Angie's List

“Bill had hired a chief operating officer Who had conservatively modeled the business in such a way that after I had agreed to come back, Bill had to call me and say we may not be able to afford you.”

“And Bill asked, so how's that website working one day? And we realized it was like, you know, half of our signups were coming in over this little website.”

“We were a magazine and a call-in service. So during the day, you'd call in, and you could ask me for the name of a plumber or an electrician, and then the, in the evening, I would go out door-to-door and also ask for reviews.”

“And if you think about the kind of decisions they're making around your home, I mean, these, you know, I call these like the high cost of failure decisions, right? I mean, it's a time when you probably know the least about what you're buying. You're spending a…”

“We raised 50,000 dollars, yeah.”

“So in about 18 months, we opened a hundred markets.”

“I used to measure success by one or two memberships a day. Like, if I sold two memberships in a day, it was a banner day.”

“You know, for me, if I hadn't kind of taken that time, I probably wouldn't have stayed.”

“Yeah, so we ended up signing up a thousand members in the first year, and so we're like .”

“We ended up signing up a thousand members in the first year”

“I call these like the high cost of failure decisions, right? I mean, it's a time when you probably know the least about what you're buying. You're spending a lot of money and if it goes wrong, it could potentially ruin your largest asset. Your house.”

“We have over three million paid members.”

“But in Indianapolis, he was introduced to a little business called Unified Neighbors that had been around since the early seventies, which was basically a list of who was good and who wasn't in the city for home improvement. And so when he moved to Columbus, h…”

“He said, like, why don't you move to Columbus and we can start a business. I'll raise a little bit of money from, you know, friends and enough to get you through the first year, but I want you to commit for a year.”

“By that point Bill had hired a chief operating officer Who had conservatively modeled the business in such a way that after I had agreed to come back, Bill had to call me and say we may not be able to afford you.”

“We raised 50,000 dollars, yeah.”

“So in about 18 months, we opened a hundred markets.”

“19 dollars. So 19 bucks for the year. We were a magazine and a call-in service. So during the day, you'd call in, and you could ask me for the name of a plumber or an electrician, and then in the evening, I would go out door-to-door and also ask for reviews.”

“It was called Columbus Neighbors.”

“Bill asked, so how's that website working one day? And we realized it was like, you know, half of our signups were coming in over this little website.”