Thinking out loud
What we have learned running a fixed-price home services marketplace in Porto — on scheduling, vetting, pricing, and why the informal market keeps failing homeowners and tradespeople alike.
Current scheduling reacts to bookings as they arrive. The next iteration pre-positions professionals by neighbourhood using demand forecasting — before the booking is even made.
Many homeowners want the same plumber who fixed their pipes last spring. Here is how the preference system works in the scheduler — and why we built it after homeowners kept asking for it.
No marketplace operates without problems. A job done badly. A professional who misunderstood the scope. Here is exactly what we do in each case, and what homeowners can expect from the first report to resolution.
Atlantic winters bring moisture, wind, and temperature swings. These are the five preventive jobs that prevent expensive emergencies.
A homeowner uploading two photos of a leaking tap can trigger a job complexity score informed by building age, tap type, and historical time data.
A 4.5-star overall rating tells you almost nothing. Did the professional arrive on time? Was the price accurate? Was the work clean?
We started with plumbing and locksmith work. After six months of operational learning, we are ready to add three more categories.
As a two-sided marketplace under GDPR, we hold personal data for homeowners, professionals, and job records. Here is a plain-language breakdown of what we collect, why each piece is necessary, and what we do not do with it.
Idle travel time is unpaid time. A plumber who spends 3 hours driving earns less per day than one clustered in the same neighbourhood.
We can vet professionals rigorously, but we can't accompany every job. Trust relies on photos, real-time tracking, and structured post-job review.
Offering a guaranteed same-day slot sounds simple until you model the constraint graph: availability, travel time, duration variance, and coverage.
Three phone calls for a single plumber quote. Four days waiting for a callback. We mapped the full booking journey from a homeowner's perspective and identified seven places where it breaks down — and why each one is fixable.
Hourly billing creates the wrong incentives. A job that should take 90 minutes takes three hours when the worker gets paid for time.
Background checks, license verification, and a two-job probationary track. Here is the exact process every OSCAR professional passes.
A plumber finishing a pipe replacement in Matosinhos needs 40 minutes to reach Paranhos for the next job. Our scheduler knows that.
Four months of interviews with Porto and Lisbon homeowners and tradespeople. The failure patterns were consistent: unclear pricing, no-show incentives, and zero accountability structures.
