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ClubLocal recently announced that they received $10.7 million in funding, led by Groupon, a group of individual investors and two of the original founders of ReachLocal. The Encino-based startup has been operating with a beta platform in the Dallas and San Francisco markets, bringing the digital world to home service and repairs.
ClubLocal operates a home service platform that connects people needing home services to available and trusted workers. It's abundant with features, including live updates of how close your service worker is to your home and every worker is pre-screened by ClubLocal. Formerly a wholly-owned subsidiary of ReachLocal, ClubLocal now operates as a completely separate business.
"We're very excited about the funding and have been keeping busy," Garry Galinsky, VP of Product Development, said. "Home service requires a lot of customer work. People still run through the Yellow Pages, maybe Google, spending hours on research, often with expensive and terrible results." (referring to a story about a house that caught on fire due to faulty gas work.)
The challenge has been to bring all the forward-thinking digital benefits to an industry that is just starting to catch on to it. Galinsky noted how Uber faced similar challenges when bringing its digital platform to a taxi service that used to operate on waving your hands in the air and whistling.
For the first six months of 2014, ClubLocal will be focused on the technology. They will continue to improve all the home repair challenges facing customers like reliability, cost, timing and communication, but there is also a whole back-end system the public doesn't see that focuses on the technicians, plumbers and other service workers that will be updated.
The second half of the year will be focused on market expansion, possibly starting with Los Angeles to afford ClubLocal the chance to analyze how the service can be improved in their own backyard. While the company sits in Encino, its first two markets were established in Dallas and San Francisco. The current team of about 20 will also expand in the later part of this year, though no exact headcount has been sorted yet.
Though ClubLocal is a completely stand-alone business, Galinsky noted that there could be possible tie-ins with Groupon on consumer offers for home services as the business develops because, according to a press release, Groupon "believes home services is one of the next areas primed for an offline-to-online transformation, and ClubLocal has the opportunity to be a part of this fundamental business shift.”
