Woot, I have commenting access now :) I'm the lead PM at Pro.com, and am looking forward to participating on this site. I've been lurking for a couple of weeks and this seems like a fantastic community for having product conversations.
@rrhoover Re: the domain, it's a fascinating story involving a lot of sleuthing and even more luck. It wasn't cheap, but I still think we got a great deal on it. I hope to see the full story in Matt W's future book. Anyhow, I feel really fortunate that we landed that name - I can't tell you how much time/energy was spent on the naming process.
@adamsigel Re: our pros, this is a problem where we're really scratching our own itch. Most of us are homeowners or have been and gone through the pain of finding contractors. We've all used Angie's List, Porch, Yelp, RedBeacon, Craigslist, etc and are trying to take a different approach where we do the leg work for you in finding great pros and let you focus on the "last mile" of the decision - e.g. this guy's gallery has Craftsman homes in it, or I have an urgent need and this guy is available immediately. But all of them are great.
How do you know they are great? That's an interesting question. I can tell you about our vetting process and how we're hand picking these pros based on a bunch of criteria, talking to them, talking to their customers, finding out what exactly is so great (or not great...) about them, and background checking their crews - but ultimately it comes down to word of mouth. With home contracting, personal referrals are so huge - 60%+ of people start there whenever they have a project to take care of. If you have a great experience with a particular pro or Pro.com in general, that's worth a ton in this space. So we're also over investing in a layer of customer service on top of things, and that's where @grmeyer's crew comes in. They're like this superstar concierge team that is standing by to make sure you have a solid experience, and swoop in to fix things if you ever have a problem. Things do go wrong - even the best contractor might get their wires crossed and show up on the wrong day. But the save makes all the difference.
@ffumarola, it is a super tough space that is filled with nuance. We think we're one of the few companies in it who are going after the hard problems. We've got a ways to go, but we're on the path. My research totally validates your premise about the value of personal referrals or even signals from people "like you" or in your neighborhood. We definitely want to bring more of that in especially as we accumulate more review data. If anyone has suggestions about this in particular, I think it would be super valuable for us.
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