What NEED does this meet?
Lots of people who are in the situation that the need a plumber / electrician / plasterer / builder / brickie / conveyancer / surveyor / accountant etc. At this point they resort to the yellow pages / yell.com to try and find someone. Typically they only details they get are the phone number of the tradesman, who invariably fails to show up for the appointment.
What is the APPROACH?
You have a directory like yell.com, where you can add feedback – it should explicity ask for useful data like ‘did they turn up for the quote’, ‘lead time to work being carried out’, ‘call out charge’, ‘how satisfactory was the work’, ‘how much did it cost for what was done’, ‘what certifications does this person have’.
What are the BENEFITS to people?
Dealing with tradesmen is a total pain in the arse and it’s impossible to get information on them, especially on quality of service which is why so much is done by word of mouth recommendation from other people. This is a pain if you don’t know anyway whos used the services of a plumber/a damp proof courser/a roofer/bouncy castle hire before.
What is the COMPETITION?
Yell.com provides details of a small fraction of the tradesmen, the cam.misc wiki provides a +/- recommendation service.
What BUDGETS & LOGISTICS are required?
Trivial, it’s a database backed website linked to the postcode database to get ‘people near you’.
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April 19th, 2006 at 6:57pm
Good suggestion but you might be pulling the rug from under a commercial proposition and i can’t see how you’d stop individuals gaming the system
July 12th, 2006 at 6:37pm
I’m working on part of this. It’s not trivial, and you’ll need to have social network information to be able to show you who your friends liked first.
Yellow pages are a very big market, and there’s a lot of people in that space right now hoping to get a piece of it. Markets are eventually get this one sorted out!