Using Thumbtack to Request Web Design Services

How to get results from Web Design Thumbtack requests

Shortly after diving headlong into freelance work, my partner alerted me to a service called Thumbtack. The amount of work requests there impressed me and I told her to put in a bid. That’s when we saw the extreme difference between this site and other types of Freelance sites (Upwork, Fiverr, etc.). Bidding costs money, and for the web design category it was quite high. 

The $30 bids wouldn’t even be such a big deal if we were bidding for serious customers. It became apparent that most users requesting design services weren’t at all serious. We put in several bids without hearing anything back from clients. Sometimes, they would send us back a message saying they had “decided to go a different way.” All of this would be fine, but we were quoting some very competitive bids and should have gotten better results.

It was obvious when we were dealing with serious clients. We did get results from using Thumbtack, and we are still working together with clients we met from using that service. We then started to filter results based on types of requests that came in that we just assumed were tire-kickers.

Recipe for best results on Thumbtack

The longer we spent on Thumbtack, the more we came to the conclusion that there were two basic types of requests. One type would give the minimum amount of information. (So minimal it would be impossible to give a qualified bid). The other type that would give an abundance of information, and often provided links to sites they liked. The first type may well have been legitimate customers. Since it cost us $30 a bid to try to qualify them, it wasn’t really worth the time or money to do so.

There may be folks who’ve tried to use Thumbtack and thought it was a waste of time since they didn’t get the results they wanted. From my perspective, if they want better results they should try filling in as much information as possible. This includes the optional fields.

Using Thumbtack for Web Design

There are some other things that would be helpful to know as well. Oftentimes, Thumbtack does those requesting a disservice by giving them options to select. This provides an easy out rather than thinking about the specifics of what a client will actually need. For example, one question involves the type of content management system (CMS) to be used. One choice is: “I would like a custom website created from scratch.” Although there’s nothing wrong with that, there is a difference between building on a CMS and building a website from scratch. And yet, I see folks with budgets set for the “from-scratch website” at the same range as using an established CMS.

I can only guess that those using this option do not understand what building a custom website entails. Long story short, it’s unlikely that anyone would bid on a custom-website project under $1K. Especially, if the additional “optional” details aren’t there to paint the full picture of what’s needed.

Does Thumbtack still have potential?

Ultimately, I think Thumbtack does have potential. It should also be noted the bidding price for web design is twice what it should be. I can personally vouch that I have turned down many projects simply because there wasn’t enough information. It wasn’t worth my time or money to find out. If you are looking for great website designers, I’m certain you’ll be able to find them on Thumbtack. But you will have to do some legwork of your own, fill out all the fields you can or your request will most likely go nowhere. If you do decide to use Thumbtack and you came upon this piece, I hope you found something useful. I wish you the best of luck in your endeavor.