Thumbtack emailed local pros by hand; co-founder credits email marketing for first 1,000 users

What they ran

Marco Zappacosta, Jonathan Swanson and Sander Daniels founded Thumbtack in 2008 as a marketplace for hiring local service pros. To fill the supply side, the team searched business websites, social profiles and directory listings by hand to build contact lists. They then emailed local professionals to tell them Thumbtack existed, as Daniels recalls in a write-up on Thumbtack's unscalable tactics. The founders answered replies themselves and walked interested pros through registration. An early investor says the founders were operating out of a house and still cooking meals together.

What happened

Daniels credits email marketing with Thumbtack's first 1,000 users. He later told TechCrunch that the company had found how to sign up pros in huge numbers while consumers arrived too. Later still, it handled about $1 billion a year in business for providers across roughly 1,000 categories. A blog claims more than 250,000 active pros by 2021, but it gives no source.

What the account does not show

The 1,000 figure is the founder's own recollection, with no baseline or timeline. It does not say whether those users were pros, consumers or both. The sources give no reply or sign-up rates for the emails. The $1 billion and 250,000 figures come years later, and neither source ties them to the manual outreach.