
results: 10
topic id 32384: Private Chef/Catering Pricing
topic id 26197: Paying twice for the same lead
topic id 25265: Pricing
topic id 22503: Leads
topic id 22064: Questionable leads
topic id 14288: Declined "Leads" charged
Level 4

Re: zero business 2019

I may not be super tech savvy but I’m not a moron either. Once upon a time tt sent me leads from within my travel preferences. Now it does not. And when I open the “continue set up” it shows my travel preferences are still in tact. And no, I have not expressed interest in a job that could come from up to 150 miles away. Pls stop trying to make this about my “confusion” or failure to do something right. Only thing I’m confused about is why I’m still wasting my time with tt.
Level 4

Re: zero business 2019

Hmmm- something is just becoming clear to me. Am I the last to know this?

Unlike before, Tt will now only honor my travel preferences if I agree to auto pay for exact matches. Otherwise I will be sent useless garbage from all over.
Way to support your small biz pros, thumbtack. 👎
Level 12

Re: zero business 2019


I've suggested a few times that the travel preferences should be in sync with both, auto pay and non-auto pay. And I still don't know what happened with that suggestion after it was supposedly passed on.

DJ Stevie 7-7-20219

0 Kudos
Level 4

Re: Introducing the TackMaster program.

I for 1 would like to see the real estate leads made more fair. I have been a member for many years and even when responding imediatly ive never gotton a lead. Perhaps only a few can be notified and rotate so everyone gets a chance to have access to them. 

I would like to know more About the program.

0 Kudos

17 leads. 0 hire, 7 no response, 7 canceled, 3 wrong or illegal leads


My statistic data from 6/25 to today 7/8.
I spent over $150(exclude refunds) and got 0 hire.
7 of them never reply
7 of them told me they canceled the projects or not interested anymore.
3 of them are wrong leads(contacted me under my rate or asked the wrong service) and 1 gave me an Inappropriate and Defamatory Review before she hires me.

So far, 0% hire rate on Thumbtack. You hit the record!

Even include the last 3 hires on 6/24, from 5/29 to today 7/8. over 1 month.
I spent over $400/mo(exclude refunds) and got 3 hires, 30 leads.
10% hire rate.

I know that you launched the promotion system that you are happy at the end of last year.
In fact, no one in the third-party website and facebook vote likes your new system. (85% dislike I guess?)
I faced the same problem at the beginning of this year and also gave feedbacks to you.
You haven't changed or improved anything in the half-year trial run. I am facing the same problem now.
Since you are not willing to change anything,
Tell me if there anything you can explain to me or anything I can do before I leave.





Re: 17 leads. 0 hire, 7 no response, 7 canceled, 3 wrong or illegal leads

It's never easy to hear from a pro under circumstances like these. I know you and some other pros here have had a harder time getting along in the new Thumbtack and I'm here to help in any way that I can. We've seen great improvements in the overall health of the marketplace and an increased number of hires in all areas, and we want the new system to benefit you as well. 

In regards to the review that you mentioned, I know that Meckell was able to take a look into it to determine that the lead and review were legitimate. You can view Meckells response HERE.

As for any advice I can give, I'd start by working to chip away at and lower your average response time. Right now it sits at over 3 hours as opposed to the average pro at under 1 hour. Not only will this help your ranking to attract more customers, we also see a 50% increase in jobs leading to hires when pros respond in the first 30minutes vs after the first 2 hours. This can help with those customers that didn't respond or chose to go another route. You can learn more about response time HERE.

I hope this helps and if you have any follow up or additional questions please feel free to ask them. Ultimately we want what's best for you and your business and if you feel that Thumbtack is simply not for you right now and that you need to momentarily step away, then that's a decision we'll respect.

0 Kudos
Level 12



Hope it's ok for me to chime in here.

You say that "We've seen great improvements in the overall health of the marketplace and an increased number of hires in all areas". If possible, may I ask to see the stats for my category, as compared to last year with overall hires?

DJ Stevie 7-9-2019


@Kameron the new system is just not working for long time Pros.

Full Time Freelance Graphic Design.
On time and on budget!

Re: Filter by distance to find jobs where you want

I don't know if Kameron posted that, but I posted that a few months ago based on my own statistics. If I recall correctly, not a single hire came from what I bid on - they only came from those that reached out to me. It makes sense now that we know that there is a delay from the time the client reaches out to a pro, until it goes out to everyone else for bid. The serious person is more likely to respond fairly quickly. If they don't bother to respond to the pros they reached out to, why would they ever bother with the additional bids.

I don't know how anyone else is surviving this, because I made Top Pro when it was only 1%, and I've got over 300 hires and 140 reviews, and am a walking poster-child for how to be successful on TT - they even put me in their featured pro section, and I could teach classes on how to be successful on TT. I've run my biz for 5 years on 100% TT clients! And I always appear in 1st, 2nd, or 3rd position in the TT search results! So, you don't get much better than that! Then January came and I sat dead with no clients... Feb... Mar.... APRIL... MAY!!!!!!! Barely a trickle!!!! MY HIRES ARE DOWN BY 80% and I'm freaking out!!! I'm hanging on by a thread, starving and freaking!!! So if that's what's going on with me, I can't imagine what's going on with the rest of you, when 50% of the clients that hire anyone, hire me!!! The rest of the pros in my area are left scrambling to share the other 50% between them! You'd think with these kind of stats I'd be grossing well into a 6-figure income! But no, nothing like that at all because the number of hires are down by 80% this year!!! I used to average about $300 a month in TT fees, now I get bills for less than $10 a week because so few people are contacting me!! 80% of my income is gone!!!! But guess what... my living expenses didn't drop... in fact they've gone up $600 per month since last year!!!! TT is bringing in barely a trickle!!! Since I had no work the first 4 months of the year, I had time to rebuild my website and have gotten a few direct leads there, so I've been just about able to pay my minimums on bills every month with the TT trickle.

So I share this for everyone's benefit so you sit down and figure out your own numbers. You've got to know where your hires are coming from; how much you're spending on leads; your overhead to get a customer sitting in front of you, and the minimum you need to charge that customer to make sure you're covering your overhead, labor, and some profit. If you don't know your numbers you're going to dig yourself into a hole. There's all these amateurs and newbies in my categories that are charging these ridiculous cheap rates because they're not real businesses - their just making unreported cash on the side from a hobby, and thier work is way below professional standards. So, take that into account too, and make yourself stand out from the crowd! Like I said, I get 50% of the available jobs on TT and I'm starving to death this year. If you're not doing at least that, then you're going to go belly up. It's all in the numbers. Get on top or get out!

Every time TT made changes over the years, it knocked me down and then I figured out the secrets of how to make it work. I'm one of TT's biggest success stories! Technically I still am, based on my performance - unfortunately that performance is now based on a paltry number of leads coming in, but now it's based on 50% of 40 hires per year, where in previous years I was 30% of of 300 hires per year! The problem is that even if I got 100% of the jobs, there's not enough leads coming in for me to survive. That's the one issue that I can't remedy with how I work on TT to stay on top. I'm still on top, compared to my competition, but if the leads aren't coming in to TT this year, there just aren't clients to look at my beautiful work and rave reviews. TT has become a ghost town. I guess it's because they stopped advertising in my area. I used to see commercials all the time but haven't seen one in two years now. The ball has to be in their court to figure out how to get more people to the site. I've done my job, and I've excelled like virtually no other... so I'm sitting here eager to serve the clients, but the halls are echoing with emptiness.

So, Kameron, I'm eye to eye with you that promote is better than not (in certain categories - I cannot possibly use promote for events because I've only bid a few times all year because their request budgets are impossibly low and I cannot do those jobs). So we're telling you loudly and clearly that we need more jobs. What will TT be doing about that? Without the leads, anything they're "looking into" is an utter waste of time, becasue even if the system was working perfectly and thrilling all of us, meeting all our fantasies, if there are no requests coming in, it's all a moot point. Trust me, I LOVED paying TT $3400 per year!!! That investment was bringing me $50,000 to $75,0000 a year in sales!!! The rate of return was phenomonal!!!! The issues that the leads arent' there for me to bid on. I can't survive on the trickle of hires. I used to do 2-3 jobs per week, now it's 2-3 per MONTH!!!

So TT's number one focus needs to be getting more leads for us! I would say to please take this urgent message to the top of the chain there, as marco needs to be aware of this. However, I believe the issue is that TT makes much more money per lead now, so they think that we pros are more profitable now too! It's just not the case. IE. the other day a request came in for a wedding. The budget, as typical, was just insanely low. Why people think they can hire a wedding photog for 5 hours for less than $250 is a whole case that I've been screaming about for 5 years now... but let's not digress. This client contacted 11 pros!!!! Of course I'm not foolish enough to use promote under those condtions, so I wasn't charged for it. However, TT made over $308 on that lead. In the old days, with a 5 bid max at about $12 to bid, maybe 2 amateurs would have bid on that job. TT would have made $24 on it. They now made over $300. A lead has now become TWELVE TIMES more profitable for TT. Yet this lead was worthless to the 11 people contacted as no pro could possibly do that job for that price. That job would be priced at $1000 for a new pro and up to $2500 for an experienced pro, and double that for a world-class pro. So, nobody did the job and TT made $300+. They may be thinking that their enormous success since the change has trickled down to us pros. They are surely mistaken as the lack of leads has left us starving and they need to realize this, if they care. Honestly, it appears to us that they don't care, by the fact that our pleas have not been addressed. Please answer with your heart and address this honestly, because we are in a desperate situation on our end and we need to know if there is a light at the end of the tunnel, and if TT will start to advertise again so that we can get leads. Thank you.

Level 7

Re: Filter by distance to find jobs where you want

My experience is a bit different than most I guess. I have no shortage of "leads", and I decline several a week. First is that we have been running several weeks behind schedule as it is, but mostly is location. I live and work in NH, and I get all kids of request for MA. I feel bad that TT shows they our profile, because I decline all of them. Honestly, I hate traffic, and if I don't need it, I am not tangling with the Boston commuter traffic. But that is on TT. If they had any concern for their "Clients" they wouldn't show us out of NH. Every decline, they ask why, and I say "Because we don't work in MA". They give the little thank you for your input, file it in the round file, and we move on to dashing the expectations of the next "Client".

 Now for me, every lead is $75. I get leads all the time, my railing is loose, a board needs to be replaced on my deck, etc. TT seriously thinks that any sane person would pay $75 for that lead, and not only that but travel a hour to do it.

 Personally, I think that they have lost grip on reality at times.

 All that said, I do snag a job now and again that peeks my interest, but at $75 a pop, I am very, very selective. 

 TT is no longer the mainstay of my business, like so many others I have had to move on when TT left us behind.