Why I built MyGuyPro.

The pattern I kept hearing.

Over months of conversations with plumbers, electricians, HVAC techs, handymen, contractors, attorneys, and CPAs — independent operators running real businesses — the same arithmetic came up over and over.

A plumber who'd been on Thumbtack for two years told me he was spending $1,800 a month on lead fees and closing roughly one in eight quotes. An electrician on Angi described bidding against four other pros for the same homeowner request, then paying for the lead either way. A handyman said he'd quietly stopped checking his Thumbtack inbox because every notification felt like a small charge against his bank account.

The numbers were different. The story wasn't.

That's not a bug. That's the business model. Thumbtack, Angi, Bark — they're structurally dependent on lead-fee revenue. They can't move to flat-fee pricing without rebuilding from the ground up, because the lead-fee economics are baked into how they value their pros and how they sell to investors. The pros end up footing the bill.

And it isn't great for clients either.

The pro side of the story is the loudest. But the client side is just as broken — and I noticed it before I noticed the pro side, because I was the client.

Try to find a plumber on Google. You'll get an avalanche of paid placements, "best of" lists written by SEO agencies, contradictory reviews, and businesses you can't tell apart. Try Yelp — every plumber has either five stars or one star, and you can't tell which reviews are real. Try Thumbtack — fine, but now you've got to fill out a request form, get bombarded by quotes from four pros you've never heard of, and the platform won't help you tell which one's legit.

It's exhausting. And every minute of that exhaustion is a minute you're not getting your sink fixed.

The friend-recommendation system works because there's trust on both sides. Your friend has met the pro. The pro has done work for your friend. You don't have to dig through reviews because someone already vouched.

The problem is that not everyone has the right friend for every job. A new transplant in a new city has zero contractor relationships. A homeowner whose plumber retired has nobody to call. The "I know a guy" network is the best discovery mechanism humans have ever invented for trades work — and most people don't have access to it for any given category.

So I tried to build the network instead.

The idea is simple. Take the trust-and-vouching model that makes "I know a guy" work, and turn it into a platform that doesn't charge pros to fight over scraps and doesn't make clients dig through noise. The pro side pays a flat subscription — $79.99 or $139.99 per month — and that's the whole revenue. No per-quote fees, no platform commission on jobs. The client side is free.

The trust layer is human. Every pro who lists is manually reviewed before they go live in search. License and insurance details are self-reported by the pro and displayed with a clear disclaimer — we're not pretending to be a credentialing authority, but we are saying "here's what this person told us about themselves, and we looked at their profile carefully before letting them in."

Payment, scheduling, messaging, reviews — all in one app. No phone-tag, no "Venmo me later," no wondering whether the pro will show up. Bookings move through a clear state machine: request → accepted → in progress → completed → reviewed. And once a job is done, the review is tied to a real booking, not a Yelp account someone made twenty minutes ago.

What's different about us.

I want to be specific about this, because "we're different" is what every marketplace says.

Pros pay flat — period. Whether you close one job a month or fifty, the bill is the same. The savings vs. lead-fee platforms compound monthly. For a pro spending $2,000/month on Thumbtack leads, switching is a $23,000/year raise.

Clients pay nothing to MyGuyPro. We don't take a cut of the jobs. The platform doesn't sit between the pro and their paycheck. Card processing has a standard processing fee like any business takes, but MyGuyPro doesn't stack platform commission on top.

Every pro is manually reviewed before going live. Not "background checks optional" or "self-attestation only." A real person on our team reviews each profile before it shows up in search. We're a small team and that scales slower than auto-approval, and we think that's a feature, not a bug.

The whole booking happens in the app. Search, message, request, accept, pay, complete, review — one surface, one record. No "follow up by text later," no separate Venmo, no scheduling-in-three-different-tools.

What we're not yet.

I want to be honest about this too. We launched a week ago. The marketplace is new. The pro pool is small. We're growing city by city, starting with where we have the strongest founding-pro relationships — Houston, Southern California, and a few more from there.

The first 30 days are going to feel sparse in some cities. That's the chicken-and-egg of every new marketplace. We're addressing it the boring honest way: offering the first two months free to founding pros, manually onboarding the early ones, and asking our first 100 pros to vouch for us with their networks.

The platforms we're competing with have a decade of pro inventory. We have a clean slate, no investor pressure to extract per-lead margin, and a business model that scales with subscriptions instead of friction. We'll get there.

What you can do.

If you're a pro tired of paying to lose: download the app and claim your two months free. Build out your profile. Take a swing. If it doesn't pencil out, cancel in iOS Settings — no holds, no calls, no "retention specialist" trying to talk you out of it.

If you're a homeowner who's just tired: open the app, look up a pro by category and ZIP, and message them directly. No request form, no quote bombs.

If you have ideas for what we should build next, or feedback on what's not working yet, write us directly: support@myguypro.app. We read every email.