Fiverr meets Uber for local service providers: Dubb.co connects providers to buyers locally

by Jessica Ainlay
March 20, 2015

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Photo by Brandon Emerson, who the founders hired on Dubb.co
 
When two friends who are also entrepreneurs start talking about something they need, odds are pretty good they might just build it themselves.
 
Such was the case with Ruben Dua and Venk Tatineni, co-founders of mobile marketplace app, Dubb.co
 
One day Tatineni mentioned to Dua his interest in growing an herb garden in his backyard. He didn’t need to hire professionals. All he wanted was someone to come by and teach him how to plant basil and chiles. Did someone offer that sort of thing professionally? 
 
Around the same time, Dua’s wife was planning a birthday party for their son. She had been scouring the internet for local talent to hire for the party — someone to do facepainting, maybe a band for music — but her search took ages across a whole mess of disjointed websites and services. 
 
It shouldn’t be this hard to connect to providers of all these services with buyers, so Dubb.co was put into motion. 

[ibimage==36471==Original==none==self==ibimage_align-left]Keeping it in the ‘hood

The Dubb.co app serves as a mobile marketplace for buyers to find all the local talent they need in one place. The emphasis is on the idea of ‘local’. 
 
There is value in the “essence of being able to connect with people in our own communities to enrich our lives,”  Dua said. The app will have ratings and reviews for service providers, much like Angie's List, giving students and others looking to build out their portfolios a chance to get reviews, as well as feedback on their offering and an opportunity to plug into a much wider, more targeted audience. 
 
To start, the Dubb team has niched and niched again, currently targeting moms in the Los Angeles area. They are looking to a wider rollout in the near future. 

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So why ‘Dubb’? 

Dubb is slang for twenty — all services on the site start at $20. From there, the real money to be made by service providers is in the value add-on. Once buyers are interested in the $20 service, providers can also include any number of valuable add-ons to enrich the experiences they offer. 
 
There are three sets of target provider types: experience, events and instruction. Yoga teachers, private chefs, photographers and other kinds of semi-professional providers can make good money doing what they love, with Dubb earning its revenue off the transaction fee, a la Uber’s model. 
 
For buyers, benefits go beyond having services aggregated in one place. There is an element of experiential discovery that allows buyers to spontaneously find services they may have never considered or known about before. 
 
Those who see this as a solid business concept are in good company. Brian Liu, co-founder and chairman of the board at LegalZoom was one of Dubb.co’s first angel investors. 
 
Dubb is currently in invite-only beta and will open up to a wider audience later this year. 
 
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