Ethan Anderson

And everybody was licensed, insured, and guaranteed by Red Beacon.

So you select somebody, and that service provider then pays us a percentage of the job, usually ranging between 10% and 20%, depending on the vertical.

What was the average job cost?

That's a good question.

I don't exactly remember.

This is about five or six years ago for me.

I can't remember what the average job cost was, but it was probably around $100 or something thereabouts.

Oh, it was definitely fewer than a million requests per month.

And that's actually something that is very interesting if you want to contrast Red Beacon and what I'm doing now in my time.

With Red Beacon, how often do you need a home service job?

Maybe once a year, maybe twice a year, maybe 10, 15 times in your life.

And so the problem with Red Beacon is there wasn't enough continuous usage.

This is like the opposite of Uber or OpenTable, which you use every week.

And we found that getting the repeat usage was difficult because people didn't need new bids from new service providers all that often.

So in that kind of situation, you have to really be able to monetize a lot on every single transaction simply because there's not a lot of transactions.

So you better hit a home run each time.

And that was the hard, hard thing about Red Beacon.

It was arbitrage, lead generation.

So what that means is you go and you buy ads on Google and other sources, you pay for that traffic, you try to convert the traffic, and then you try to monetize it as much as possible.

So that's really the whole game.