First Gig Deposit from a Thumbtack Lead!!

I'm sooo psyched! Today I received my deposit in PayPal for the first gig I got through the gig site Thumbtack, it's for a birthday party this Saturday. I set up my Thumbtack profile a couple of weeks ago and got 1 lead pretty fast, but when I went into my dashboard to send my quote, a boxed popped up saying I had to pay $2.99 to follow up on 1 lead or pay $29.99 upfront for a whole month. This caught me very much by surprise, as I read their guidelines VERY closely, and I thought the service was free, I never saw anything about fees!

So I googled to see what I could find out about them and found a large number of service providers complaining about the fees as well, as they said they saw nothing in Thumbtacks policies about fees and some folks felt that Thumbtack was sending providers phony leads. I was beginning to feel like it be have been some kind of a scam, but as I continued to research, I found they changed their fees to be refundable, so if your never heard back from the person after you sent them your bid you got your money back.

Still, I was considering taking my profile down, when I got another lead and I googled her and even with just her full first name and only her last initial, I found out she was a real person (she has an unusual for USA name, yes, I can be pretty good at tracking!) So, I sent her my bid and she accepted it, I told her I had thought about taking my profile off, she said she was glad I didn't!!

I feel so successful that I completed my Thumbtack profile and setup a Gig Salad profile tonight!

The party I was booked for was today and it was great! They are a wonderful family I asked the mom what made her pick me and she said I had better photos then a lot of the other face painters, the description of my services made me seem like a nice person and her daughter liked my name (like Princes Jasmin)