I have to ask. How much did you pay for that sexy domain name, @grmeyer?

I honestly didn't expect Greg to tell me how much they paid for pro.com but I had to ask. ;) I heard what you're saying @taylorhou and @ffumarola but @grmeyer's a good guy and I'm excited to see him jump into startups from his previous role at Salesforce. :)

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As a new home owner in the Seattle are my browser has been jam packed with angies list, porch, zillow, and now Pro.com! Excited to see my current partner's previous partner's new startup! I think that makes us somehow related in the startup world? I actually just used Pro.com to find a vendor. So far loving it!

Looks like this might be Product Hunt's first "Rampart" moment. Live and learn.

This is very interesting @grmeyer. Looks like a twist on Angie's List that's project-centric instead of vendor-centric. How do I know your pros are pros / your prices are accurate?

I just wanted to give you a major props @ecwilson - cool service and great answers in this thread. Cheers!

This thread is full of deflected answers urging people to take conversation to email. You responded 6 times in this thread -- 4 times were to tell people to go to email and 2 times were just to say thanks. What a lost opportunity to engage with product minded folk who were interested in the product @grmeyer

@rrhoover I'm sure @grmeyer is a fantastic guy, I wouldn't insinuate otherwise! Still a missed opportunity. And honestly, I would stop coming to Product Hunt if every thread turns into "Hey, can you explain XYZ?" "Sure, go to our FAQ or email us!" I really like this community for the chance to engage with the people behind the products.

@grmeyer here are 4 that I thought were pretty great back and forths http://www.producthunt.co/posts/... http://www.producthunt.co/posts/... http://www.producthunt.co/posts/... http://www.producthunt.co/posts/... Many more, but they were all pretty recent and convos that I was part of (and thus familiar with).

@grmeyer Cool! Probably in response to part of @adamsigel's question so I'll tag him here. Contracting is a really tough space due to how easy it is for contractors to form new companies to abandon their bad reputation, how costly mistakes are (e.g. hiring the wrong person can be *catastrophic*), and how impactful even seemingly small things can be on choosing the right contractor (e.g. this is a great roofer UNLESS you have a slate roof). I worked with Adrian Talapan a bit on sussing out his vision for "HouseFix" and the premise was that the recommendations from around you (your neighborhood) and from your friends are more valuable than the recommendations from random people. Any plans to add some element of adding more weight to reviews that are in close proximity to you or reviews from your friends?

Woot, I have commenting access now :) I'm the lead PM at Pro.com, and am looking forward to participating on this site. I've been lurking for a couple of weeks and this seems like a fantastic community for having product conversations.

@rrhoover Re: the domain, it's a fascinating story involving a lot of sleuthing and even more luck. It wasn't cheap, but I still think we got a great deal on it. I hope to see the full story in Matt W's future book. Anyhow, I feel really fortunate that we landed that name - I can't tell you how much time/energy was spent on the naming process.

@adamsigel Re: our pros, this is a problem where we're really scratching our own itch. Most of us are homeowners or have been and gone through the pain of finding contractors. We've all used Angie's List, Porch, Yelp, RedBeacon, Craigslist, etc and are trying to take a different approach where we do the leg work for you in finding great pros and let you focus on the "last mile" of the decision - e.g. this guy's gallery has Craftsman homes in it, or I have an urgent need and this guy is available immediately. But all of them are great. How do you know they are great? That's an interesting question. I can tell you about our vetting process and how we're hand picking these pros based on a bunch of criteria, talking to them, talking to their customers, finding out what exactly is so great (or not great...) about them, and background checking their crews - but ultimately it comes down to word of mouth. With home contracting, personal referrals are so huge - 60%+ of people start there whenever they have a project to take care of. If you have a great experience with a particular pro or Pro.com in general, that's worth a ton in this space. So we're also over investing in a layer of customer service on top of things, and that's where @grmeyer's crew comes in. They're like this superstar concierge team that is standing by to make sure you have a solid experience, and swoop in to fix things if you ever have a problem. Things do go wrong - even the best contractor might get their wires crossed and show up on the wrong day. But the save makes all the difference.

@ffumarola, it is a super tough space that is filled with nuance. We think we're one of the few companies in it who are going after the hard problems. We've got a ways to go, but we're on the path. My research totally validates your premise about the value of personal referrals or even signals from people "like you" or in your neighborhood. We definitely want to bring more of that in especially as we accumulate more review data. If anyone has suggestions about this in particular, I think it would be super valuable for us.

Sorry Ryan, we don't share business or financial information about the company - please contact pr@pro.com.

@ffumarola - We look for publicly available sources of information to validate the pro and the quality of their work. This includes and is not limited to licensing information, rating information, and customer sentiment. In some cases we also reach out to the pro to ask additional questions.

@ffumarola awesome idea and will share with the team

Thanks Adam - you can learn more here https://pro.com/info/faq or contact support@pro.com - thanks!

@ffumarola - trying to learn here as well - would love a pointer to Q&As that are more inline with what you expected.