The Handyman

The majority of people in Singapore are not really into DIY [no criticism intended] so they tend to hire folks to get the odd jobs done for them. The problem is, how to find reliable contractors if you don’t have a good network already built up? Many of the experienced, reliable ones may not even have a website, and even if they do, it may not rank anywhere that would enable someone to easily find them online. As such, I thought I would have a crack at consolidating various trades people into a single platform, that platform is called “The Handyman”.

I sat down and drew out the concept and various page mock-ups before working with a designer to bring the concepts to life. After that we developed the website via WordPress, including the ability for trades people to sign-up and actively content manage their own profile within the platform. For a while we tried to actively engage with individual trades people and companies to encourage them to list themselves and manage their own profiles on the website, but we quickly realised they basically couldn’t be bothered. Its a bit of a chicken and egg situation because without an audience we don’t have a compelling story to convince vendors to add themselves, but without vendors, we won’t ever build an audience. Rather than continue to wait, I decided to give it a go by hiring a contractor to research and list vendors directly to the platform. At current count we are fast approaching 100 vendors.

Its really to early to say. The site has been live for a while now, but we only just started adding vendors to the platform at scale in August 2021. I’m hoping that with a little bit of a push in this area, we might be able to start moving the rankings slightly to generate some extra traction. Either way, this is really just a passion project. I don’t intend to leverage it for any kind of financial gain. If it can make consumers life easier and/or help trades people gather more business, that’ll be good enough for me.