This week's episode of Masters of MAX features Tom Butta interviewing Alexis Baird, the Head of Product Experience at Thumbtack. Today’s focus is all about redesigns. Alexis and the team at Thumbtack recently launched an extensive redesign to expand their offerings beyond hiring professionals to provide their users a single app for all of their home needs.
This week's episode of Masters of MAX features Tom Butta interviewing Alexis Baird, the Head of Product Experience at Thumbtack. Alexis shares her journey from linguistics and computer science to product management roles at Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Lyft. At Thumbtack, she leads innovations that connect homeowners with home service professionals.
Today’s focus is all about redesigns. Alexis and the team at Thumbtack recently launched an extensive redesign to expand their offerings beyond hiring professionals to provide their users a single app for all of their home needs.
Alexis underscores the critical need for a personalized, user-centric approach, explaining how Thumbtack tailored their app to meet individual homeowner goals and house-specific needs, integrating tools like personalized guides and educational tidbits to boost user engagement. She discusses how the dev team was given a sandbox environment with a small percentage of customers and without traditional revenue targets, allowing for bold experimentation and significant advancements in user experience without the pressure of immediate financial returns.
The overarching theme of the episode revolves around executing a successful redesign. Alexis advises maintaining flexibility, refining hypotheses with careful analysis, and creating a cross-functional team encompassing design, engineering, marketing and more. By aligning a long-term vision with short-term iterative goals, and ensuring continuous feedback loops, Thumbtack was able to deliver a significantly enhanced product that better serves their customers' evolving needs.
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Guest Bio
Alexis has been working on products for the past 13 years, looking at the world through her customer's eyes, to build features that make a real impact for them. She is currently leading the customer experience and growth product teams as Head of Product Experience at Thumbtack.
Before her current role, she spent almost three years at Lyft, first as a Product Manager before she was promoted to Head of Product. In this role, she first focused on rider experience and later, Lyft Healthcare which included their concierge products.
She has also worked as a Senior and Group Product Manager at LinkedIn. She worked on the Talent Solutions, Content, Slideshare as well as LinkedIn Profiles teams. Her first product position was as a Product Manager for the Captions Metrics team at Microsoft Bing.
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Guest Quote
"One of the big misconceptions is that you do a big launch and you just kind of disappear. I've been part of redesigns in other lives, and you almost never get it right the first time or the second time or the third time. It takes a lot of iteration to get to that bar that you want for a broader launch."
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Time Stamps
*(01:18) Alexis' background
*(03:12) What is Thumbtack?
*(04:29) Why the team decided to redesign their entire offering
*(08:41) Drilling down on personalization
*(11:30) The importance of collecting user feedback
*(14:24) The results of Thumbtack's redesign
*(17:17) Lessons for others looking to make significant change
*(21:37) How to prove your hypotheses with your users
*(23:17) When is the time to put your pencils down?
*(26:15) Do you go broad? Do you go deep?
*(27:19) Rapid Fire Questions
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Links
[00:00:00] Alexis Baird: I think one of the big misconceptions is that you do a big launch and you just kind of disappear for six months, a year, whatever it is. You build the thing and then you release it to your users and it's a big splash and you all high five and that's the end of that. And I've been part of redesigns in other lives and you almost never get it right the first time or the second time or the third time.
[00:00:29] Alexis Baird: And it takes a lot of iteration to go. Get that to kind of the bar that you want for a broader launch.
[00:00:40] Voiceover: Welcome to Masters of MAX, a mobile app experience podcast. Please welcome your host, Tom Buda, Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer at Airship.
[00:00:53] Tom Butta: Welcome to another episode of Masters of Max today. I have the pleasure of speaking with Alexis Baird from Thumbtack. Many [00:01:00] of you probably have used Thumbtack, and many of you are homeowners or home renters. Anyway, welcome to the show, Alexis.
[00:01:06] Alexis Baird: Thanks for having me, Tom. Pleasure to be here.
[00:01:08] Tom Butta: You have had quite an extensive set of experiences that seems destined to lead you to thumbtack.
[00:01:15] Tom Butta: Maybe, can you just give us a quick summation of those experiences?
[00:01:18] Alexis Baird: I don't know how, the farther back you go, the less destined it seems. But, but I originally, I mean, I, in undergrad, I studied linguistics and at a small liberal arts college. And after graduating, I didn't really know what I wanted to do next, so I spent a year in Vietnam, I would say, teaching English.
[00:01:40] Alexis Baird: I learned very quickly. I wasn't particularly gifted when it came to, to actually teaching. And so after that year, I decided to go back to grad school in computer science. Thinking that I would do computational linguistics that led me to a startup that had just been acquired by Microsoft, where I worked on actually [00:02:00] before Bing was even launched and working there, I transitioned to become a product manager, which, to be totally honest, I didn't really know much about at the time, but I did.
[00:02:10] Alexis Baird: our office needed more product managers. And so I thought it sounded interesting, at least in the two sentence description that I got from the one other product manager in the office. And that's kind of how I fell into product management. So from there, I was lucky enough to work at both LinkedIn and then later Lyft, where I just got to see those companies go through some incredible growth and transformation, learn from some really brilliant people, and discovered that I had a real sort of passion slash fascination with marketplaces.
[00:02:44] Alexis Baird: And so when I was considering kind of my next move after Lyft, Thumbtack was really intriguing for multiple reasons. I'd say as a product person, marketplace companies are really just fascinating intellectual problems, but [00:03:00] also the company culture and a place that was really mission driven. Again, I'd been lucky enough to work for some companies that were very mission driven and I knew that was going to be important to me and Thumbtack was a great fit in that sense as well.
[00:03:11] Tom Butta: What is the mission of Thumbtack?
[00:03:12] Alexis Baird: So Thumbtack is all about helping homeowners care for their home and helping home service professionals grow their business. And those two sort of groups are what we refer to as customers and pros internally. And I think the great part about My job and working at a place like Thumbtack is ultimately, if you deliver on a great customer experience, most customers are looking to, you know, care for their home, which means they need the help of a home service professional.
[00:03:41] Alexis Baird: That actually is what our pros are looking for as well. They're looking to grow their business. And so when you do that well, both sides win.
[00:03:49] Tom Butta: Yeah, so it's interesting because I just, I was just taking some notes like with a pen. This is a pen, by the way, for those of you that, I wrote home care and I wrote growing business and then, and I put a [00:04:00] space between them.
[00:04:00] Tom Butta: And what I did is I created an X and frankly that X just naturally is all about the experience that you know, both sides are having, which creates value for each and the reference. I mean, I just love that idea that you have this sort of support function that enables the mission of caring. for one's home easier, right?
[00:04:20] Tom Butta: And it's like one is dependent upon the other and that codependency, if you get it right, is magic. So, um, so thank goodness for Thumbtack. So what's happened, like, since you've come in? I hear that there's a redesign.
[00:04:33] Alexis Baird: Yeah, this past spring, we had our biggest product update in the company's history. We launched 30 new features.
[00:04:42] Alexis Baird: And it was really about, you say, redesign, which I think kind of almost makes you think of just a surface level visual design. But this was a huge shift for our app. So, historically, for most of Thumbtack's history, it's been about being able to [00:05:00] hire a pro. And that is, to be clear, by the way, if your sync is bad, broken, and you really need a plumber, that is a huge pain point and Thumbtack solves that really well.
[00:05:10] Alexis Baird: But we wanted to really expand that. And when we talked to homeowners about some of the other challenges that they were facing, it really was about this idea of more sort of uncertainty and stress around what should I do? When should I do it? How should I get it done? And so that was kind of the genesis of this new launch, which is really about being the one app you need to care for your home.
[00:05:36] Alexis Baird: And this is everything from personalized guidance, to tools to help you. you overcome procrastination and get things done, to being able to kind of rebook your favorite prose, all of which, of course, is integrated with our core hiring experience.
[00:05:53] Tom Butta: I love that sort of positioning idea of the one at your home, but I also love this distinction that you've made in here.
[00:05:59] Tom Butta: Again, I've [00:06:00] written this sort of, this sort of two need sets, if you will, on the consumer side and probably, therefore, on the provider side. Which is, in the one case, there's like an immediate, maybe practical need,
[00:06:13] Alexis Baird: right?
[00:06:13] Tom Butta: You want to get, you want to get something, I don't know, hung up on a wall, you need to get something fixed.
[00:06:17] Tom Butta: Some very specific tactical, call it practical, action that has to be taken and help that's needed and probably needed soon, right? In some cases. And then on the other side of it, when you think about care, you know, you do think about like, gee, I wonder, like, Should I be doing things that, I don't know, improve the quality of our home and our experience that aren't necessarily broken,
[00:06:43] Alexis Baird: if you
[00:06:43] Tom Butta: will,
[00:06:44] Alexis Baird: but
[00:06:44] Tom Butta: maybe will make our lives a little bit better?
[00:06:46] Tom Butta: And there's a lot of uncertainty as to like what that would could potentially be. You probably have instincts. There's the practical and then there's like, I don't know, the emotional side of it.
[00:06:54] Alexis Baird: Yeah, I think what you're touching on too is something that we've observed where there's, [00:07:00] it's, we call it reactive.
[00:07:02] Alexis Baird: There's these moments where, you know, your hot water heater bursts, and then you kind of have, in that moment, of course, you need to take care of that immediately. But, There are sort of more of these like hidden pieces of owning a home that are more about, it's almost like a preventative health care parallel, perhaps, where,
[00:07:25] Tom Butta: like, almost like a diagnostic.
[00:07:27] Tom Butta: Exactly.
[00:07:27] Alexis Baird: Yeah. And what we heard from homeowners over and over again, and I became a homeowner a few years ago for the first time, this really resonated with me, that When you buy a home, it's your largest financial asset, and yet it does not come with a how to take care of it user
[00:07:45] Tom Butta: manual. Yes,
[00:07:46] Alexis Baird: exactly, which is wild, right?
[00:07:48] Alexis Baird: It's
[00:07:48] Tom Butta: like having a baby also, by the way. There are manuals, but it's Yeah. They don't work.
[00:07:55] Alexis Baird: Exactly. Exactly. Hopefully, your house is a little bit more predictable than a baby, [00:08:00] at least in my experience. Yeah. But yeah, there, there isn't sort of go to trusted source that you can turn to as a homeowner. And I give kind of the example, my brother actually recently moved to a new home and the prior owner never got the gutters cleaned.
[00:08:15] Alexis Baird: And, of course, when they moved in, they realized that because the water had backed up in the gutters, then, of course, the roof was starting to rot. And so now this is like a very costly project that they have to take on and fix. And so we really want to help homeowners avoid that moment to the extent possible.
[00:08:32] Alexis Baird: How do you kind of stay on top of caring for your home so that you can avoid some of those costly repairs and, you know, those moments of like, well, in the future?
[00:08:41] Tom Butta: How are you providing that level of awareness? To the homeowners that they should even be thinking about things are, you know, is it a checklist?
[00:08:49] Tom Butta: Is it these like pop up interstitial, I mean.
[00:08:52] Alexis Baird: Yeah, it's not a single approach. So we take a variety of approaches here. I think it's really starts with [00:09:00] giving homeowners that support and guidance. And making sure, by the way, that it's really personalized to them and their goals. And so part of this new experience is really understanding the, the homeowner, their home, and what their goals are for their home.
[00:09:15] Alexis Baird: So for example, you might be really excited to kind of Boost the curb appeal of your home and you're interested in doing that. Maybe I want to make a bunch of changes to make my home more energy efficient. Different homeowners are going to have different goals. Different homes are different. I live in a 1906 house, has like very different needs, I'm sure, than a brand new build that, you know, was just.
[00:09:38] Alexis Baird: And so we've tried to make that guidance really tailored, uh, both to the homeowner's goals and their home. Um, so that's kind of one piece of it. And part of that guidance is helping educate the customer. Part of what we launched in this new spring launch are these little bite sized education moments in the app, little kind of did you know factoids because we found that was like a [00:10:00] nice light way for people to learn more about their home and to feel more confident in being a homeowner.
[00:10:06] Tom Butta: So I love that. Bitesize, like, you know, doesn't take a lot of investment of time, but like, how do those show up? How do you find those?
[00:10:13] Alexis Baird: Yeah, so we have it in a variety of places, partially because we found in different moments for different customers in different kind of use cases. Sometimes they want to consume that in a really bite sized way.
[00:10:25] Alexis Baird: And so we have that kind of on the surface level. We have a little bit of, you know, sort of a, almost like a teaser. And then we have these more full blown, what we call guides, where customers can kind of drill in more, learn more, whether it's how to DIY this, this task versus, you know, hiring a pro, what, tools they might need for the job, what time of year it's going to be most cost effective for them to do the job, why should they care about doing the job, a lot of those different pieces.
[00:10:54] Alexis Baird: And we found that really resonates with customers, but we had to strike a balance between [00:11:00] ensuring that this was kind of low friction and we're not putting a wall of text in front of every single customer, because that's what we're doing. You know, people don't read long walls of text, right?
[00:11:09] Tom Butta: One question I have is in some response to a phrase you used earlier, you said, you've said it a couple of times.
[00:11:15] Tom Butta: We found out that, and then you pointed out what you've done. I'm curious, this is going now to the sort of inside, you know, other people who have roles similar to yours who may be facing similar challenges. Yeah. How did you find out? How did you get feedback?
[00:11:30] Alexis Baird: I think one of the big misconceptions, maybe outside of product, is that you do a big launch and you just kind of disappear for, I don't know, six months, a year, whatever it is.
[00:11:43] Alexis Baird: Um, you build the thing and then you release it to your users and it's a big splash and you all high five and that's the end of that. And we spent probably a little over a year working on this experience. And we, uh, We're testing it in front of [00:12:00] customers, very small portion of customers, but testing it in front of customers.
[00:12:04] Alexis Baird: We were looking at how they were behaving in products. So we were looking at data signals and then we were also doing a ton of customer research to talk to customers about, you know, why weren't you responding that way? So we were sort of constantly getting feedback and iterating and refining and changing and evolving.
[00:12:24] Alexis Baird: And it was definitely a iterative process. Now, that said, we didn't do this with the entire customer base. We carved off a very small portion of customer traffic. We sometimes refer to this internally as the sandbox that we let, you know, told the teams, Hey, just go crazy within this sandbox, knowing that, you know, our friends on the finance side couldn't have to worry that we were going to completely tank revenue because we put something crazy in front of all of our customers.
[00:12:52] Tom Butta: Right. This had to have been a cross functional effort, right? Extremely. I mean, this is maybe [00:13:00] something worth talking about a little bit later, which is, I mean, the role of product management, like, you're like a mini CEO in the sense that, you know, you're like kind of on point to build a business, right?
[00:13:10] Alexis Baird: I'd say in some ways. Worse, better, I don't know, than being a CEO because you, no one reports to you, right? No one reports up to you. So it's really that classic influence without authority. But in the case of
[00:13:26] Tom Butta: I fully understand that principle. Yeah,
[00:13:27] Alexis Baird: but your question on the sort of cross functional nature of this.
[00:13:33] Alexis Baird: The product piece and the product experience obviously was huge. And for that, we worked with, uh, design, engineering, content design, data science. So it was incredibly cross functional for that piece of it. I think the other interesting aspect to this launch was that we were putting something out to our customers that was a completely new or maybe a sort of expanded or evolved value [00:14:00] proposition.
[00:14:00] Alexis Baird: We were taking a bunch of customers who had come to us because they thought of us as the place to hire a pro. And we were giving them this experience of That was much, much broader than that about caring for their home. And so that took a lot of work from our friends on the marketing side, PR side, obviously.
[00:14:19] Alexis Baird: And so there were a lot of different, yeah, different elements that we had to work with throughout the company.
[00:14:24] Tom Butta: So you said that was in the spring when you did this launch. What kind of results can you share that? You know, with folks just to get a sense of, like, the lift as it were.
[00:14:33] Alexis Baird: Yeah, we've seen that since launch, we've gotten a great reception in terms of, like, engagement with the guidance that we're giving people.
[00:14:41] Alexis Baird: And currently, close to 90 percent of the tasks that people are creating on their plans are coming from those guidance recommendations that we're giving them. In addition to that, people are Creating plans. And there seems to be a lot of interest in plans.
[00:14:58] Tom Butta: It's astounding. [00:15:00] You just said 90%. of the tasks
[00:15:04] Alexis Baird: that are
[00:15:04] Tom Butta: happening are a result of the guidance that you all provided.
[00:15:07] Alexis Baird: Yeah, yeah. You can
[00:15:08] Tom Butta: link that. You can track that. Is that? How can you track that actually?
[00:15:12] Alexis Baird: Um, so we, we have a flow, we have two different ways that customers can add tasks to their plan. They can take our suggestions and that's kind of a one click. They just add it to their plan. Or they can add their own tasks to their plan.
[00:15:27] Alexis Baird: And actually, in the case where customers want to add tasks to their plan, we let them add kind of whatever free form language they want to use. Because we found that for a lot of customers, they have a problem or a task in their head, and it doesn't necessarily map to the way we think about it.
[00:15:46] Tom Butta: Doesn't map to a drop down menu.
[00:15:48] Tom Butta: No,
[00:15:48] Alexis Baird: exactly. Exactly. So Remember to winterize my sprinkler system, you know, something along those lines. And so they, they can add that task to their plan. [00:16:00] And then in the background, we actually have a large language model that will map that task to the right category of pros. And this is actually a pain point that we've seen from customers where they know what the problem is.
[00:16:13] Alexis Baird: You know, they can say, I have this like stain on my ceiling, but they have no idea whether they need a plumber or, you know, a interior painter or, you know, a handyman, no idea. Um, and so that's actually been a way that we've been able to help with that, that pain point of going from, I have this nagging problem in my head to actually getting it done.
[00:16:35] Tom Butta: Very interesting. I love that you allow them to just insert, you know, what's in their head, like, don't freeze the pipes, like, kind of thing. Yep, yep, yeah. That's very cool. So, these, as you point out, these lifts are pretty big. They're pretty significant. How did you set out, I mean, maybe just like for other people that know that, you know, what we're doing today is good, but there's definitely a lot [00:17:00] more that should be done and, you know, the sort of incremental change versus geometric change, you know, are there some fundamental, I don't know, learnings, principles, if you will, about how to go about planning and things that should be done to, to increase your odds of success?
[00:17:17] Alexis Baird: Yeah, because a couple kind of interesting learnings, the first was, we actually did try and did not go well, but we tried having the team sort of take a giant vision of caring for your home, big, bold vision, and sort of incrementally bolt that on to our current experience, our sort of baseline of hiring a pro.
[00:17:44] Alexis Baird: And we had the teams go at that for a few quarters. They had some nice little incremental wins, but we found they were constantly worrying about disrupting our core conversion flows and our business metrics. And it was really [00:18:00] hindering their ability to go much bigger and go broader. And so we made the change to say, okay, we're going to give you A small percentage is about 7 percent of customers, and we're not going to give you any revenue targets for a year and a half, even longer sometimes.
[00:18:19] Alexis Baird: But we want you to kind of go much bolder and think about just moving towards this broader vision of what would it be to create a The only app that homeowners need to care for their home. So we want to move towards this world where when you buy a home for the first time, you say, it's time for me to download the Thumbtack app.
[00:18:38] Alexis Baird: And we kind of gave them this very broad vision, broad kind of long term goal. And then we were really flexible on tactics. tactics. We originally tried kind of more of an open ended to do list without that element of recommendations. And we didn't see nearly the kind of traction that when we, we added in that layer of really [00:19:00] personalized guidance.
[00:19:01] Alexis Baird: And then of course, there's been many iterations even on top of that to make that more relevant to customers, to incorporate more signals, et cetera.
[00:19:10] Tom Butta: One of the things that I heard was Give a team a sandbox and let them go. But it seems like that sandbox is, in your case, you said 7 percent of your customers.
[00:19:21] Tom Butta: Like, so it's like, you're actually trying a whole bunch of stuff on. How much did, how much of that experience was exposed to the, Customer. I mean, how much did they know that they were participating in a whatever in this quote sandbox?
[00:19:35] Alexis Baird: Yeah. So for the customers that were getting this experience, it was very different.
[00:19:41] Alexis Baird: Everything from the home screen looked very different. The onboarding was very different. Features that they had access to were very different. And that was why we kept it pretty small, knowing that this was going to be a pretty big departure. I've been part of redesigns. You know, in other lives, and you almost [00:20:00] never get it right the first time or the second time or the third time, sometimes, you know, it takes a lot of iteration to go get that to kind of the bar that you want for a broader launch.
[00:20:12] Alexis Baird: One other thing that I want to clarify. So we carved off. this small sandbox for the teams to go after. And we told them, you don't have revenue targets. In fact, if you need to take some risky bets that might hurt revenue, you also have latitude to do that. That said, that didn't mean that they didn't have any accountability, right?
[00:20:33] Alexis Baird: Or any goals, but those goals were much more in those. That's sort of we call, we use the classic OKR as objectives and key results. Those were much more focused on proving out different hypotheses. And we had, you know, metrics associated with them, but again, they weren't kind of your classic revenue or business metrics.
[00:20:53] Tom Butta: And again, those were, but those are real live, you know,
[00:20:56] Alexis Baird: so we made the decision to only target new [00:21:00] customers so that we weren't kind of dealing with that
[00:21:03] Tom Butta: returning. Yeah,
[00:21:04] Alexis Baird: sort of that bias. That was also a lesson that I had learned in prior kind of company redesigns. We did. Eventually, once we were fairly confident that we had an experience that was valuable, you know, We did then test with existing customers, and we had to, based on some of those learnings, create, you know, as anyone who's done a redesign with existing customers, you have to create kind of those breadcrumbs and those education moments to, to guide your existing customers through what can feel like a pretty big change in the experience that they're used to.
[00:21:37] Tom Butta: Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of lessons here you've been sharing. I love the idea that you're, the way they evaluated the work from those. Yeah. teams is to prove out the hypotheses. Like, so, like, how hard was it to get those hypotheses right? Like, to articulate them? Yeah. Or was that the easy part?
[00:21:56] Alexis Baird: The easy part, the harder part, was kind of proving [00:22:00] them out and feeling like oftentimes it's not a, you know, binary, right?
[00:22:04] Alexis Baird: There's gray area and sometimes there's judgment call involved in, you know, we can check this box versus we can't check that box. And so I would say in the case of, sort of, to take an example, we had this hypothesis that customers are interested in personalized guidance. That was kind of the high level hypothesis.
[00:22:25] Alexis Baird: And we saw, again, took some iterations, etc. But as I mentioned, we have seen a ton of interest and then engagement with that personalized guidance piece. And so in, in that case, we kind of, you know, how much more interest do you want to drive is kind of relative. So it's not something that we'll kind of, Stop working on right.
[00:22:49] Alexis Baird: But in the case of can we actually build an experience that will not disrupt our current customers who are trying to hire a pro not get in [00:23:00] their way versus really pushing the new experience again that we experimented with a couple different times that has like a pretty clear metrics associated with when you know, you've interrupted a customer and they're, you know, they're going to bounce instead of hiring a pro, which obviously was something we did not want to do.
[00:23:17] Tom Butta: How did you know when it was time to go from the sandbox to, you know, I don't know, the beach?
[00:23:24] Alexis Baird: Yeah, that's a great question, and I wish there was a really clear answer. At the end of the day, that's going to be a judgment call, right? Like, you can always continue refining and making better, and I'm sure As most product people can relate to, you always have a list of about 27 additional things that you would like to do.
[00:23:44] Alexis Baird: But for us, we started from, and again, we worked with folks on the marketing side to kind of say, all right, what's the long term story we want to tell for, you know, Two years from now, three years from now, and then what is kind of working backwards? What's [00:24:00] the story that we want to be able to tell by April of 2024?
[00:24:04] Alexis Baird: And then we kind of created, okay, what does the experience need to look like at that point? And again, that's not going to, you know, preempt being able to continue to iterate on it, but at what point are we going to feel comfortable releasing this? And then from a sort of visual design polish perspective as well, we did a full audit of the experience.
[00:24:23] Alexis Baird: And we kept saying, you know, this is the moment to put our best foot forward. How do we ensure that this will meet our quality bar? And, you know, that included things that weren't exactly functionality, but were part of kind of creating that experience of trust. And this is an app that I feel comfortable opening that, you know, knows what's going on, that has it together.
[00:24:43] Alexis Baird: And so the combination of all of those things, we probably put in place about six months ahead of time. And then we worked towards that, you know, we had tons and tons of Gantt charts and all kinds of spreadsheets to work towards that.
[00:24:57] Tom Butta: So another question I have is. Was there more than [00:25:00] one sandbox?
[00:25:01] Alexis Baird: For the most part, we kept it pretty consistent with that sandbox, but we did run, when we could, ran tests within the sandbox.
[00:25:10] Alexis Baird: Okay. We definitely did some A B testing wherever we could, but yeah.
[00:25:16] Tom Butta: Okay, very cool. So, I think for all of us who have a home or live in a property that requires some care, I think you're providing a fantastic service. So, thank you. for doing that. And I guess maybe before, before we sign off, I'm curious how you vet on the provider side, right?
[00:25:36] Alexis Baird: All of our pros have to go through background checks. And then we do provide the customers with things like reviews, like portfolio of prior work, licensing, etc. Yeah. So we try to give the customer as much information as you can imagine. It's very category by category.
[00:25:56] Tom Butta: Sure. Have people asked for things? I mean, [00:26:00] in terms of like your customers, the homeowners, have they started to ask for things that feel like now we're talking about the driveway and maybe the car in the driveway, like they starting to, is it starting to grow a little bit in terms of with help because you're a trusted source now?
[00:26:15] Alexis Baird: Yeah, I think there's always that tension on do you kind of go broad or do you go deep? And I would say, you know, Starting with our CEO has been, Marco, has been incredibly disciplined about that singular focus. And so from our perspective, we want to make sure we really nail the homeowner and the home before we start to think about other product experiences.
[00:26:42] Alexis Baird: But Uh, of course, I can understand once you sort of create this personalized guidance plan to get things done, you know, it, it feels like a natural bridge, but we want to make sure that we're really focused on this. And I would say this doesn't really exist in the world [00:27:00] today. So this is a huge opportunity when you go to buy a home.
[00:27:03] Alexis Baird: It's like, Which app do you download, right, to care for your home, which is, by the way, daunting and also, I think, a really exciting opportunity for us to go after. So, for now, we're very focused on the homeowner and solving their problems around taking care of the home.
[00:27:19] Tom Butta: Alexis, this has been great. You're obviously incredibly talented, and it sounds like you've had a great You know, launch, but, or relaunch of the business.
[00:27:28] Tom Butta: Yeah. Yeah. So, at the end of the show, and basically, we do a little bit of rapid fire questions. Love
[00:27:35] Alexis Baird: it.
[00:27:35] Tom Butta: Uh, so, one question we ask everybody is like, Android or iOS?
[00:27:41] Alexis Baird: I I'm an Android user. I always have been, and I think now I've held onto it as sort of this contrarian streak that I have. I also like to point out that my co workers that give me a hard time, that I'm usually the one who actually catches the bugs on the Android side because no one else [00:28:00] in Silicon Valley apparently is using, is using Android, but a lot of our customers are.
[00:28:04] Alexis Baird: So it's become a running joke that I'm chief Android tester
[00:28:08] Tom Butta: on the team. Hey, job security. Okay. Are there any trends? It could be, you know, new technology trends or
[00:28:17] Alexis Baird: So maybe a slight variant on the AI trend, and this isn't like a massively new app, but I'm a horrible gardener, and we actually inherited this, was, I'm sure, beautiful garden with our house a couple years ago.
[00:28:33] Alexis Baird: So I've gotten really into using this app, Picture This. where you can take a picture of a plant and it not only tells you what the plant is, but whether it's sick and how you can take care of it. So, um, I think with like GPT 4, oh, like this kind of multimodal sort of interactions are going to get better and better.
[00:28:52] Alexis Baird: But honestly, like, it's already pure magic for me as a terrible gardener. So that would be my most exciting [00:29:00] one.
[00:29:00] Tom Butta: Well, so. Even growing plants has become a science. Wow. That's pretty fun. That's pretty fascinating.
[00:29:07] Alexis Baird: Yeah.
[00:29:07] Tom Butta: Any plans, any vacation plans?
[00:29:09] Alexis Baird: Yeah. I love travel and love traveling with my family. So lots of different places, but most top of mind for me is Spain.
[00:29:17] Alexis Baird: So my family is going to be spending a month there. there this summer. Thumbtack is fully remote, so I'll be able to work remotely and my kids are going to go to summer camp there.
[00:29:27] Tom Butta: Isn't that fantastic? Yeah. What a great experience. Yeah.
[00:29:30] Alexis Baird: We're going to be in Madrid and then a little bit of time on the northern coast where we have some family friends.
[00:29:35] Tom Butta: Excellent. Yeah. What a great experience. Last question, have you been back to Vietnam?
[00:29:40] Alexis Baird: I have not, and I would love to. I'm sure it has changed massively since I was there. It was already kind of in the process of transitioning from, I think, predominantly bikes to Motorbikes.
[00:29:55] Voiceover: Scooters. Scooters.
[00:29:56] Alexis Baird: Yeah, exactly.
[00:29:57] Alexis Baird: And I've heard that it's now transitioned more to [00:30:00] cars, but there were almost no cars when I was there. So, even little kind of markers like that, I'm sure it's, yeah, I would love to go back.
[00:30:07] Tom Butta: I'll have to show you some photos. I've been to Vietnam a couple of times now. Oh, nice. And, uh, yeah. And I, I've seen families of four on a scooter.
[00:30:14] Tom Butta: I've seen the recycling van, you know, man, you know, on a, I've seen, you know, a gaggle of, I think it's a gaggle of ducks, uh, and like, you know, people coming into the market and there's just sprawling bags that they're going to send, distribute to the restaurants. It's phenomenal what they can get on a scooter.
[00:30:35] Alexis Baird: Yep. I saw a refrigerator once. I think that was, Yeah. Oh, yeah.
[00:30:39] Tom Butta: I saw spare tires for a truck. That's
[00:30:42] Alexis Baird: amazing. Are you kidding me? It's
[00:30:45] Tom Butta: so incredible. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:30:47] Alexis Baird: Yeah. No, I'd love to go back.
[00:30:49] Tom Butta: Yeah. Well, this was a lot of fun. Thank you very much. Yeah. I really appreciate your time and your wisdom, and I'm sure all of the listeners here will as well.
[00:30:58] Tom Butta: So thank you, Alexis. [00:31:00] Look, I look forward to remaining in touch and maybe meeting up someday.
[00:31:04] Alexis Baird: Absolutely. Well, thank you, Tom. This was really fun. I thoroughly enjoyed this.
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