GigPark – Score (another) one for Canada

Noah Godfrey and Pema Hegan, founded a company called GigPark along with their wives.  GigPark was born out of a very simple idea; people would much rather get a handyman/services from people they know and trust. Mathew Ingram nicely coined the phrase ‘word of mouth online’ and wrote up something nice. 

“In many other recommendation networks, such as TripAdvisor or Epinions.com, it's difficult (if not impossible) to know whether the person who is gushing about a particular product or service is genuine or not. One of the attractive things about GigPark is that those recommendations come only from people you know or have added as friends, making them -- at least theoretically -- more reliable.”

That was written in April of this year. Yesterday, CanPages got super smart and bought the company.  You can read about the acquisition here.

I had the pleasure of meeting up with Noah and Pema during a No Harm No Foul meeting when they first got started.  It was a great conversation and I followed the company while doing the VC thing as I knew these two guys would be successful.  They are super smart.  You can read their collective history here, but this is my favorite part which I can share as they’ve documented it.

“GigPark is the brainchild of Noah Godfrey and Pema Hegan. The two founders were the Founding Publisher and Founding Editor of Dose Magazine and came up with the concept when looking for an employment lawyer to review their termination package after Dose was closed.”

Well done, guys, well done.

Comments

[Paul Dawalibi]

Nice to see so many things written about Praized Answers....err i mean GigPark ;)

In all seriousness: http://answers.yellowpages.ca/ and http://praizedmedia.com/en/enterprise

This definitely validates what we've been doing, and is a clear sign that the directory industry is starting to see the writing on the wall when it comes to social media.

[Noah Godfrey]

Thanks Rick. We really appreciate your support and kind words. I remember that No Harm No Foul meeting like it was yesterday. You really challenged us and forced us to think about what we were building in a different light ... it was really useful!

I know I speak on behalf of a lot of other founders of Canadian startups when I say you will be sorely missed as a VC / mentor in this community.