The sweatystartup is doomed

@joeysoley On the podcast, He said that you need to go after high paying clients - But then again your competing with the big guys.

This is not correct, depending on what you mean by "high paying clients". If you mean commercial accounts, then you are generally correct. If you mean a niche service that you can charge a higher rate (hourly or whatever) then, no, the big boys can't do this kind of thing. They are focused on doing the basic jobs for the lowest price to gain market share.

Who wants to compete with that?
 
@rls I agree that the commercial guys wouldn't dip into residential and freelance stuff. In my eyes, In the future there will only be B2b (commercial) services and then normal home servicing jobs, For individuals it is so much more convenient to use these directories where they can check prices and ratings on one page and choose than it is to go onto a companies website, My mother is not stingy with money in the slightest and is willing to pay for a good job yet she still used a directory and the job was done well very quickly.
My concern is that these directories split home services into two groups
1)B2b
2)b2c - I believe these will use directories out of convenience and on these directories people seem to compete solely on price
 
@rls Oh man I should probably have said gig economy type websites, There's a ton of them things like mybuilder,midrive,taskrabbit,(soon) Amazon home services - There's a shit ton of them for pretty much every field
 
@kersh Nah just an example (Probably a bad one considering I haven't a clue what it means) - The English ones are Mybuilder,checkatrade,handyman ect
 
@joeysoley I definitely identify with this and have had many of the same thoughts. At the end of the day, the percentage of customers who are willing to pay enough so that you can support yourself is dwindling. People who may have in the past (before the advent of all these middleman tech companies) paid a higher price, will move toward the cheaper convenient option simply because it's there. So like you said, there's no middle ground. You either compete on price or you try to be a premium, niched out service. There just isn't enough money or work to go around though for everyone to try and be a premium service, it's not feasible.

In the past, where the distribution of customer preference for cost may have been:

50% cheap

30% moderate

20% premium

I think it's now more like 65% cheap, 20% moderate, 15% premium.

The unfortunate truth is that all of this drives down wages as a whole and it creates a catch 22 situation. There aren't enough people willing or able to pay premium prices for services to support all of the people who need to make a real living with their business. More people are forced to work the lower paid gigs and they fight for scraps while an ever-shrinking portion of people actually land the premium paid work. If the majority of people are losing money, there are even fewer people willing to pay a premium. Thus, the cycle continues.
 
@joeysoley I want to agree that technology may put everyone out of business ...

But then we've sort of seen this card played before. Large companies do not own all the markets. Robots were supposed to eliminate all labor from factories and warehouses way back in the 80s. The Internet was supposed to take over all commerce, buts its still only something like 10-12%. Computers and digital data were supposed to replace paper reports, but it really had the opposite effect.

I can't read tea leaves. When the facebook generation ages and replaces the boomers, maybe you'll be right. These "startups" you mention as competitors live in a weird time were you can hemorrhage millions and investors seem to be okay with it. In a downturn they could also (will go) go out of business.

I do know there's a price, service and quality point for everyone. Otherwise we'd all be driving yugos and wearing walmart clothing.
 
@joeysoley Depends on what the startup is. Something easy that takes no real skills (driving an uber) and then the market gets flooded with people willing to make an extra buck. Try to create an "uber" app for plumbing and it will not move pricing because the supply of workers will not increase.
 
@joeysoley People with money pay premium to not have discount trades people in their homes.

Some people will always buy Hondas and some people will always buy Porsches.

The Porsche guy is your market. Let the bottom feeders fight it out for the rest.
 
@datafastproxiespx01 I agree somewhat.
But, A lot of these guys on the sites have lots of good reviews and are top quality tradesmen so it's more like comparing 2 Porsches.

Also, @traviscig sells the idea that the competition is low, Which is not the case when we (Entry level businesses) are all competing with the big companies at the top while not finding work at the bottom to gain any traction
 
@joeysoley Disagree. Getting a quality tradesman who is punctual, runs a tight ship and displays fantastic customer service AND is cheap is as hard to find as a good mechanic. Nearly impossible.

For sweaty businesses such as trades and service business, the best way for a customer to get a decent person is via recommendation and most of the time those recommended know their value and charge adequately.

Large companies suck because their employees could give two fucks about the job they performed. They will do the bare minimum. People know that. The only reason they still call them is that the large companies won't stuff you around, will pick up the phone, schedule an appointment and treat the customer in a professional manner. This is adequate for many people.

Take for example a company like ZeroRez (carpet cleaning). Yes they get volume because they run ludicrous specials, yet their work is almost garbage and most of their clients end up paying more for the next carpet cleaner who comes in and wows them.

There is a growing anti-corporation trend in the western world, where people find more value in the local, family run small businesses, rather than a perceived large corporation without soul.
 
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