WhoCanDo - Doing It Well
WhoCanDo are a web portal that offer reverse auction services for pretty much anything. The company, who just celebrated their first birthday, describe themselves as a one stop portal:
They provide a platform for auctions across an array of categories with current listings ranging from building services and domestic cleaning to dental work! The simple and effective layout of the site belies the efforts of the team, who have spent considerable time and gone to great length to ensure the experience is as friendly as possible for their customers. The company earn revenue as a commission on successful auctions, it’s an effective and I imagine profitable, model with transaction values varying from a few hundred dollars to as high as $150, 000 [WhoCanDo May 2010: largest job to date $1,350,000]. It’s great to see seasoned entrepreneurs like this in the Australian start up scene, and even attending the OpenCoffee meetings, the resumes of the management read like a VC’s dream team including Kelkoo founder William Klippgen. So let’s hear from one of the founders, Robert Finkeldey: Can you tell us about the Who Can Do story? 3 successful entrepreneurs started WhoCanDo in 2006. The NSW Government is promoting WhoCanDo in the Australian Technology Showcase since 2007. CeBIT 2008 selected WhoCanDo as one of the five Best Australian Start-ups of the Year. Featured several times in the print media, Len Rust sums up ’Aussies Worth Watching’. Where did the idea came from, has it evolved over time? WhoCanDo responds to the market need of a much more efficient and more transparent service procurement. When I moved into a new suburb, I needed several jobs done around the house and I did not know who the good tradespeople were in my area. So I used Yellow Pages Online, Google, and other directories to call around, to leave messages, to never be called back, to arrange site-visits for tradespeople who were late or did not show up at all, to finally receive a couple of quotes which I could not really compare because their format and length was entirely different. People then often go by price and a typical logic is: the cheapest quote can’t be any good, the most expensive one is the platinum version which I don’t need, so I take the middle of the road. You waste all this time on research, and you are still left only with a prayer that you get value for money. There must be a better way of doing it. And this was the starting point for WhoCanDo. Can you describe any research you carried out to validate that opportunity. We carried out several rounds of market research. At first at macro-level, we researched both demand and supply-side, leveraging several sources of secondary research material. One important signal was a sudden and significant increase in the number of tradespeople who started using the Internet to communicate with customers. Before and during our design phase, we carried out user wants & needs analysis as well as several rounds of usability interviews. With a very specific description of what the perfect system has to look like, we soon discovered that we had to develop this system from scratch because we did not want to risk any compromises with our design. Up to 5 web developers worked for 14 months on the system to satisfy our expectations, and more importantly exceed the expectations of our customers. Can you tell us how the founders met or came together for this venture and the role each has played in getting this far? We are three partners in the business, and we all met at Gartner Inc. and stayed in contact since. I was running Gartner’s consulting practice for market & business strategies in Asia/Pacific and William Klippgen was one of my senior consultants in Singapore. William was the CTO and co-founder of kelkoo.com and left Gartner soon after kelkoo was acquired by Yahoo in 2004 to open Tigris Capital. Neil McMurchy has held several senior positions across Gartner’s Research, Consulting, and Sales organisation, after he was the CEO of several medium-size software companies. We got together in 2005 and founded WhoCanDo in May 2006. I am the founder and managing director. Neil is a director of the company. William is chair of the advisory board. On the face of it there is nothing stopping a PHP / ASP etc whiz copying your idea and creating their own version of Who Can Do, how do you counter this and can you offer any advice for any start ups out there operating in the dark because they are afraid of copycats? There is no point in starting a business if you cannot protect your IP and/or customer base. There are several ways of protecting yourself (and this is what we do):
There you have it, a big thank you Robert not only for taking the time out to answer our questions but for providing some valuable insight into the execution side of a startup. Source: TechNation Australia, September 12, 2008 |
