same job, at three times the price
A TV mounting lead cost us roughly $25. The same job, when it came through classified as home theater, cost roughly $75.
I don’t know who chose the category. I assume it was the customer, and that Thumbtack pushed it through without checking the details. I don’t know how their classification system worked then or works now. What I know is that the identical work arrived at two different prices depending on a word somebody picked from a menu.
We never disputed one. I’m not confident a dispute program existed for us at the time.
The customers who booked us and kept shopping
Customers would accept our quote. We would put them on the schedule for the next day. Then they would cancel that afternoon.
I found out why because they told me. They had accepted our job and then gone with somebody else. Not always somebody cheaper. Sometimes just somebody faster. They kept shopping the platform after they had already booked us.
That isn’t Thumbtack showing our job to other pros after the fact. That isn’t how the system works. It was the customer continuing to browse on their own, which the platform makes easy and which costs them nothing.
Why we stopped
We never ran a sophisticated analysis. This was early in the company and we were watching monthly expenses closely, and the credit card charges from Thumbtack just kept going up. Small numbers, over and over. It was clear before we ever dumped anything into a spreadsheet that we weren’t making money on those leads.
We spent approximately $1,600 over about 3 months. That bought us about 60 leads, and about 10 of them turned into jobs. That’s about $160 in leads for every job we won. What those 10 jobs paid didn’t cover the leads plus the actual cost of doing the work.
What I tell people now
We tried it. It didn’t work out for us.
I do not know what it is like for other trades, and I don’t know how the platform has changed since we used it.
The thing you are buying isn’t a customer. It’s a click. And if you can’t answer what a click is worth to you before you buy the first one, the platform will answer it for you, one charge at a time.