I must first apologise to the guys at WhoCanDo and to our illustrious editor (Kim), I had meant to post this some weeks back. 

WhoCanDo are a web portal that offer reverse auction services for pretty much anything. The company, who just celebrated their first birthday, describe themselves as a one stop portal: 

• for buyers who want to find high-quality services quickly at fair prices and
• for service providers who seek high-quality leads with very little investment in marketing, sales or time.   

They provide a platform for auctions across an array of categories with current listings ranging from building services and domestic cleaning to dental work!

The simple and effective layout of the site belies the efforts of the team, who have spent considerable time and gone to great length to ensure the experience is as friendly as possible for their customers. 

The company earn revenue as a commission on successful auctions, it’s an effective and I imagine profitable, model with transaction values varying from a few hundred dollars to as high as $150, 000.

It’s great to see seasoned entrepreneurs like this in the Australian start up scene, and even attending the OpenCoffee meetings, the resumes of the management read like a VC’s dream team including Kelkoo founder William Klippgen.  So let’s hear from one of the founders, Robert Finkeldey:

Can you tell us about the Who Can Do story?
WhoCanDo.com.au is Australia’s first online marketplace for trades & services. It operates as a quotation, tender, and auction system which allows the buyer to make an informed decision quickly based on qualifications, licences, reputation, price and other factors describing service providers and their offerings. WhoCanDo provides a safe platform for trustworthy relationships where quality matters through several unique (and patented) features, including identity verification and certification.

 3 successful entrepreneurs started WhoCanDo in 2006. The NSW Government is promoting WhoCanDo in the Australian Technology Showcase since 2007. CeBIT 2008 selected WhoCanDo as one of the five Best Australian Start-ups of the Year. Featured several times in the print media, Len Rust sums up ’Aussies Worth Watching’.

Where did the idea came from, has it evolved over time?
 -When did you first spot the market opportunity  

WhoCanDo responds to the market need of a much more efficient and more transparent service procurement. When I moved into a new suburb, I needed several jobs done around the house and I did not know who the good tradespeople were in my area. So I used Yellow Pages Online, Google, and other directories to call around, to leave messages, to never be called back, to arrange site-visits for tradespeople who were late or did not show up at all, to finally receive a couple of quotes which I could not really compare because their format and length was entirely different. People then often go by price and a typical logic is: the cheapest quote can’t be any good, the most expensive one is the platinum version which I don’t need, so I take the middle of the road. You waste all this time on research, and you are still left only with a prayer that you get value for money. There must be a better way of doing it. And this was the starting point for WhoCanDo.

Can you describe any research you carried out to validate that opportunity.

We carried out several rounds of market research. At first at macro-level, we researched both demand and supply-side, leveraging several sources of secondary research material. One important signal was a sudden and significant increase in the number of tradespeople who started using the Internet to communicate with customers. Before and during our design phase, we carried out user wants & needs analysis as well as several rounds of usability interviews. With a very specific description of what the perfect system has to look like, we soon discovered that we had to develop this system from scratch because we did not want to risk any compromises with our design. Up to 5 web developers worked for 14 months on the system to satisfy our expectations, and more importantly exceed the expectations of our customers.

Can you tell us how the founders met or came together for this venture and the role each has played in getting this far?

We are three partners in the business, and we all met at Gartner Inc. and stayed in contact since. I was running Gartner’s consulting practice for market & business strategies in Asia/Pacific and William Klippgen was one of my senior consultants in Singapore. William was the CTO and co-founder of kelkoo.com and left Gartner soon after kelkoo was acquired by Yahoo in 2004 to open Tigris Capital. Neil McMurchy has held several senior positions across Gartner’s Research, Consulting, and Sales organisation, after he was the CEO of several medium-size software companies. We got together in 2005 and founded WhoCanDo in May 2006. I am the founder and managing director. Neil is a director of the company. William is chair of the advisory board.

 On the face of it there is nothing stopping a PHP / ASP etc whiz copying your idea and creating their own version of Who Can Do, how do you counter this and can you offer any advice for any start ups out there operating in the dark because they are afraid of copycats?

There is no point in starting a business if you cannot protect your IP and/or customer base. There are several ways of protecting yourself (and this is what we do):

• Share information about your business idea only when you have to and then use an NDA, preferably with a non-circumvention clause.
• Get patents for innovative parts of your technology which can be easily replicated andwhich are critical for your unique value proposition (WhoCanDo has got 3 such patents)
• Patents are expensive – some government grants can help soothe the pain
• Timing of disclosure of your invention is key – preferably decide what should be patented before your website goes live
• Get trademark(s) – they are inexpensive; get them now (you don’t want to change your name once you have build a good reputation which will grow into a brand over time)
• Stay ahead – technology always evolves and copycats are not always bad (e.g. they might help you educate the market) but make sure you are better/faster than them (e.g. get your new release out just when they think they are catching up)
• Protect your customer database, it is an asset – provide users only with limited views and access.
• Use your first mover advantage; focus on customer acquisition from day one – customer acquisition is less expensive when you don’t compete with similar offerings.
• Establish a good customer loyalty program from day one – customer retention is less expensive than customer acquisition; and it is harder for your competition to attract your customers if your customers are happy with you.

One of our aims at TNA is to provide as much transparency as possible about the companies we profile. Would you be so brave as to share any metrics with our readers?
-Revenues / forecasts
-User base

Because it is linked to our strategy, I can’t give away too much at this stage. I can share with you:

• Customers pay for our service (people are happy to pay a small success fee to save time and money)
• Customers return to use our service (the vast number of members have already placed a second, third or fourth auction)
• We do not need a lot of auctions to meet break-even.

What does the future hold for Who Can do?
 - expansion plans
 - new services / features

All of the above: organic growth and growth with partners; international and national; new service categories; new features on our website.

I will keep you posted as soon as we can make an announcement.

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There you have it, a big thank you Robert not only for taking the time out to answer our questions but for providing some valuable insight into the execution side of a startup.