Yes, that is the smell of baited breath.

/sarcasm

How many contractors are REALLY going to give their credit card to them? How many contractors actually HAVE a credit card? Never gonna work.

It sounds great, but this relies on having a huge base of businesses that are active, I can’t see this working.

Quick survey, how many Bay Area TC readers will use this?

I probably won’t. I’d prefer to look at Yelp and/or merchant websites to find a few merchants that appear reputable and are close by, and then I’d call or email those guys.

That said, there could be some SEM arbitrage here, if RedBeacon is thrifty about buying clicks.

I agree, maybe some search arbitrage, but what kind of contractor is going to give you a realistic quote without coming out to see the job. possibly they will do it and pay per lead or cpa for each job they get, but i do not see this being big. it will just serve to drive down price, which will just be matched with poor quality.
sounds like it was thought up by young kids that do not have families our own their own homes yet.

How long until this turns into the hot new Erotic Services successor to craigslist?

Amazing how the “Recent Requests from the Community” list contains exactly one request for each type of service.

if they had a smooth sounding natural language domain name like FindaCompany they would have a better chance of success. most people cant spell beacon, becon, beecon, beckon. red-be-a-con can be misinterpreted in many ways.

Yes, this will be dynamite for erotic services. Post the qualifications for the “job” that you want done, then watch the bidding begin. Funny.

I think we’ve been thoroughly introduced to how RedBeacon can be useful for ordering cupcapes… Anything else useful about it?

How many contractors rightfully belong in the country?

True, but they got some great press, so I imagine they will probably pick up steam kinda fast. Maybe not though. I think it’s a neat idea, however, so we’ll see how it goes. Good luck RB!

You need to go drinking.

As I remember, the way they solve the chicken and egg problem is to call providers up in the beginning, as they won’t have sufficient providers to serve the request. While it is great entrepreneur spirit, it is also quite laughable. I can imagine all competitors will post fake requests there and keep them busy till midnight.

Yes they can pickup some providers sign up but providers will be upset they are busying with fake request.

apparently berkeley is not part of the “bay area” launch. odd. the idea seems promising, there is no equivalent, excepting yelp. of which only one roofer showed up in my search yesterday.

I started almost an identical company 4 years ago called BidOverMe.com. People came looking for service providers, they said what they need done, then the providers could bid over it.

We also let them contact the customer directly to find out more information or come out and see it themselves first. This is what most all the contractors chose to do.

Contractors don’t like to work within a system. For anything bigger than 50 or 100 bucks, they are going to want to talk to the customer themselves and perhaps actually see it first. And this is where the real money is at – in large projects. Not little cupcake deliveries.

I wish them the best, but I don’t think they will be able to remain profitable once all the hype dies down.

They said they would actively call business to get them to reply to ads in the early days. I think a business owner when offered a paying gig will be willing to signup. Why not its just another avenue for leads.

But most contractors don’t sit around reading TechCrunch all day.

Exactly, phone call or some sort of direct communication is a must for service transaction, as service is not like a product that you fully describe. That is why Yext is able to have the investment after a demo on TC50.

Take a look at http://www.QuestBid.com. This is one slick model that on top of everyone does including redbeacon, their powerful VOIP platform automatically call providers for screening and then connect the provider and consumer if both sides prefer. They have a cool Ring the Bell button that actually works!

It is all about connecting provider and consumer. The natural language search and machine learning thing is a hype. There are only 700+ categories in local business that a high school kid can easily sort out the keyword mapping.

+1 x 2

Word “local business” makes 99% of VCs look for a door. There is a good reason for it…go-to-market.

What about liability? If a courier delivers cupcakes to Techcrunch and than steals Arrington’s purse, who pays? This service has a lot of open ends.

Nothing against the firm, but I was disappointed to see them win at techcrunch50. Products like this have existsed for a while for specialty areas, such as home repairs, home healther care, etc. and general services…just look at http://www.needhelpers.com…same exact concept, but has been around a lot longer.

Long story short, this is nothing more than a leads generation firm, which is a very crowded and competitive arena. I looked at starting the same firm several years ago (owned and started several firms) and decided to pass…long story short, acquisition cost for customers (via cpc, etc.) is just too high. Will take a lot of cash, marketing, etc. to get get close to breaking even.

Having said that, good luck…nothing like starting a new company!!!1

http://www.needhelpers.com…sorry about that…

needhelpers.com

As the world is slightly bigger than SF Bay Area.

There will be scaling problems: both on servers and operations (and probably sales and marketing too).

Getting the marketing message out to all small business owners and shops is a huge undertaking.

Kara’s cupcakes are simply yumptious. What a great request. Can I post on RedBeacon to get someone to ship some to London?

so where’s the update?

guaranteed this would not have worked if you didn’t put it up on the site so you could get some startup walking to your door with a cupcake in hand

This is a cool idea and I wish them the best!

I think the bad economy will help redbeacon because contractors have to fight for business now. It will be interesting to see if RedBeacon can get contracters to use a bidding system. If they can, the skies the limit!

[...] It Looks To Bring Local Service Providers Online November 25th, 2009 Last month we saw the launch of TechCrunch50 winner RedBeacon, the startup that lets you book local service providers directly [...]

[...] month we saw the launch of TechCrunch50 winner RedBeacon, the startup that lets you book local service providers directly [...]