Introducing Prefer: Connecting People and Professionals Through Trusted Referrals

Today we are launching Prefer to enable service professionals and clients to find each other via referrals and build stronger relationships over time.

For clients, a trusted referral from a friend matters more than a million reviews from strangers. You want to work with my babysitter, and I with yours. You’d trust my lawyer, and I’d trust yours. For professionals of all kinds — from housekeepers and accountants to personal trainers and dog walkers — a referral from your client is preferred over any other source. Personal introductions beat paid advertising. Human relationships triumph over commoditized labor marketplaces.

Why Prefer?
Prefer was inspired by the stories, struggles, and aspirations of hundreds of independent service professionals. Across industry and geography, their rallying cry is the same:

They feel marginalized and commoditized by “on-demand” platforms that charge exorbitant fees and limit relationships with clients to one-night stands
They are tired of subjecting themselves to random reviews from strangers on open marketplaces
They hate bidding against less-qualified “pros” for new leads; they want intros to clients because they deserve it, not because they pay for it

We’re on a mission to empower service professionals and clients to find each other and work together, enabling both professionals and clients to thrive. We aim to celebrate the people behind the services and the relationship above the transaction.

How Prefer Works

As a client, Prefer enables you to find and discover the professionals you need from people you know. When you need to hire a professional, you can have your friends’ recommendations at your fingertips. For professionals, Prefer generates a steady stream of referrals from your clients’ friends.

Prefer’s app brings all of the professionals your friends recommend to your fingertips — and booking is a breeze.

Professionals and clients working together on Prefer enjoy a better experience without the hassle of texting back-and-forth to schedule appointments and last-minute ATM runs. On Prefer clients can check out all the professionals their friends use and recommend, and with a few taps on their phone, they can schedule, manage, and pay their service providers. Prefer is currently available in New York City and is invitation-only (participants invite participants) as we work to cultivate a tight-knit community from the start.

Professionals can use Prefer to manage their clients, appointments, and earnings, and in so doing, get automatically introduced to friends of clients looking for their services. Prefer for Professionals is free and easy to use.

Service Professionals of all kinds can use the “Prefer For Pros” app to showcase their services and availability, manage their clients, get referrals to their clients’ friends, and streamline their business.

Looking Ahead

The best products bring elegant solutions to painful problems. They do so in familiar and intuitive ways, that appear obvious in hindsight. For millennia, we have been relying on trusted referrals from our communities. The best and most trusted professionals are already in your network — you just had no way of knowing it and locating them. Today, Prefer enables you to find and work with them.

Talented service professionals around the world are constrained by their current way of working. They aspire to be more independent but are still beholden to firms, salons, gyms, and online middlemen. We seek to redefine the nature of the firm through technology, to make it one that celebrates and empowers professionals, supporting them in delivering exceptional service to their clients.

With members of the community connected and invested in each others’ success, we envision a day when anyone with skills, motivation and a passion for helping others can turn that into a successful career.

Suffice to say, we have our work cut out for us. Learn more and join Prefer.

— The Prefer Team.

PS: Download Prefer here.
PPS: Check out other posts from Prefer team members: AB, SB, BI — as well as this good summary at Fast Company.