Palo Alto-based Genie Town launches this morning. They’re trying to crack the local services nut – a huge market, but one that a lot of the big guys are eyeing, too.
The company says they are addressing the long tail of local services. The GenieTown site allows local service providers (plumbers, dentists, whatever) to put up a web presence. Users looking for providers can find them, based on their location and user rating.
The site competes on one end with services like (gulp) Google Local, Yahoo Local, Yelp and of course the Yellow Pages (both online and off). All of those services are great places to find local service providers.
Eventually GenieTown says they’ll integrate more closely with service providers to coordinate calendars and booking systems. At that point they’ll run into another group of competitors, including recently funded Liberysy.
If they are going to be successful in both carving out a niche and avoiding all those competitors, they’ll need to quickly get a lot of those service providers to start using their service. To concentrate their efforts they are rolling out the Bay Area only for now – service providers and users from anywhere can use the service, but the company will only market locally. They’ll grow from there.
And GenieTown is also trying to engage with users on more than just making introductions. The smartest part of the service, in my opinion, is a Q&A area that will do very will with search engine optimization.
The company has raised $2 million in a first round of funding from a number of angel investors, including Stanford professors Hassan Chafi (also the CEO) and Kunle Olukotun.
Cool, another great place for finding help. Looking and connecting with consumers is now easier.
http://www.itrush.com
It doesn’t allow you to link back to your company’s website. worthless.
Getting boring…
I really like their layout. Looks clean and wish them the best of luck. Not to steal Genietown’s thunder but 2 months ago I too launched my own local services site hoping to get all freelancers together called http://www.HELLUVAJOB.com. The concept is a bit different.
i dont understand – how they are different from ebay or Yahoo and Google local services.
Took 2 years to launch? Or is this a paid ad? Anyway here in NYC check out metrohorse.com, a year ago it raised a few million.
Absolutely wonderful. I bet this will be aquired by Gogle/Yahoo or another biggie in the near future.
Anyone can use this type of site.
How is it different from Google/Yahoo local? — Look at the interface. Web 2.0 platform. Same that differentiates Ryze and Linkedin.
Yes Linkedin could also be a possible aquirer.
@ #7 you’re joking right? Acquired?
How does a start up social site like this actually get the word out locally? local press? or just word of mouth. Will they just run around the bay area looking for plumbers and say hey sign up here?
nice post
This is a tough market indeed. We have taken a little different approach to this market by providing services for them, hence the name http://im2busy.com
The local search market is a very tough nut to crack. It’s a huge market with lots of potential, but no one will crack the local search nut until local merchants start to take the virtual world serious.
Interesting concept. I see it as having the same problem with Yelp, Google, Yahoo and rest. Businesses being ranked by Stars or out of 10. Too many people will have different thoughts of what constitutes a rating.
We just launched in alpha a digg style voting system for local businesses at http://www.yokld.com. The best will rise to the top.
Also, Angie’s List, (and of course Craigslist), LittleEngine.com, ServiceMagic.com, BidClerk, MyContractorLocator, YourContratorDirect.com, and others. I did some research for some home remodeling a while back.
Holy crap you Genie guys have a big hill to climb. I worked at a startup that tried a similar model in 2000. It failed because we just couldn’t get enough providers to sign up, which in turn meant we couldn’t get enough users to access the site. Acquistion costs are high and the revenue potential is really questionable with a small numbers of users.
Some suggestions based on a 60 sec visit.
For a newcomer to the site, GenieTown (terrible name) doesn’t say they are focusing on Bay Area only. This is a problem for a local-focused directory. Your visitor is going to see your crappy 4 architects, find an alternative and never go back.
In addition, newcomers are taken to an introductory splash page that really isn’t clear about what the site will do for a person looking for a local service provider. It almost looks like you have to register in order to find someone to help you….that is really bad. Take people directly in to the directory. If a service provider wants to sign up, I guarantee they will find the link. Make sure your site works with all sorts of browsers including the iPhone. iPhone sounds stupid I know, but you could theoretically get some traction there with an application-like offering.
Once in the directory, the site almost looks like one of those crappy domain squatter listing sites…Something isn’t quite right yet, but take this with a grain of salt….I’m not very good with aesthetics. One thing you should do is refine the categories on the left. On my screen, the first category was expanded, pushing the others off the screen. It almost looked like that was all you offered.
For what it’s worth…I would make it clear you are bay area only right now and then continue your strategy of focusing on getting as many providers signed up as possible, and then driving traffic. There is a very good chance you are going to find it extremely expensive to get service providers AND users, and that there is no way you’ll do it on a national level.
Oh, and no offense, but think about changing your name while you can. I think it is going to be hard to create a strong brand around. Oh and tell the CEO to remove his title “Mayor”. Maybe I’m jaded but it just makes you look like another about-to-fail dot com.
At worst you fail early while gaining a bunch of insight. If you’re lucky you might end up with a small local directory that can earn a few bucks and sustain itself.
Good Luck!
This is a growing segment, but I have found a new one at http://www.mycityfaces.com a lot easier to navigate and right to the point! Anyone can sign up for free and it has the K.I.S.S effect (keep it simple stupid)!
How is it different from Google/Yahoo local? — Look at the interface. Web 2.0 platform. Same that differentiates Ryze and Linkedin.
I like the approach. We are using the same approach at LakePlace.com (excuse the ads, we are bootstrappers). Start by focusing on a smaller market, dominate the market and repeat.
If you look at 99% of all successful companies (outside of the Internet), this is the basic business plan…it has worked for hundreds of years and it works online, too -=)
Hey Michael, for someone who likes to knock MSM, you sure are picking up a lot of their bad habits. It’s bad enough I have to deal with internal links on NYT.com. Please, please, please, (in the case of Liberysy, for example) link to the site itself and save your Crunchbase link for the bottom of the story.
Hey Mike.
You totally missed a major player in this space. This site is loaded with useful functionality and has Q&A, groups, video reviews, ratings, etc. The founder sold his last company to internet brands.
http://www.mojopages.com
They have been around for over 18 months and are gaining traction and traffic. You should do a story on them.
I wish them all the luck but they have mountain everest to climb.
2 million wont be enough, period.
hey it would be interesting to see a side post on what is the process for selecting start-ups for write ups on this blog? I’m sure it’s not possible for you to cover every great start up…..but like VCs post somewhat of a process (no matter how BS it sounds) for selecting companies that they fund…..it would be nice to know if there is something you guys look at before writing about a start up….I’m talking about ones where the founders don’t know you personally, are not funded by Sequoia (or any top 5 VC) and are not based within 10 miles of Palo Alto…..
I hope they’re making use of Sun’s Startup essentials program for cheap x64 servers! They’re going to get a lot of traffic…. (check them out at http://www.sun.com/startup)
It is another $2M wasted. This space is so crowded, and small businesses are so hard to sell, it is like a long match in a desert. Unless you have very low cost user acquisition, sales process and customer retention, you are going to hang dry by the roadside in 12 months. We at http://www.trivalleybook.com bootstrapped our start for a tenth of $2M and finally we are getting real revenue from real customers. One piece of advice, spend as little as possible.
To give you an idea of how fragmented this space is – take a look at how every commenter is trying to plug his/her own site! I have never seen so many plugs on one post in my life.
Let numbers do the talking. If you’ve got a great company, post your user numbers? Traffic? That would be far more impressive than saying your site is the best.
you wanna get acquired?
develop and grow either a local business site, or college site
Thats true, this space is pretty crowded already, and I am one of them.
won’t work, and their name is whack.
WTF Mike,
“Off Line Yellow Pages”
I didn’t take you for a fan of a multi billion dollar off line business that has falloff of over 10% annually due to Internet Yellow Pages, local search engines and search and listing services.
Great. Another site to make Google’s search results useless.
At GenieTown we’re excited about all the interest and the many positive and constructive comments by the community. Join http://www.genietown.com, find help and become a service provider, a Genie. Everyone can become a Genie.
To clarify – The GenieTown Series “A” funding was authorized up to $2m of which $1.5m went into the company early in 2007. We will seek Series “B” funding in Spring 2008. Hassan Chafi is the CEO and as Crunchbase shows, a PhD student on leave and not a professor at Stanford.
Well, seems like there are a lot of these. I use Service Villa (http://www.servicevilla.com) in particular. I think they need to become a bit more niche to be successful.