HourTown: Lightweight Infrastructure for Small Business

Sometimes the future shows up sooner than you think. Or your forecasting isn't quite as long-range as you think it is. HourTown, a new Palo Alto-based startup launching in the next few weeks, is giving me that feeling.

In our research last year on the future of small business for Intuit, which was published in 3 reports available for all on the web here, we forecast that the broad diffusion of connected technologies was merging with a demographic wave of new entrepreneurs to drive strong future expansion of small business. While forecasters have long highlighted maverick freelancers, and the growing entrepreneurialism of the "creative class", we saw something far more universal.... very small businesses, what we called "personal businesses", could thrive using technology to manage resources, time and customers efficiently and in customized ways.

So when co-founder Ryan Donohue told me about HourTown, the new service he is launching, I realized we were on the right track with this forecast. Essentially, HourTown is a simple, easy-to-use customer relationship management system for people that provide personalized local services. It's Web 2.0 for the guy that cleans your pool. In addition to dead-easy scheduling and communication and hooks into Craigslist ads, it also helps you generate leads by publishing into Google Base and other search indices.

There's been so much excitement about sites like Etsy over the last six months (or say AliBaba before that) - platforms that provide small businesses the infrastructure and reach to go global. But HourTown is the first of the Web 2.0 platforms that I've seen that are looking to transform the way local, face-to-face small business economies work by providing new tools for discovery, relationship building and synchronization of highly mobile consumers and service providers.

Best of luck to the HourTown crew. FYI, I need my grass cut on Tuesday at 9:30 am.

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