bark.com

Inadequate marketing

They show the BBC logo as some form of endorsement, but searching for bark.com within bbc.co.uk turns up this

"I stole £30,000 from my mum to make millions"

For these things it's always worth going in as a tradesperson and seeing how it works from that side.

It looks like Mybuilder in that you post a job and tradespeople pay for the lead if they're interested in the job. There is also a Checkatrade like directory but it's not searchable - you have to click through the type of job and the location before it shows you.

There are reviews, but they seem quite thin. eg when I go for fencers in Cambridgeshire this is my local sawmill, but there are 8 reviews over 10 years:

I created a job for a fence replacement, it found me 142 tradespeople who are up to 50 miles away, and many of them general builders not fencers. I think they have to pay to bid for the work, but it didn't ask me for many details - type of fence, length of fence, etc, but there wasn't a freeform box to enter details or upload photos (although I didn't complete the whole process when it started asking for address details etc).

So the leads the tradesperson sees must be fairly generic, like the example here:

For Bark it seems like anyone can kick tyres and tradespeople have to pay even if the customer never replies to their offer. (I closed my request so nobody had to pay to solicit my fictitious job). It seems like most of the benefit flows to Bark and not to the traders.

I've tried posting a few jobs at Mybuilder and had a decent response but low quality replies - eg there was some guy who said he could do a new flat roof but he had no history, was 90 miles away and when I looked him up his Linkedin said he was employed maintaining trains. I've never found anyone worth giving jobs to (and by posting jobs I haven't wasted their money if I don't shortlist the lead).

I can't see Bark being much better, frankly. The good people are busy, and the people who aren't busy aren't good. It's only the edge cases like those starting out where a platform like this might help.

Theo

Maybe their bark is worse than their bite? Brian