About WhoIPick
The question is the product.
Everybody asks it the same way — who do I pick? — and until now nothing has answered it properly.
Why it exists
Think about the last time you had to hire someone for something that mattered. A contractor, a mover, an agent to sell your house. You called three people, you got three numbers, and you picked — mostly on the number, or on whichever one your neighbour used. The things that actually differed between those three people never made it in front of you in a form you could compare.
That is a strange gap, because the providers wanted to tell you. An agent who would have thrown in staging, paid for the photography, and put a truck and four movers on your driveway the day you left had no way to make that visible next to somebody quoting a lower rate for none of it. The whole industry competes on one axis because one axis is all anyone built a place to show.
So we built the other thing. On WhoIPick you post what you need, and providers nearby compete for it with bundled offers — a price plus everything they are including, itemised, with the value of each piece and the name of whoever is actually going to do it. The offers sit side by side. Sometimes the cheapest headline rate turns out to be the most expensive deal on the page, and you can see exactly why. Then you pick. Or you pick nobody, which is also allowed.
We started with home sellers and listing agents in the Chicago metro, because that is where the gap is widest and the stakes are highest. The same mechanic works for anyone hiring anyone locally, and the categories are built to hold all of it.
What we hold to
Five decisions that are not up for revision when growth gets slow.
Seekers never pay.
Posting a request, comparing offers, messaging providers and hiring one are free, and there is no seeker tier to upgrade to. This is a founding decision rather than a launch promotion — a marketplace where the person asking for help hesitates before asking is not a marketplace.
Compete on the whole offer, not the price.
Every other platform lets a provider compete on two things: a smaller number and a slightly better review average. Here a provider competes on what they include — staging, a truck, the crew, the clean-up — and the person deciding can see all of it side by side.
Rank is earned. Placement that is paid says so.
Leaderboards rank on completed work, ratings with their volume attached, response speed and recency. Featured placement is a real product and is always labelled as paid and visually distinct. Quietly selling rank is how a marketplace stops being worth reading.
A score without its volume is not a score.
Five stars from two jobs is not four-point-eight from three hundred, and we will not display it as though it were. Every rating on this platform is shown with the number of reviews behind it.
Nobody buys a lead.
You are not charged for the privilege of contacting someone who may not exist, and the same job is never sold to four people. Providers subscribe for the right to compete, and they see the actual job before they spend anything on it.
Free. Always. Posting a request, comparing offers, messaging providers, and hiring are free and always will be. There is no seeker tier to upgrade to.
Who is building it
Three founders: one who builds it, one who sells it, and one who knows the market it launches into.
- Patrick Kelly
Patrick Kelly
Founder, technical
Builds the platform.
Patrick builds and runs the product: the marketplace, the ranking system, and the credit ledger underneath it. He was previously CTO of a cryptocurrency company, which is the reason the credit layer on this roadmap is designed as an internal double-entry ledger with the on-chain parts switched off behind legal review, rather than the other way round.
- Alan Pan
Alan Pan
Founder, vision and sales
Owns the narrative, the raise, and the go-to-market.
Alan set the direction the product is built against — that a marketplace for labour compounds in a way a marketplace for goods does not. He runs fundraising and sales.
- Mohammad Akhtar
Mohammad Akhtar
Founder, real estate and mortgage
Owns the beachhead and the agent network it runs on.
Mohammad brings the real estate and mortgage domain expertise the launch market depends on, and the agent relationships that make a Chicago-metro pilot something we can staff rather than something we have to advertise for.
We are opening in the Chicago metro first.
Tell us which side you are on and we will come and find you when your area opens.
Free, always · Free tier, no card