Handyman
platform
Support
local businesses
Increase their
online visibility
Opportunity
DIY is not a big thing in Singapore. The majority of folks tend to hire other professionals to complete jobs around the home and office. The problem is, how to find reliable contractors if you don’t have a good network already built up? Many of the experienced, reliable ones may not even have a website, and even if they do, it may not rank anywhere that would enable someone to easily find them online. As such, we built out The Handyman website, a place to consolidate trades people into a single platform.
What we did
We sat down and drew out the concept and various page mock-ups before working with the designer to bring the concepts to life. After that we developed the website via WordPress, including the ability for trades people to sign-up and actively content manage their own profile within the platform.
For a while we tried to actively engage with individual trades people and companies to encourage them to list themselves and manage their own profiles on the website, but we quickly realised they basically couldn’t be bothered. It’s a bit of a chicken and egg situation, because without an audience we don’t have a compelling story to convince vendors to add themselves, but without vendors, we won’t ever build an audience. Rather than continue to wait, we decided to give it a go by researching and listing vendors directly to the platform ourselves. At current count we have around 100 vendors listed.
Results
It’s really too early to say. The site has been live for a while now, but we only just started adding vendors to the platform at scale. We are hoping that with a little bit of a push in this area, we might be able to start moving the rankings slightly to generate some extra traction. Either way, this is really just a passion project. We don’t intend to leverage it for any kind of financial gain. If it can make consumers life easier and/or help trades people gather more business, that’ll be good enough for us.