Why we picked a PIN over a star rating

Every marketplace eventually adds a star rating. They are easy to build, easy to display, and they do something. But what they do is often not what you want.

A 4.8-star master tells you very little about whether this specific job, in this specific home, on this specific day, will go well. Reviews are a lagging signal. By the time a bad master accumulates enough one-star reviews to be filtered out, they have already taken money from a hundred households.

A PIN is a real-time gate. The master cannot mark the job started without it. The master cannot get paid without it. It moves the trust signal from "after the fact" to "during the moment that matters." It is a small piece of UX that does a lot of work.

We still have ratings. We just do not lean on them. The PIN does the heavy lifting.