We have some experience. Thumbtack came to mind today as one of our smb's received a request for a price quote...but there was a charge attached to it; something we hadn't experienced before.
Here is the history;
About 3 years ago I was reading about thumbtack and ended up putting a link to thumbtack on our site at the very bottom of a long page. It was quite obscure.
I simultaneously searched for visibility for the smb in question via a thumbtack link. The search visibility was very poor. Regardless over the 3 years the smb site has averaged about 1 lead/month from Thumbtack. Possibly b/c we had the link on our site we never saw charges for the leads till the other day.
Meanwhile over that 3 year period the smb received thousands of leads. Lead volume is somewhere in the hundreds/month. Needless to say thumbtack was a very minor contributor to leads.
Over the couple of years I couldn't figure out how searchers came to us via thumbtack. Visibility is simply minimal and miserable. Finally after actually getting follow up w/ some of the leads I was able to ask some questions and the link off of our website was referenced.
Son of a gun. At least some of the leads were off our own site. I had completely forgotten about the reference and had to search the site to find it.
We haven't seen a lead via thumbtack since this past June and one in Sept was the first requesting a payment.
Scr#%*^w that. I'm not paying thumbtack for leads that quite possibly come off our own site.
On the other hand, the intriguing emails/forms/ responses to people who clicked on the link and requested "price bids" obviously has worked at some levels. These were off of pages with highly visible contact forms. On the OTHER OTHER Hand the contact forms generated leads at a rate of something in excess of 100+ to every one thumbtack lead.
Lesson: the thumbtack email/form to a user offering a "price bid" is somewhat effective. I'm going to offer something like that on the site(s) to see how they work.
Thumbtack does offer leads. Are they valuable? You'll have to figure that out. Besides offering leads it forces the leads to compete with other vendors. That automatically discounts their effectiveness, especially if you are losing on price or other qualities.
Finally per Greg Sterling thumbtack recently raised very very big bucks through a VC fund raising effort as of late August:
Under the Radar, Thumbtack Grabs Surprising $100M Series D Round
If they use that money wisely they may boost their site's visibility considerably. I guess we'll all see in the future.
