Hello folks!

We are three young entrepreneurs who recently embarked on the (exciting and bittersweet) start-up journey. We are working on developing a web application to ease the process of dealing with home services (plumbing, electricians, carpentry, etc) in Geneva and the surrounding regions, including making appointments, electronic billing, etc. We are sure you guys have many valuable opinion which you can share with us and we would love to know your thoughts and experience in this.

In the spirit of crowdsourcing wisdom, we would appreciate it very much if you guys can help us out by answering to a simple (only 10 straightforward questions) survey:

[English] http://fixonaut.com/survey.html
[French] http://fixonaut.com/enquete.html

Our sincerest thanks in advance, and we look forward to hearing your thoughts!

kind regards,
the Fixonaut team

Welcome to the Forum. I did your survey, will that help you? I don't think so!

Why not?
For me it's a good idea, always is useful any person to repair the heater, the electricity and whatever we used in a house!
Really, the worst things don't happened very often but is very good to solve it very quickly.

Hey... Good initiative!

Yopu maybe want to check out the competition : www.renovero.ch

Hey

First off, let me congratulate you for making the choice to start your own business. I truly hope you succeed with your venture.

Rather than filling out your survey, I will post my feedback here in the open. First, while surveys are a great tool for certain use cases, I believe they aren't of that much help in your situation. The reason is, because most people don't care - they have no incentive to fill out this survey, even though it would only take a couple of minutes' worth of their time. At least, you should not only rely on the survey to gather feedback. The best way is the hardest - call people up! Yes, it takes a bit of a thick skin, but that's how you get real feedback. That's also how you can best reach handymen and other potential providers, who are probably mostly non-technical and are not hanging out online. On the other hand, I might be totally wrong, and you're already being flooded with responses. If so, please let me know, and I will reconsider my opinion about surveys!

I would also be very interested in learning more about your business model. You want to crowdsource feedback, well, tell us the whole story. There may be quite a few entrepreneurs hanging out on this forum, and they all may be willing to give you their take on your plans. I believe feedback from experienced business people is invaluable, don't miss the chance.

Lastly, this is a very competitive space - many variations of what you are planning to do are already out there. Renovero.ch has already been mentioned, they allow you to post jobs and handymen/electricians/etc. will bid on it. So, you must be very clear about what it is that you can bring to the table as a new player compared to the established platforms. Renovero is *buyer* oriented, so it might be a good strategy to be *seller* oriented instead. Think how you can make it easier for providers to sell their services to their customers - you already seem to be going in that direction with appointment & electronic billing. But there may be other ways how you can help providers to stand out. Or, perhaps, you could specialize in "exotic" fields, such as furniture restoration companies. Yet another way would be how you could make it easier for providers to get services from their providers in turn. Just some ideas...! In any case, stay flexible, and be willing to adapt your business model to something that meets a genuine demand.

HTH
r

Couldn't load your page on IE8. Sorry.

Same here.