Local Services Making Global Business: Airtasker Essay.

Discuss about the Local Services Making Global Business Case Study of Airtasker.

Airtasker is a one of the most successful fresh tech startup companies of Australia. It is an online based company which offers its users to outsource menial jobs. One can access thousand of trained persons who would do someone’s office or home tasks.  The company offers diverse jobs from standing in a queue for someone to bring stuff from a foreign country. They offer a range of work, from house cleaning to staff delivering to repair services to marketing (Airtasker.com, 2017).

A company’s business model is the company’s core business practice. This can be defined as how the company is addressing the consumers, creating and delivering the products and services. This also includes the infrastructure, business strategies, and customer acquisition.  Business models can come in variety of models like freemium business model, direct sales model, franchise model and subscription model. In the direct sale business model the business is hugely dependent on the sales persons. They get the services or products from the suppliers and sale them to the customers. In Australia, companies like Avon run by this model (IBISWorld, 2017). In the franchise business model the company acquire a certain stake from another company and sells their services to the customers. IGA supermarket network is such model in Australia. The subscription model aims to hold the customer for a longer period of time. Amazon or Birch box are such models examples.  The freemium model is based on personal or business services via internet (Fleisch, Weinberger & Wortmann, 2015). The community based model is dependent on user loyalty; revenue is made on voluntary contributions.  Then there is utility or on-demand model, which allows the customers to choose service workers and services from an online based platform with the approach of ‘pay as you go’. The company Airtasker follows this business model (Nillesen, Pollitt & Witteler, 2014). 

This is an online based marketplace, which connects skilled employees with the customers who wants to get their tasks done. The company is based in Sydney, Australia. In the year 2017, the company total amount of 165 million worth services received. It is a new company, started only in 2012. The founders are Tim Fung and Jonathan Lui. 1.3 million people use the service (Airtasker.com, 2017 ). 

The founders got the idea of starting a business of such a innovative kind from a personal experience, when they had to shift their place and was having trouble managing so much work together. In Australia, thousands people earn from more than one job, so the availability of people who would happily work for such tasks was great (Tao, 2015). People can avail the service from the official app from i-Phone or androids. Then they post their required task in details and choose the worker they want to do the job. They have a conversation over the message board and if the customer is happy with the process and worker’s requirement then the process initially completes. The customer then adds funds to his task through Airtasker Pay (Warren, 2016). The fund will not be taken till the work is done. Then the customer releases the fund to the worker.

The Company

The company hires only local workers. This is an outsourcing platform which connects the business, the customers and local workers, who smoothly gets the job done.

The business the company runs is very simple and almost anyone can use them. The company charges no money for the people who are outsourcing their tasks.

The company has revolutionized in the area where people are getting their work done by strangers successfully and that too without any trust issues.  There has always been a tradition where the consumers believe that for a simple task they always need an expert, but the company helps to bridge the gap it was creating in the market place. The concept of employment and earning money has become easier as well.  The company applies the concept named ‘liquid access’ which allows the talent to avail work (Stephany, 2015). This enables them to find their jobs fit their profile and at their convenient time.

The platform has a number of diverse people who are skilled in their specific areas. Almost every customer can meet his requirement from them. In that way the business platform is very versatile and flexible (Airtasker.com, 2017). The customers choose the workers from their skills.

The company utilizes latest technological advances, which allows them to grow faster. The use smart CRM system, which syncs data automatically, so all sales are available to the company and to the team instantly (Ajmera et al., 2013).Airtasker requires the customer and the workers conversation, there comes the auto responder. In this process the workers spends less time in the data entry and more on requirement clarification and customer relationship building.

The company is open minded regarding taking other’s help or getting associated with other companies to achieve profitability. Airtasker uses another platform named Vero (Getvero.com, 2017). This is a unique platform which is able to manage the consumers separately based on their behavior or services. It also sends emails to the efficient workers, who have completed more than 100 jobs successfully. This strategy helped the company to treat every consumer exclusively by their groups. This strategy helped the company to huge profit in a short period of time.

The company is based on two pillars, which are the supply or workers and the job posters or the buyers. The company initially focused on the acquiring the supply, as the buyers are always present with their requirements. Their effective market analysis helped them to decide that. They not only focused on the young college students with various side job experiences, but other matured business professionals as well (Airtasker.com, 2017). Their research found out that the students hold a small amount of the whole workforce working in that manner.

The next strategy the company took was building up an Alpha Test group. This group consisted job posters from various fields like marketing, technology and asked them to use the Airtasker platform for their tasks (Lim & Ting (2014). Company had appointed few experienced service providers for the jobs. This proved to be successful. The company then started using feedback loops, which help them to keep the trust on the company.

Background

The company never offered any discounts of any sorts, as they believed that it would change chaos and complexity in the simple business structure.  However this affects the customer loyalty as customers always look for cheaper services. The company followed the conventional method of utilizing talented and hardworking service workers to achieve the success. The new and diverse young minds sometimes fall short on experience,. As the company employee fresh talented people without much knowledge, they sometimes tend to do mistake.

The company realized that it is even more important than designing the products and raising funds at times through experiences. The authorities of the company encourage the employees to participate in building rapport with them and with the customers. The company lets them fix their mistakes by themselves as it believes that this will help them to mature and efficient. They created a free environment and embraced an effective working culture. The company faced most difficulty in building up an effective working culture. 

The company sometimes suffers from the fragmented nature. The blocking of same type of job from the same location for a single worker has not yet been implemented. This creates situations where multiple service workers go to a same place at several times of the day. This costs money for the workers, which is not worth. The company is trying cluster the similar jobs or jobs from a single location together so that it becomes easier for the workers and they could earn more. In near future the internet based market will grow massively (Forbes.com, 2017). The opportunity for work in this type of business is growing every day. The company sees huge potential in the future marketplace.

Conclusion

Airtasker is just a 5 year old company, which has been pioneering in the online based on demand business. To achieve so much so quickly the company adapted many innovative business strategies and adapted new technologies intelligently. The digital era has given birth to huge opportunities for internet based companies. Airtasker grabbed the opportunity and utilized it most successfully. This detailed specific case study of a fresh company will be helpful to understand business strategies and how to apply them successfully in the marketplace for new and future entrepreneurs.

References

Ajmera, J., Ahn, H. I., Nagarajan, M., Verma, A., Contractor, D., Dill, S., & Denesuk, M. (2013, May). A CRM system for social media: challenges and experiences. In Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on World Wide Web (pp. 49-58). ACM.

Fleisch, E., Weinberger, M., & Wortmann, F. (2015). Business models and the internet of things. In Interoperability and Open-Source Solutions for the Internet of Things (pp. 6-10). Springer, Cham.

Vero (2017). | The event driven email platform for product focused teams. Vero | The event driven email platform for product focused teams. Retrieved 23 July 2017, from https://www.getvero.com

Hire skilled people & earn extra money today on Airtasker.com. (2017). Airtasker. Retrieved 23 July 2017, from https://www.airtasker.com/

Lim, W. M., & Ting, D. H. (2014). Consumer acceptance and continuance of online group buying. Journal of Computer Information Systems, 54(3), 87-96.

Nillesen, P., Pollitt, M., & Witteler, E. (2014). New utility business model: a global view. Distributed Generation and its Implications for the Utility Industry, 33-47.

Rosa, M. L., Van Der Aalst, W. M., Dumas, M., & Milani, F. P. (2017). Business process variability modeling: a survey. ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), 50(1), 2.

Roundup of internet of things forecasts and-market-estimates-2016. (2017). Forbes.com. Retrieved 23 July 2017, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2016/11/27/roundup-of-internet-of-things-forecasts-and-market-estimates-2016/#5dddc3a4292d

Stephany, A. (2015). The business of sharing: Making it in the new sharing economy. Springer.

Tao, H. L. (2015). Multiple earnings comparisons and subjective earnings fairness: A cross-country study. Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, 57, 45-54.

Warren, K. (2016). Rise of gig economy threatens vulnerable workers. Newsmonth, 36(7), 5.