The trades are the last frontier of the digital economy. While every other sector — retail, logistics, hospitality, finance — went through its platform moment in the 2010s, plumbers and electricians are still running their businesses on WhatsApp, paper invoices, and word-of-mouth. That's not a knock on them — it's an observation about where the opportunity sits.
The holdout reasons are well-understood: trades skew older and more practically-minded, the unit economics of a single job are too small to justify expensive software, and the fragmentation of the market (thousands of one- and two-person operations) makes it impossible to sell through a traditional enterprise motion. The result is a sector where software penetration is 15–20 years behind comparable B2B categories.
What's changing is the cost of building and distributing software. AI-assisted onboarding means a plumber can be live on a booking system in under ten minutes without a sales call. Mobile-first interfaces have closed the device gap. And the post-pandemic shift in homeowner behaviour — people are far more comfortable booking services online than they were in 2019 — has created demand pull that didn't exist before.
The companies that move fast in this window will define the category for the next decade. The moat isn't the technology — it's the network effects, the reviews, and the trust relationships with both sides of the marketplace. Once a platform has the density of supply and demand in a given city, displacement becomes extremely difficult. The race is on, and the players who understand the European specifics — language, regulation, payment preferences — have a structural advantage over anyone trying to expand from outside the continent.