Hey Sean. Good to hear from you again!
Sorry to hear that you are struggling now, but I still think your original idea is killer. Before you kill that one off I would like to hear some more specifics. What exact services were you offering? What services were you actually getting calls on?
A couple points on why you may have found problems:
To me it looks like you have a classic 2 sided market problem. Until you get enough customers, you cannot exert any leverage on the contractors. And until you get enough high quality contractors, you cannot offer any compelling package to potential customers.
I'm not entirely sure on how you tried to approach this business, but I wonder if maybe you tried to offer too much too soon? Did you offer an all in one solution for home maintenance needs from the beginning? Trying to go this route before you have built up the infrastructure and built a brand name might be too hard or expensive to do.
Maybe you could consider focusing on one niche. Say lawn care. Once you have a captive audience who love your service, trust you, and are willing to offer you testimonials and referrals you can start adding services one by one. Lets say pool service. In this case you still aren't able to offer an all in one package to home owners yet, but you could offer your large pool of customers to pool maintenance guys. Because of the large customer base you already have from lawn care you could exert some leverage on these contractors, and because you already have an established relationship with your customer base they will want to go through you because you are vetting these guys.
Now start adding niches one by one. Home cleaning? Painting? Winterizing homes? As your customer base grows, your offer to contractors becomes stronger. As you get better contractors, your offer to customers becomes stronger. At a certain point, customers and contractors will begin to hear about your business and then your brand itself will be enough to offer value.
I think in the beginning you may need to live with low margins just to grow the network. In other words offer leads to contractors for free until your business grows enough. For the consumer, you can offer other services at no additional cost while still vetting contractors and offering centralized billing, etc.
Also, please link your previous threads on this topic. Others may not remember.
Sorry to hear that you are struggling now, but I still think your original idea is killer. Before you kill that one off I would like to hear some more specifics. What exact services were you offering? What services were you actually getting calls on?
A couple points on why you may have found problems:
To me it looks like you have a classic 2 sided market problem. Until you get enough customers, you cannot exert any leverage on the contractors. And until you get enough high quality contractors, you cannot offer any compelling package to potential customers.
I'm not entirely sure on how you tried to approach this business, but I wonder if maybe you tried to offer too much too soon? Did you offer an all in one solution for home maintenance needs from the beginning? Trying to go this route before you have built up the infrastructure and built a brand name might be too hard or expensive to do.
Maybe you could consider focusing on one niche. Say lawn care. Once you have a captive audience who love your service, trust you, and are willing to offer you testimonials and referrals you can start adding services one by one. Lets say pool service. In this case you still aren't able to offer an all in one package to home owners yet, but you could offer your large pool of customers to pool maintenance guys. Because of the large customer base you already have from lawn care you could exert some leverage on these contractors, and because you already have an established relationship with your customer base they will want to go through you because you are vetting these guys.
Now start adding niches one by one. Home cleaning? Painting? Winterizing homes? As your customer base grows, your offer to contractors becomes stronger. As you get better contractors, your offer to customers becomes stronger. At a certain point, customers and contractors will begin to hear about your business and then your brand itself will be enough to offer value.
I think in the beginning you may need to live with low margins just to grow the network. In other words offer leads to contractors for free until your business grows enough. For the consumer, you can offer other services at no additional cost while still vetting contractors and offering centralized billing, etc.
Also, please link your previous threads on this topic. Others may not remember.