![]() Similarly, TaskRabbit’s niche was providing a race-to-the-bottom bidding model to yield the cheapest labor possible. Gigwalk, for example, takes the more curated approach, specializing in providing companies with laborers for short-term, unskilled, retail-related gigs. They can’t create a sort of vibrant marketplace with lots of different skills. “What that means is that these companies, if they want to provide all those expectations, they generally have to narrow their scope. “When you go onto eBay … you realize that it’s a marketplace and that you’re dealing with another real person, as opposed to when you walk into a store, you know that you’re dealing with a big corporation that’s supposed to have a different set of expectations,” Fung explains. The major difference between Airtasker and other crowdsourced labor platforms is that Fung and Lui choose to pursue an open marketplace-style platform, rather than a more curated approach - more eBay than Target, if you will. Essentially, Airtasker is much like any other crowdsourcing labor-platform - e.g., TaskRabbit or Gigwalk : it connects people and businesses with other people in the local area who are willing and able to perform specific tasks in exchange for payment. “I guess the analogy is that we would say we are like an oDesk for the real world,” Fung says. “That’s not appropriate for this type of task.” “For example, tasks like photography, like store inspections, like market research, product testing – all of these things often require a physical component to them, or at least a local component to them, meaning that you don’t want someone in India or the Philippines,” Fung elaborates. Services like oDesk and Elance already existed, allowing people to pick up computer-based freelance work from all over the world, but Fung and Lui saw an opportunity to apply that model to local commerce - to tasks that need a physical location or presence. We saw the car getting disrupted with Getaround, and GoGet here in Australia, and Lyft and Uber in the U.S.” “We saw the home getting disrupted with Airbnb. “They’re the three biggest assets that people own,” Fung says. “Basically, we just felt that reputations were all moving online, and that was going to enable a bunch of commercial transactions that hadn’t been possible before,” Fung explains.įung and Lui believed that there were three “big areas” in peoples lives that would be especially affected by the digitization of reputation: the home, the car, and the job. “That’s when we came up with the idea to start Airtasker,” Fung says. It was during his stint at Amaysim that Fung and his coworker Jonathan Lui, itching to do something disruptive again, decided to take a look at what was happening in the mobile app space. ![]() ![]() Fung has done finance he was a talent agent with a celebrity management firm he helped start Australian telecom service Amaysim - and these are just some of the highlights. Tim Fung, the co-founder and CEO of Australian crowd labor platform Airtasker, has what you might call the exemplar resumé of gen Y’s multi-careerism. ![]()
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