Skillslate: Matching Clients And Service Providers

Now, the lazy people who run this blog don't run ads, but we aren't journalistic paragons either. When our good friends Bartek and Adrian (B&A) started a company and asked DBB to write about it, we happily obliged. It turns out that B&A got real jobs after college, and actually have more money than time. The reverse is true for graduate students. So, B&A frequently encounter problems in life that we've only heard about in Drew Barrymore romcoms -- how can one easily find trustworthy service providers?(movers, dogwalkers, hairdressers, etc) At DBB, we don't just do our own laundry, we make our own laundry detergent. For B&A, who took economics classes, nothing crushes their spirit more than a perceived market need going unfulfilled.

So, they took matters into their own hands, and spent the better part of a year getting initial funding for www.skillslate.com . Skillslate doesn't expect to make money from the customers or advertisements, but instead has built a revenue model based on commissions from service providers. So, Skillslate's biggest challenge will be meeting the needs of the service providers: a group often ensconced within the underground economy, thriving on word of mouth and the lowest possible overhead. Since Skillslate was initially conceived to meet the needs of the customers, thinking from the service provider's POV will take a level of method acting that would make Lee Strasberg proud.

There obviously is a need for a website where customers can search a database of rated service providers. Skillslate continues to evolve, through redesigns and expansions, in order to distinguish it from the pack of like-minded competitors. One niche that Skillslate could definitely step into is the void left behind by Craigslist in the wake of their dropping of the "Adult Services" section. However, due to the nature of Skillslate's revenue model, this could be a tricky proposition, from a legal standpoint.

One recent development at Skillslate that we are decidedly not fans of is the loss of A from Skillslate. Days after this "move", Skillslate announced $1.1M in new funding.