Zaarly

» see zaarly.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

zaarly was a US local-services startup that came out of a los angeles startup weekend in february 2011 and lasted just long enough to run through $14 million and ten years. bo fishback, then a vice president at the kauffman foundation in kansas city, pitched the idea on a plane. the pitch won the weekend. it also won kleiner perkins.

the original bet was reverse-craigslist. you post what you need done, nearby people bid. within 48 hours of the SXSW test in march 2011 the app had moved $10,000 in transactions. by that summer meg whitman was on the board and ashton kutcher was an investor. the company moved between kansas city and san francisco, and fishback flew back and forth every week.

i had no reach into this. zaarly was a US-only app built on smartphone density that turkey did not have in 2011, and the labor pool was american freelancers and handyman crews in specific US cities. even the pivot years (2013 onward) narrowed it down to kansas city home services, which is a market the size of a postage stamp from where i sit. the story i can tell is the shape of the arc, not the feel of using it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it actually was ~

after the reverse-craigslist model failed to hold outside big cities, zaarly rebuilt in 2013 as a curated marketplace: vetted local pros, subscription customers, reputation carried across jobs. the pivot worked in kansas city. it never worked anywhere else. the company spent the second half of its life trying to scale a model that had only ever proven itself in one metro.

~ the day it died ~

in april 2021, after ten years, fishback wrote a memo announcing the wind-down. the local pros would keep working, just without the platform. that would have been the ending. then he got an email from someone at airtasker, an australian services marketplace that had gone public on the ASX in 2021 and wanted a US foothold. three weeks later airtasker acquired zaarly for $2.6 million. fishback became airtasker's US CEO.

~ what remains ~

the curated-pro model zaarly landed on after its pivot is now standard across the whole home services vertical. thumbtack and angi both sell some version of it. zaarly proved the model could work in one city and could not prove it worked in twenty. the acquirer got the team plus the code for $2.6 million, which is about what one series A used to cost the same category.

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