|
Forums >
Photography Talk >
Any luck with Thumbtak?
Is it just me or Thumbtack is just a waste of money. I have been bidding on photography jobs for months and nothing. Not even a single reply. Jan 24 15 06:01 pm Link From what I've seen most of the people looking for a service via Thumbtack are the same kind of people that are looking at Craigslist ads, too.... which means that they're looking for the lowest price.... period. I know that some photographers (actually people from various service industries) will put up fake Thumbtack ads so that their competitors will reply. Each reply sent costs each of the competitors a few bucks. The competitors get tired of spending their $$$ to get business via Thumbtack and eventually give up. This may have happened to you. Jan 24 15 07:57 pm Link Was a big waste of both time and money. Jan 25 15 04:59 am Link Random Image wrote: +1 Jan 25 15 05:27 am Link me voy wrote: No it is not just you. In the last year I have only had one job. I made two different buys of credits to get that one bid. Before that I spent few hard earned dollars and got no where. I wrote to Thumbtack and told them this was crap. Here I ma spending my money to bid on a job and in lots of different cases never got a simple "I am sorry I have chosen someone else". They gave me 20 free credits and gave me some advise on choosing a bid. Jan 25 15 07:11 am Link It's a waste! I signed up initially, then when I found I had to pay to make a bid, I trashed it and have been ignoring their emails ever since. I will never, EVER pay to ask a client questions so I can find out details that will allow me to bid a job correctly. As far as I know, I don't really know of anyone who has gotten a job through them. It does annoy me, though, that their "gigs" are showing up on regular job search sites! Jan 25 15 07:27 am Link TaylorScott Photography wrote: THAT should be a WARNING SIGN! Jan 25 15 07:54 am Link Thumbtack USED to be good, when they first got started. I had quite a bit of luck with them and used to land a lot of great clients, but then they started changing their policies and now their leads are pretty much useless. I don't even bother with them anymore. Back when the leads were, at least mediocre, my system was to: 1. NEVER reply to an ad where they don't list their budget. Period. That's Rule Numero Uno. If there is anything I've learned in my 20+ years of being in business is that a client ALWAYS knows what their budget is. They may not be able to articulate it or they may not want to disclose it, but they have a number in their head, I guarantee that. So when a person wants quotes but refuses to list a budget, it's because they don't want to put it out there what that number is because either it will not get them enough bids because the number is too low or the bids they do get will be on the higher side if they put a number down. Either way, no budget, no quote. 2. People found Thumbtack because they are looking for a bargain and they wouldn't recognize quality, professional work if it bit them on the face. These are also usually the low-rent, low-quality people who annoy the fuck out of vendors on Groupon as well. Once in a great while you get a solid client off Thumbtack, but now, because of how their website shows up in the search engines, the average client isn't the $2,000 wedding photography client, it's the $200 wedding photography client. Lately I've even seen numerous people asking for TFP shoots for their family events or modeling portfolios on Thumbtack. 3. How you contact your potential client on TT is a double-edged sword. I noticed that when I wrote a rather boilerplate email, I'd never get a response back. When I wrote a more detailed, well written proposal I usually did. Potential clients see right through the standard cut-and-paste emails and will usually skip those to go to the more detailed, personal quotes. The problem is, while you are writing out your detailed email, the five quotes from your competitors have all been submitted. I've had this happen on WAY more occasions than I can count. This is especially true when anyone posted a gig for pay higher than a $500 budget. To get their bid in first, vendors would just fire in a response of something like, "Hello, I am a professional photographer here in Anytown and I'm desperate for your business because I can't find any good gigs on craigslist right now and taking nude photos of women in my basement doesn't pay my bills so I'll send you a separate email with a detailed quote in a few minutes." Then, they would submit the detailed quote in a separate email, just so they can get their bid in the fastest. 4. Asking for more details about the gig now is a waste of time. People are firing in cut-and-paste bids on quotes within seconds after the job is posted. I used to get their email notifications when a new prospect would arrive but I noticed that the emails would take about 30 minutes to get to my inbox after the job went live. By the time I replied, the job was gone because five others got to the quote before me. I then figured the instant txt message feature would be faster so I turned that option on. I did notice the lag time was much less but again, I'd notice that the better the gig, the less likely it was that I would get a bid in under their 5-quote criteria if I bothered to ask any questions about the gig. 5. You need to understand who your competition is. Most vendors on TT are out-of-work office workers who got an entry-level DSLR with a kit lens for Christmas and still think their pop-up flash is strong enough to shoot events with. They aren't professionals and they need the money desperately. They may have a website but they usually have no other method for getting business except for the trickle of leads they get from websites like Thumbtack or Craigslist. They aren't business people, they don't have a clue how to market their business, they don't have even a basic understanding on how to go get new customers, but they can sure bid $500 on a full day wedding shoot when you, the true professional, are bidding $1,500 for the same gig. 6. Most of the customers on TT are of the mindset that "good enough" is all they need. This is something that took me quite a while to wrap my head around. again, these are people who don't really understand what quality photography is. They really don't, and the problem is in the context of TT, you don't have time to educate them as to what it is. Most of the time, an average client will go with a vendor who bids somewhere on the lower end of the middle range of quotes. I've had many conversations with my clients from Thumbtack and the ones who use the site frequently all tell me this. So if someone posts a wedding with a budget of $1,000-$1500, they will usually get bids that look like this: Vendor A - $750 Vendor B- $950 Vendor C- $1,100 Vendor D- $1,350 Vendor E- $1,500 To the customer, who's attitude is "good enough is all I really need and I can't afford some celebrity photographer for my wedding in the hotel banquet room" they will most likely go with Vendor B or C. So while you, as Vendor D, may have a better portfolio than Vendor C, his work is pretty much "good enough" and that extra $250 will buy several more bottles of Smirnoff and a few more 12-packs of beer for the reception. 7. Thumbtack does an excellent job of hiding how the process works from clients. An overwhelming majority of people posting jobs on TT have no clue that vendors pay to submit bids to them. As such, they don't feel any guilt when they don't respond to people. I can assure you, this is deliberate on the part of TT. I had a client once from TT who I did an engagement shoot for. She told me they use Thumbtack all the time to find vendors for their home remodeling, for catering jobs for their work, and other things. She told me they used Thumbtack for a long time and loved it. She was astounded to find out that vendors were actually paying to submit quotes to her when I told her so. She had no idea. She just assumed that it was free for Vendors and then I explained to her that's how TT makes their money, is off the Vendors, she saw the light. People just don't know, so when they post gigs there because of how ThumbTack lures them in off of pay per click ads, they never really think about it. As such, the client has nothing at stake in this whole process, which is one of the reasons why it's so rare to ever get a response back from people anymore. Seriously, think of the process of your average Thumbtack user...they are looking for a wedding photographer and their budget is $750 but they refuse to disclose that in their job bid. So they post the gig and five photographers jump on it and respond in a few seconds. The bids range from $500 to $2,500. The client doesn't like the lowball photographers and they can't afford the better ones, so they leave without ever responding to anyone. This is now the norm on sites like TT. 8. I'd say over half of the actual gigs posted are done by people who are just tire kickers. I've actually bid on jobs where the potential client told me, point blank, that they had no intention on hiring someone off the site. They were just comparison shopping on there. One person even told me that they already hired a photographer and were just using Thumbtack to get bids to see if they were over paying on their existing one or not. 9. Thumbtack never gives you a refund, only a return on credits. This is absolute bullshit. I've filed complaints with TT on countless occasions because of bullshit clients on the site and they are always happy to return your credits, but will never give you a refund. They already have your money so giving you some free credits is just fine by them. So now you get your credits back so you can bid on more worthless clients...woo hoo. 10. Just like #1, where if they don't provide their budget I don't bid, I later stopped bidding on jobs that provided no phone number. For the reasons mentioned above, if someone is unwilling to put their phone number down, they are just tire kickers. 11. Thumbtack keeps changing the rules because they are afraid that the more questions a vendor may have about the gig, the higher the likelihood is that the client will not use their service anymore because the client doesn't want to disclose any actual details. This is the main reason I bailed on them. It used to be that if you had questions about the gig, what their budget is, etc., you could ask the vendor (assuming the lowballers and cut-and-paste bidders didn't beat you to the punch already). Thumbtack started changing the types of questions you could ask because they were afraid that by doing so, you would scare the clients away because you asked them a hard question. One of the customer service reps over there actually told me this. The problem is, many clients on TT are clueless about their own shoots, so you can't ask them any details anymore to see if they are worth bidding on or not. I'll give you a perfect real-world example. Here in Las Vegas, most of the hotels frown upon having outside wedding photographers shoot on their property because it competes with their own in-house photographers who want a piece of that action. This is even more true with many of the small wedding chapels in town as well. A sizable chunk of their income comes from selling wedding packages, so they don't allow outside photographers in because they would be stealing that income from them. Once in a while you'll see someone post a wedding gig on TT and they will state that, "It's just a small ceremony at a local chapel in Vegas". So if you ask them if they are actually allowed to bring in an outside photographer to shoot the wedding, they never realized it was an issue, so now they no longer need your services because they just realized that they can't hire you to begin with. Thumbtack figured this out, so they changed the rules on questions so you can't actually ask any details about the venue any more because it would scare away the client and they couldn't squeeze the ten bucks out of you to bid on a job you couldn't get hired for anyway. So yeah, I've pretty much given up on Thumbtack. Many of the gigs are low quality and many now are just fake jobs as well, put up by competitors and such. They used to have some merit, but honestly, I have found them now to be less in value than craigslist. Jan 25 15 08:42 am Link we've had a few nibbles but have never booked a job from thumbtack or eventective (or craig's list for that matter). all our paid gigs have come from people we know, google searches, people dropping by the studio (when we had one) or in one case a Facebook ad we ran. Jan 25 15 09:03 am Link TaylorScott Photography wrote: Taylor, Jan 27 15 11:14 am Link Shot By Adam wrote: Adam, Jan 27 15 11:15 am Link Adam hit the nail on the head. Even though I knew it would be a crapshoot, I started out excited about it, but it's really just garbage. The requests have always sucked and have only gotten worse. Once and awhile, the starts align and a *seemingly* good request will come along, but even then you have to be lucky to submit your quote in time. I've wasted far too much money on it. If people knew that pros pay to send their quotes, that alone would be a huge improvement. EDIT: One more thing. They stopped sending me requests for a long time, because I hadn't sent a quote in a while. I finally logged in and got a message saying "click to opt back in," but it took more than a few tries to get that to go into effect. After spending a damn decent amount of money with them, it really pissed me off that they just decided to cut me off. Jan 27 15 11:55 am Link This one came through the other day and I got a screen grab of it before it was gone. I just forgot to post it here but luckily I still had it on my screen in PS. THIS is the problem with Thumbtack:  Jan 27 15 03:24 pm Link I will report early success with my early Thumbtack experience. I was referred by a trusted friend and setup my profile. I was initially disappointment to find out the minimum purchase for bids was $35 even though it showed many other price points. However, I bid on my first project at a rate over my normal model package and it was accepted. The shoot was today and the client was great, the shoot was smooth, and I was paid extra for added additional services. I have passed on 20+ jobs that were not at my price point or location. I have 3 more bids out, so I hope this is a pattern of success. Jan 27 15 06:54 pm Link I guess I am the odd person out. Having nearly completed my first tax run-through, I note that I was hired 90 times off of Thumbtack for 2014. The "average" was $203.00. That was skewed by a couple of large events for several hundred bucks. I do not shoot weddings, engagements, Quinceañeras, or young children's parties. There are many who are far better than I at those type of events. I developed 4 full time, multiple return, clients off of the site for jewelry and small products that have been great!. I have done loads of promotion and military portraits last year that all were from ONE Thumbtack gig and then the many referrals from that one person. So... if you use them right, it seems OK. But... defiantly follow the advice of the person a few posts above. Be VERY selective in your bids and complain to TT if things seem off. They seem to make things right if you are straight with them. Funny story, Last spring I noticed a string of names of people looking for Headshots or portraits that seemed completely fake but I bid on anyway. Yeah I know, stupid. I never heard from anyone after 10 days so I wrote to TT and bitched a storm. They refunded all of the credits from the bids, agreed they looked fake and even sweetened the deal with 24 free credits. I was OK with that. Then not 2 days later I was hired by two of the fake names and ended up doing a book cover. Go figure. Jan 28 15 10:07 am Link I just saw something very interesting happen on Thumbtack. Someone posted a gig looking for photographers for a high-end corporate event. The pay was very good, and usually those get snatched up with the five bids on Thumbtack almost in seconds. This one didn't though. In fact, it lingered for quite some time with only 3 bids on it within 24 hours. Why? They specifically stated in the listing that the photographer had to carry an insurance policy for liability due to the venue requiring it. Again, it just reinforces my point...the majority of people going on there to hire someone are just tire kickers or lowballers and most of the people bidding on those jobs so quickly are just non-pros posing as professionals. Jan 29 15 08:56 am Link @Tamarack - There's definitely opportunity on there, but like Craigslist, you have to know how to weed things out and/or get lucky. I was reminded again yesterday how important it is to get your quote in quickly too... missed out on what could've been a good one. I think I'm going to just start reusing a quote (Thumbtack has that option) that says something like "Hello, I'm very interested in speaking with you further. I will send a detailed quote momentarily." That way, I can at least get in before the buzzer. Funny enough, after bashing them here, I sent another quote for some food photography yesterday and it might actually happen. 4-figure pay. Not giving up just yet, but I swear it feels like gambling! Jan 29 15 09:00 am Link |
