Are Lawyers and Doctors Fungible?

    WASHINGTON, DC, February 12, 2014 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Why do online professional services marketplaces take the same approach to connecting buyers and sellers of professional services that eBay takes to connecting buyers and sellers of fungible goods? That is a question that has perplexed Neil Sandhu for at least the past decade. In 2006, Sandhu, an attorney, founded HireTrade, a website that was intended to provide a better system for connecting professionals with clients. While HireTrade got some favorable press for what it was attempting to do, Sandhu shut HireTrade down in 2007, both because Sandhu had not yet perfected his system for connecting buyers and sellers of professional services and because the company relied on third-party web developers. Since shutting down HireTrade, Sandhu learned to code and his new company, ProfectMarket LLC, has just launched ProfectMarket, the Perfect Market for Professionals (http://profectmarket.com).

What makes ProfectMarket unique from other websites that attempt to connect professionals with clients? The short answer is that ProfectMarket does not treat professional services like Pez dispensers. There are several reasons why personal referrals are still the preferred method by which most sophisticated clients connect with professionals. Most important among these is both that the level of service that professionals provide is so variable from one individual to the next and because the level of service a particular professional will provide on a project depends on how closely the project specifics align with the professional's exact expertise.

To that end, ProfectMarket's patent-pending system harnesses the collective wisdom of the crowd to permit buyers of professional services to select the best professionals for their particular projects. While it is a lofty goal, Sandhu believes that ProfectMarket's system has the potential to do for professionals what Google's PageRank did for websites.

# # #