Q&A with Dan Spinosa and Drew Stanley from Fixable on building a managed marketplace for DIYers

[To source a supply of pros], we’ve used online ads, which has worked really well actually.

It's...not just unions, but the municipalities, the planners, the permitting offices, the inspectors, the cities. They're all going to have an opinion and a view on us. We'll be under the radar for a little bit, of course.

[Fixable is] a managed marketplace, but we're connecting you—the homeowner or the business owner, the DIYer—with the right pro for your project. It’s a virtual consultation. It's all on your phone, text, pictures, video chat to help you with your specific project and then to give you all the tools to be successful there.

Home improvement is...almost a $500 billion market. $250 billion of that is home center sales...About half of that is probably pros or semi-pros directly. The other half is homeowners, small business owners, and folks that would be in our market... the scope of what we can do there—with 20% of homeowners being digital natives now—is probably a $10 ... See more

Key not just to revenue but the rest of the business generally is seasonality.

Trade schools aren't pumping out as many professionals, and older ones are retiring because their bodies can only do it for so much longer. This gives them access to work from home, like the rest of us have.

We're pre-launch, and at this point, we have a focus on the supply side, so we're talking with pros. We've onboarded about 50 since June, and they span all the trades. 

Something like 20% of homeowners are digital natives, and yet the one store we still go to is Home Depot. This is something that it’s not obvious you can bring online, but you can.

[Home Depot] should have built this five years ago, honestly...I think there could be a cool opportunity to partner with them, where you could go on their site and get in touch with an actual skilled tradesperson who knows what they're talking about instead of customer service.