Expert services will be delegated, not searched.
Finding a decorator stopped being hard 20 years ago. Choosing one never got any easier. Every city in the world has the same problem and the same broken answer to it.
Finding was solved. Choosing was not.
20 years ago, getting 5 names for a birthday decorator was hard. You asked around, you rang a friend of a friend, and you took what you could get.
Google fixed that. Instagram fixed it again. Search for a decorator in Bengaluru today and 50 of them arrive in under a second, with photographs, phone numbers and a star rating each.
Nothing about the problem got better.
The hard part was never the finding. It is everything after. Which of the 50 fits what you actually want, at a price nobody publishes, delivered by a person you have no way to check. A longer list does not touch any of that. It makes it worse, by adding options you cannot tell apart.
Every product built for this market since is a list. JustDial here, Angi and Thumbtack in America, Checkatrade in Britain. Different names, same product. They solved finding and handed the rest of the job back to you.
Urban Company is the one real exception, and they deserve the credit. They took commodity services, an AC service, a standard home clean, and turned each one into a fixed price that any trained technician can deliver.
It does not transfer. An AC service is the same job in every house. A birthday decoration is a different job every time, and the person doing it is the whole product. There is nothing to standardise and nobody to swap in.
People do not want a better list.
We assumed for a long time that the answer was a better list. Cleaner filters, verified badges, more photographs. Everyone in this market assumes that. It is wrong.
In July we ran two landing pages. Same Google ads, same budget, the same providers behind both.
The first let you shop. A directory, filters, browse, pick. 10 out of 100 people messaged us.
The second said, in these words: we will find the right one, we will bring you 3, leave the rest to us. 25 out of 100.
People do not want a better search box. They want to hand it to somebody who knows.
This is not laziness. You buy an expert service 3 or 4 times in your life. A first birthday. A wedding. Doing up a house. Nobody builds judgement about a market they visit that rarely, and everybody knows it about themselves.
The only thing that has ever done this job properly is a wedding planner, and only rich people get one.
The providers are asking for the same thing.
Between 20% and 50% of a small provider's time goes on customers rather than on the work. 15% to 40% of what they earn goes the same way. Quoting, chasing, following up, explaining, discounting.
None of them came into this to do that. They came into it to decorate, or photograph, or cook.
What they want handed over is not the same job. A customer wants the choosing done. A provider wants the selling done. But it is the same middle of the same transaction, and both ends of this market are looking for somebody to take it.
If home owners can get customers, not leads, from Airbnb, and product owners can get them from Amazon, why not service providers?
Nobody built this because it needed people.
Reading a brief properly means reading 3 paragraphs where somebody has buried the thing they actually care about in the middle, and knowing which detail changes the answer. Knowing a provider properly means sitting with them for an hour and then ringing the last 3 people who hired them.
Both of those were human jobs, and neither of them works on a ₹20,000 booking. That is why the wedding planner exists at the top of the market and nothing exists below it.
That stopped being true in early 2026. A machine can now read a brief instead of matching words in it, hold 200 providers in its head at once, and build a price for a job nobody has ever quoted. Before long it will do the interviewing too.
What it costs to give an ordinary person good judgement has collapsed, and almost nobody has noticed yet.
This gets better every time somebody uses it.
Give a listings site 10 times the supply and it converts exactly as it did before. It is a bigger list.
A couple mentioned in passing, months after their wedding, that the photographer they booked had sent a junior on the day. Same studio, different eye. They only found out when the photographs arrived.
We keep a file on every provider and every customer. Hers now says what she had actually cared about. His now says that he sends juniors. Every photographer we have signed since has been asked who holds the camera. And when we went looking for somebody else to send that couple, we found we had nobody in south Bengaluru at that budget, so that went on the list of what we are missing.
6 weeks later a different couple was told, in their proposal, to check who would be holding the camera.
Nobody wrote a review. It came up in conversation, and it belongs to whoever was in the conversation.
This is what we mean by a self-improving marketplace.
Somebody with more money can buy engineers, advertising and the same models we use. They cannot buy the months of people telling us things, because none of it is for sale. And the supply that signs up fastest is always the supply that needs to sign up, which is never the supply you want. The best decorator in Indiranagar has never been on JustDial and never will be.
The buyer is starting to be a machine.
People arrive here from ChatGPT now. Nobody sent them. Something was asked a question and decided we were the answer.
An assistant can open 30 tabs and send 30 messages in a minute. It has never met the decorator.
Everything a machine can now do instantly and for nothing is the half that lists were built for. What is left over is the only half that was ever worth anything.
We are building the rails for a services economy.
The lists will not disappear and they should not. Plumbers, pest control, everything where any competent person will do. That is what they were always right for.
Rich people have always had somebody who knows. A planner, a designer, a fixer who has seen it a thousand times and takes the whole thing off your hands. Everybody else got a list and their own guesswork.
That gap is not an Indian gap. The names change from one country to the next and the answer is equally bad in all of them.
And it is not only the buying side that got nothing. Look at what happened to products, and what never happened to services.
A woman who makes spectacle cases at her kitchen table can put them on Meesho and be earning by the end of the week. No shop, no website, no marketing budget, no customers of her own. Somebody built the rails and she walked onto them.
Now take a woman who can teach millet cooking to 6 people in her neighbourhood. She is every bit as good at her thing. There are no rails. She has to find every customer herself, one at a time, forever. Most people like her never start at all.
A woman who makes spectacle cases has somewhere to go. A woman who can teach millet cooking has nowhere.
It is not only the unusual work either. A decorator with a full order book still loses a third of her week to quoting, chasing and explaining, and pays for leads that go nowhere. Meesho took all of that off the product seller. Nobody has taken it off the service provider.
The missing rails let the bad ones through as well. Anybody can put up a page, take a deposit and not turn up, and every person that happens to trusts the whole market a little less. That costs the good providers more than it costs anybody else.
It can be done now.
So that is what we are building. Rails for an efficient services economy. Anybody with a real skill should be able to earn from it. Anybody who needs that skill should be able to hand the job to somebody who knows. And the people who are bad at it should not be in the economy at all.
Kushank Poddar
Ugam Kamat
Lavish Thakkar
Bengaluru, September 2026
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