MyTime

Ethan Anderson's journey to MyTime began during his tenure at Google, where he worked as a product manager on Google Video and Image Search starting in 2006. When YouTube won the online video wars and Google acquired it, Ethan was devastated but pivoted to Image Search. However, the real catalyst came at his Harvard Business School five-year reunion in 2008, where he saw classmates like Sal Khan (Khan Academy) and Chris Dixon launching successful ventures. This sparked his realization that he needed to build his own company.

In 2008, Ethan founded Red Beacon, a lead generation platform for home services. The idea was simple: instead of calling around for bids on home repairs, customers could take a photo, describe the job, and the platform would connect them with vetted, licensed, and insured service providers. Ethan and co-founder Aaron Batalion raised $7.4 million in venture funding. A crucial early break came when Red Beacon launched at TechCrunch 50, generating "amazing publicity on day one" in front of 100,000 people. The company monetized by taking 10-20% commissions on jobs, though the challenge was low transaction frequency—most people only need home services once or twice a year, making it hard to build repeat usage like Uber or OpenTable.

Home Depot acquired Red Beacon in late 2011. Ethan explained that "companies get bought, not sold," and Home Depot came to them after tracking the company for a year. They wanted to build a "Walmart Labs on the West Coast" and lacked technical talent in Atlanta. While Ethan couldn't disclose the exact sale price due to confidentiality agreements, the VCs' support for the exit suggested it exceeded their 10x return goal, implying a valuation well above $70 million.

Ethan started MyTime while still at Red Beacon, launching the marketplace concept—"an Amazon.com of local services." The platform targets the 2.5 million local service businesses and by the time of this interview, was attracting approximately 1 million visitors per month. However, Ethan discovered a critical problem: two-thirds of businesses still used pen and paper or Google Calendar. "It's almost like trying to build websites before people are using the internet," he explained.

This realization led to a pivot. MyTime launched MyTime Scheduler, online booking software for businesses, making it unique because it combined customer acquisition (through the marketplace), transaction facilitation, and retention (via automated email and text reminders). This addressed the massive no-show problem in the industry—a no-show costs businesses twice since they lose both the appointment and their time. Ethan claimed this retention feature was worth "many hundreds, if not over a thousand dollars a month to businesses."

By the time of this October interview, MyTime had raised $9.25 million in Series A funding in April. While Ethan declined to share exact revenue figures, he described the business as "multi-million dollar" and growing in "triple digit percentages per year" for the scheduler business. The company maintained a monthly churn rate under 10%, and Ethan highlighted unique network effects: each merchant brought approximately 800 clients into the MyTime ecosystem, who could then cross-shop for other services, allowing MyTime to earn commissions on those secondary transactions—a moat most SaaS businesses lack.