Value as a Foundation

The game of business is, and always will be, the game of who can provide the most value. Most people think it’s a game of money, but it can’t be. Money is a result — a byproduct of business that has to be earned.

Anyone who’s built anything knows you don’t build by focusing on the outcome. You build by focusing on the process: the steps it takes to get there, the inputs. There are a million and one ways to provide value to someone else — a unique service, a skill, a product, anything that helps another person in some way. You just have to pick one and put in the work to provide it.

The trades have always gotten this. If you want to make more money, you find more people to show up for, or more ways to provide value to them. The only honorable way to make money is to truly earn it. You have to deserve it.

So I decided to bake that belief into TradeSpace: to build a business that only gets paid for the value it provides, and only once it can actually provide it.

Let me explain. The model for TradeSpace started by looking at the options laid out for tradespeople trying to build and grow their businesses, their brands, and their identities online. We saw how painful, and how wrong, those options were:

• You don’t exist online at all.
• You make social media accounts for your business that get ignored, because no homeowner is scrolling through Instagram looking to hire a plumber.
• You build a social media presence, but only by debasing yourself doing a song and dance to get attention.
• You sacrifice building a real brand and identity, and become a… [App name here] contractor. We all know what I’m talking about.
• You put your business on one of those apps where you pay for every lead they send — most of which are dead ends you’re stuck paying for anyway.
• You hand over a percentage of the work you do to some company, just for handing you the lead.

None of those come without a cost — to your growth, to your identity, to your potential. And most of them are taking a cut, getting paid for value that you provide, not them.

So I built a business that gets paid directly for the value we provide. Nothing more, nothing less. We built a damn good platform, a damn good app, and a damn good community. If you want access to those things, you pay a small subscription — that doesn’t cost you the growth, the potential, or the identity of the business you’re working so hard to build. A place meant for you and built to make your business succeed.

More importantly, I’ve always understood what our value proposition really is: a platform that represents trades businesses well, makes them visible to their community, and gives them the opportunity to be found and hired by putting them in front of the people they serve.

But I’m starkly aware that our value doesn’t truly come through until we reach our full potential — until there are enough people on the app looking for trades businesses. And we can’t provide value to those users until we have enough trades businesses to show them all the options. It’s always been a bit of a double-edged sword: needing both sides of the equation (businesses and customers), and in the masses, in order to actually provide value to either.

So I made a decision based on values, not money: we won’t charge the businesses who believe in us and join from the start until we’re actually providing them the value we promised. That means it’s free for a minimum of two years while we build and grow — until there are enough people that every business who joined us early is finding leads and opportunity like never before, because of the value we provide.

This comes at our own expense. It means working off zero revenue and zero cash flow, bootstrapping the whole way. But we know it’s the only way to make the TradeSpace emblem stand for building things the right way.

That’s the TradeSpace way: get paid for the value you provide. Earn it to deserve it.