About Us

The idea of GoldLatch began when we moved less than 50 miles north of where we had lived all of our lives but soon realized that it may just as well been 500 miles away. The move was from Massachusetts to New Hampshire and although, the seacoast area of New Hampshire is as populated of an area as where we left, we were now further away from the population of the major hub of Boston. We also underestimated the fact that we knew literally everyone in the surrounding area that we had left and if we didn't know where to go for help, we knew 5 people that could recommend someone. We moved such a short distance away yet, just far enough that we found ourselves having to rebuild our network of support.

We made every attempt to find someone to replace a door for us and finally got it replaced by the 4th person to take on the job. When we had a pipe burst in the middle of the night during exceptionally freezing weather, it took us 3 days of searching for help to find it. We knew that there were people nearby who could help us, but how could we find them?

The people that you need to help you very often work alone or run very small businesses and can't afford expensive listings and ads in your local newspaper. Taking on that expense would force them to add that cost to your bill and would put them out of your price range. Instead, they more often depend on word of mouth to advertise their service. In an emergency, you just have to be lucky enough to ask the right person who happens to know the right person. There just had to be a better way. Even if we were able to find 1 or 2 people that may help be able to help, could we request the information that we needed from them to make an informed decision of whether or not they were in our price range and could provide the service that we needed? And, could we do this without embarrassing the person that recommended them? Asking about experience and pricing can be so intimidating to a customer face to face or even over the phone.

Being small business owners ourselves, we understood the dilemmas facing both sides. What is needed desparately is a network to connect people that need help to the people that can help them.

So, we started thinking wouldn't it be great if we could go to a site and:

• Enter our need and our zip code and find a list of potential people to help
• Or, if no one was listed, could we list our need without having to reveal our identity and have people who believed could help, contact us
• Feel free to ask as many of these people at the same time about their qualifications, their price and other pertinent questions to determine who could best help us without feeling intimidated or cheap
• Pass our experience on to the next people needing the same type of help

And being small business owners ourselves, we thought that it would be great to go to this same site and:

• Enter our service and how far we would travel to our customers and find a list of people needing our service
• Correspond with potential customers in a completely professional manner with everything in writing
• All of this for a price of less than $10 per month so that the cost of our advertising and marketing does not have to cause an increase in the cost of our service

So you can see, this came out of a realization of our need but it is no longer about our need. Our mission is for GoldLatch to evolve in a way that will be most helpful to the Patrons and Pros who use it. We want to hear from you. Contact us and let us know how GoldLatch can best help you. If you have advice to offer or an experience to share, submit your story to us.

Thanks so much for your interest in GoldLatch.com.

Debbi Masse