Delicious Founder Debuts Jig: "A Marketplace for Things People Need"
Newly unveiled Jig lets you tell people what you want so they can help you fill your need, from suggestions for weekend activities to recipes.
Jig is the first product from Mountain View-based Tasty Labs [ @tastylabs ], started in November 2010 by Delicious founder Joshua Schachter, former Google engineering manager Paul Rademacher and Nick Nguyen, formerly of Mozilla and Delicious.
Tasty Labs raised $3M from Union Square Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz, also last November. USV backed Delicious, which Yahoo bought for a reported $10M to $15M in 2005. Joshua then worked at Yahoo as director of engineering for Delicious.
Jig is clearly in the same space as Q&A sites like Quora and Answers.com and to some extent competes with peer-request services like Zaarly.
"When I was at Yahoo, I saw Yahoo Answers grow and then fail. I thought a lot about the Q&A format and I realized that you could make a better system if you got away from the Q&A format itself. Jig is the first effort towards that," Joshua told LAUNCH via email.
"We're just beginning - we have a lot ideas and now we need an audience and a community to grow with," he continued.
Fred Wilson, a principal at USV, wrote on his blog, "There are entrepreneurs we love to work with. Joshua Schachter is on that list. When he told us last year he was starting a new company, Tasty Labs, we said 'we're in.' It wasn't exactly clear what Joshua wanted to build, but we knew it was in the general area of a marketplace for things people need."
No tweets or blog posts (yet) about Jig from Andreesen Horowitz partners Marc Andressen, Ben Horowitz, John O'Farrell or Scott Weiss.
The Jig UI is straightforward. A bar at the top of page allows users to post a need and a location with details. Requests are not (yet) sorted by category -- only by "recent" and "unmet," but you can zero in on a topic by searching for it.
You can "follow" or "mute" the streams of people posting needs, but you can only "agree" or "thank" responders.
So far, the responses appear relevant. From our quick analysis, those needing vacation or SEO advice have received the most answers, from 10 to 14 responses, while a person looking for a graphic designer has gotten 20.
Alas, we already found a less-than-savory post. We hope Jig does not become overrun with those seeking to find/fulfill illegal or otherwise low-brow needs.
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