Find new customers without cold calling

By being findable at the moment somebody is asking, rather than going out to look. People constantly ask in their own groups who can do a particular job; those questions almost never reach anybody who can actually do it. When one matches what you do, you get asked whether you want it — one message, one tap — and the person asking gets asked whether they want the introduction.

No, in both directions. One question goes to one person who said yes to it. It is not sold to four other trades, so you are not the third of five people ringing the same homeowner, and they are not fielding five calls about a question they asked once. Nobody is paying for a position in a list either — matching is on what you do and how far away you are.

No. What you agree with the customer is between you and the customer, and nothing is skimmed off it. Being reachable costs nothing; being found — strangers' questions reaching you — is the part you pay for, as a flat thing rather than a cut. That distinction is deliberate: a commission on the job turns the whole arrangement into something that has to maximise jobs.

What they wrote, in their words, and roughly where they are. “Terraced house, chimney on the party wall, water coming in upstairs since September, wants someone to look before quoting” is a far better basis for a yes or no than any category dropdown. What you do not see is their number, until they have said they want the introduction.

Nothing bad, and it makes the next one better. Declining is free, it carries no penalty and no ranking consequence, and it teaches the matching what you are not interested in. People who say no to the wrong jobs get better matches than people who say yes to everything, which is the opposite of how paid lead services work.

No. It only ever sees a question somebody deliberately asked, meaning they were actively looking for someone to do the thing. Nothing reads a street's conversation hunting for opportunities, and there is no monitoring of chats on your behalf — which is also why what arrives is a real request rather than a guess at one.

No. It makes the introduction and steps out. No price is suggested in your name, no estimate given, no date agreed. From the moment you both said yes it is a conversation between two people, which is the only arrangement where you can actually judge the job before pricing it.

Yes. The pattern is any case where somebody is asking in plain words for something you do — a bookkeeper, a dog walker, a tutor, a photographer, a cleaner, a translator, somebody who can fix a specific machine. The narrower and more concrete the way you describe what you do, the better the matches are, because it is being matched against how people actually ask.