The Ledger
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Swanson: Thumbtack Generated 25% of Craigslist's Service Postings Before Being Banned
“And this scaled up to a point where it was like a quarter of all Craigslist service volume, all these auto posts from Thumbtack pros. And then, you know, not surprisingly, we got a cease and desist that told us we should stop this and we'd been banned from Cra…”
Swanson: Philippine hire beat American applicants on English proofreading quality and price
“This woman in the Philippines named Mikan beat the Americans and everyone else, not just on price, but on quality. She was a better English proofreader than Americans.”
Swanson: Thumbtack Would Not Exist if Craigslist Had Innovated on Product
“It's easy to give Craigslist a hard time for not innovating on product, but if they did we wouldn't be here.”
Peter Thiel and Founders Fund Passed on Investing in Thumbtack
“We tried to get Peter Thiel and Founders Fund to invest and they passed.”
Swanson: Google Capital Gave Thumbtack $100M Term Sheet in Five Days
“Google capital came to us and said, we're interested in investing. We weren't fundraising and we said, okay, we'll talk to you. And five days later, they gave us a term sheet for a hundred million dollars.”
Swanson: Thumbtack search traffic fell to zero after Google de-indexed it
“And I went to, you know, Google analytics and our traffic had not fallen by 10 or 20%, but a hundred, zero. And we were de-indexed. We were completely removed from Google.”
Swanson: Thumbtack proofreader Mikan grew to manage over 1,000 people in the Philippines
“And so she went from individual contributor to a manager of five and 10 proofreaders to then eventually a general manager of a team of a few hundred To eventually the head of our team in the Philippines managing over a thousand people.”
Swanson: Thumbtack Indexed Tens of Millions of Pros by Web-Crawling Billions of Pages
“And from these billions of pages, we crawled, we created an index of tens of millions of service pros websites who were looking for active work. And then we created a mechanism to reach out to them programmatically and get them to sign up for Thumbtack.”