dslade.blog

Another one of my old ideas, has finally started to materialize. As of January, findmrfixit.com has officially launched. The idea to having a site has been quick, just a couple months of market research and development. So I expect the learning curve to be quite steep. The site’s objective is helping people find local home improvement and construction professionals. Any help from an licensed electrician to pest control companies. It’s sort of the yang to the DYI ying of the last 20 years.

It’s a project I had banging around in my head for years, since I had several handymen, professional or by hobby, in the family. I thought it fitting to combine some of my web experience to build and market a website focused on that. Due to issues like time-to-market, development costs, I went with a outsourced web shop to help build it based on a packaged web app. Sure there’s plenty of limitations, but it takes care of the previously mentioned issues. If I can get it to start moving in terms of traffic and revenue, I’ll invest more into a v2 of the site with further features.

So far, the big traffic drivers have been, painters, carpenters, architects, and plumbers.

Most of my prediction on the traffic driving categories were totally wrong. But hey, adapt and overcome. I had anticipated the categories for plumbers and electricians to be my “flagship” categories, my pillars to the main business, followed by other helpful businesses such as locksmiths, landscaping and maintenance, moving companies, and Pool, Jacuzzi and Sauna. A few of the latter are getting no traffic whatsoever unless it has AdWords or Yahoo Ads behind it.

Much of the difference has been due to the highly competitive nature of several of these sectors online. The CPC on ads for local electricians and plumbers is insane. Be prepared to hemorrhage cash to keep up with their ad spend! Will be rethinking my advertising campaigns and next round of features (focusing on cleaning up all the post launch bugs), but at least after a month or so of operations, I have over 70 members (businesses) on board. Following up with them, trying to provide the best customer service experience possible, has been a challenge, but well worth it. Have learned a lot from some of them, so now I’m armed with even more ideas to try and bring to fruition in the months to come.

And now starting to wonder what the big mortgage crisis is going to have on the site, obviously home construction is going to take a massive hit. time will tell, but for sure it will be interesting.

I now have my foot toe in the door, we’ll see if I can keep carving more out of the pie, and make a solid business out of it. Will update more later.