Hello All, 

I'm a late joiner to this group but really looking forward to using it as excuse to test some new marketing ideas.  I'm having some issues uploading photos but will work on that. 

Heroic is a free place for friends and neighbors to share referrals for service providers.  You can check out our landing page here:  http://www.beheroic.com/  Think Angie's List, but free and referrals from friends as opposed to reviews from strangers.

Heroic has been around for almost a year but we recetly underwent a bit of pivot and are preparing to relaunch in the next two weeks after a year of engaging our customers and doing small beta testing on several ideas.   

Business model: 

Heroic has a tiered subscription model on the service provider side of the market place; free, premium and soon to be enterprise.  A free profile gives service providers a tool to increase referral business from past and current customers with the ability to send socially integrated messages to their customers via email and facebook making it simple for happy customers to share their experience with their freinds and neighbors.  The premium account gives service pros a much better looking profile with the ability to import a portfolio of images and also provides the ability to verify licenses, submit a background check, and also measure their referral traction to discover who are providing their referrals.  With this is mind, Heroic is also aiming to be sort of a LinkedIn for service providers.   

Target Market(s): 

The biggest challenge with Heroic, like any marketplace site, is that we have two very different customers.  Here are our initial target segments.

User segments:  

• Homeowners, moms, engaged in social media, ages 30-45
• Realtors 

Service Providers 

• Small local independent home service providers like handymen, plumbers, painters. These are the 1-3 man teams that survice on referral business and prefer not to handle their own web presence

Current Marketing:

• Video story telling.  I'm currently creating a series of videos highlighting unique service pros from our community.  This is really fun but very time consuming.  
• Loyalty program (for lack of a better term):  Most of the activity on our site is driven by about 4% of the users right now.  We're planning "exclusive" events and creating content specifically for this group.  

Thanks a lot. Looking forward to learning a lot from this group and participating.  Please feel free to connect here or @DanLinstroth on Twitter.  

Dan