When my clients tell me they find it challenging to come up with ideas during 30 or 45 min interviews, I tell them about the old trick I learned from Lewis Lin. It is really simple to do. Since most people struggle to understand at first, and because it is good practice for me, I started this series-within-a-series to give examples of how to hone your product sense daily. Start by looking at what others do well or poorly.

Let’s Jump into today’s featured product Bark.

What is Bark? They sell themselves as “the Amazon of services”. ”But Amazon already has a services product. (Seems to me the marketing team spent too much time writing the investor pitch deck.) Basically, they are competing with Angie’s List, Yelp, Fiverr, Thumbtack, etc. to help you find the service business you need.

Who do they serve? Anyone looking for a service, but I found them after a horrible Fiverr search experience (experience for another article) had me looking for Social Media Marketing specialists. The Bark onboarding process left me feeling they focus mostly on businesses and larger ones at that but internet research says otherwise.

What went wrong? TL;DR - Bark violated my trust. I was horrified when a service provider reached out via phone after I told them I didn’t want my phone listed. In the end, two people in the marketplace have been failed.

I was looking for a list of providers to vet. As I was signing up, they asked for my telephone number before I could see anything. That was not an option for me. They didn’t let me tell them my call preferences. So I abandoned the account creation.

Yesterday, I got a cold call from an agency telling me they got my info from Bark. I explained, somewhat horrified because I knew I had not given them my number, that I had never given Bark my number. I knew I had not because I abandoned their onboarding flow and created a ticket to complain that there was no way to limit the calls.

The person on the other end of the phone tried to tell me I submitted it but “didn’t realize it”. Basically trying to tell me I didn’t know how to use my internet browser. The person who called me must have been frustrated by the bad lead. Then this morning I got a notification that Bark had canceled my account - funny because I never finished creating my account because of the phone number problem so there shouldn’t have been an account to cancel. I am fairly certain someone asked for a credit back on the bad lead.

My Perspective: If you can’t give me general prices without getting my phone number, you are either trying to sell me hard on something or it is too expensive for me. Either way, I am probably not your target market.

Note on my perspective on my phone number: I prefer emails and texts first; I hated cold calling LONG before the internet came around. Calling me before sending me an email drives me nuts. It has been made worse by Chinese-Language robocalls and of other dynamics in my life.

The Service Provider’s Perspective: They signed up for a service providing them “warm leads.” I was clearly not that. I was the opposite, a very frustrated, slightly hostile person who felt their trust had been violated. Not something the service provider wanted their team chasing.

The Marketplace’s Perspective: My hypothesis is that the company (Bark and/or the Marketing Firm) is struggling and someone did some research to find my number. They figured, why not. I am not sure if it was the service provider or Bark who did the looking up even though I abandoned the onboarding flow with purpose. But the marketplace failed.

The Exercise

Now that we understand the players and the pain point let’s try to come up with some solutions in semi-case style.

User Want: I want to find someone to help me with social media marketing without an expensive bidding process.

User Segments in the business (not Consumer Space) that might reach out to Bark for help solving a business problem.

• Solopreneur

• Small Business with a few staff members and an office

• Medium Size Business looking for a task to be completed

It was my assumption that the first user, the solopreneur is NOT their target market, otherwise, they wouldn’t have asked for my phone without the ability to provide some scheduling options. A solopreneur has limited time and can’t afford to interrupt a crucial business activity to take unscheduled calls.

If I was doing this as an interview case, the prompt might be: Improve Bark (or Yelp, Angie’s List, etc.). From there, I might consider Consumers vs Businesses. Then I would narrow and likely pick something other than Soloprenuer, as most folks in that category would go for something more self-serve. (After researching, I truly couldn’t figure out their point of differentiation. The fact that they stopped listing major accomplishments in 2020 makes me think they didn’t survive the pandemic in great shape.)

So, let’s get back to the exercise. If I was on the team, and I picked a solopreneur looking for support, some things I might consider as pain points in the search for a social media marketing expert:

• find certified help fast

• find a supplier within budget

• find a supplier I can trust with my brand

I am going to prioritize budget. All the other problems matter as well, but as a soloprenuer, let’s assume budget is my biggest problem. (For this exercise, it also aligns with the red flag a phone number request signals.)

Here are some solutions for the onboarding flow (I clearly never got past it):

• Selector for Price Ranges >> takes you only to those in price range

• Calculator (tells you what Y will cost based on Y requirement) >> warns you if your expectations are out of range

• Slider Tool - Slide up and down price options and see what you can get

Let’s walk through these quickly:

• Selector for Price Ranges

  • Super Simple drag-down with price ranges

    • Select one >> it shows you how many options are available

  • Calculator

    • Tell the tool what services you want from a menu

    • It tells you rough price range for services

    • It lets you pull things in and out of your “bucket” to balance what you need with your budget

    • Sends you to a list of possible vendors

    • In this case, you are in control of what you get, you see what it costs

  • Slider Tool

    • Set expectations by showing what you get for X price

    • Could be a list of services

    • You can change your expectations as you explore what you can get for different budgets

    • Maybe an AI-generated video sells you what you get for X price

    • In this case, you are seeing what you get for a price

All the solutions listed would set better expectations when paired with service providers. (Helping both sides.)

If the pain point was around not knowing what I needed while on a budget, I would prioritize the Slider Tool, it helps people understand what they can get or not. It is more about discovery with a budget perspective. But I didn’t set that as my pain point to solve.

For the pain point I identified, I would go with the interactive calculator solution. It would help the solopreneur know what is reasonable and start making trade-offs before wasting their time or that of the service provider. The act of picking things to put in the calculator would let the solopreneur think about what is reasonable to ask for and set proper expectations.

Trade-off: The friction might cause people to abandon faster, but I would bet the leads would be more valuable on both sides of the marketplace.

Now there are a lot of presumptions that require service providers to provide price lists, but we see Fiverr and others doing that already, so not entirely out of the realm of possibilities.

And that is how I quickly took a bad experience and wrote a quick blog over lunch. It will be even faster for you because you will not write or record it for others.

YouTube Short Version

I am starting to record short videos to explain concepts.