World wide work
What do you get when you extract two guys with experience and savvy from the corporate world and transplant them into a start-up venture with no dedicated budget and a blank piece of paper to create something “disruptive”?
One answer is Betterwage.com, a new website designed to help people find ways to make extra money outside their working hours. It’s open to anyone, anywhere.
Stitched together in seven months, the website lists numerous areas in which people can generate income, including photography, technology, transport, property, caring and body. There’s even a category called “dire need”. Mostly, these ideas come from other websites or apps.
So among the options are those that have already gained some traction, like Fiverr.com (which sells graphics, marketing and other services for US$5 or more and has more than 2m users) and Udemy, a website through which anyone can create and sell an online course.
Dean Furman, the CEO and cofounder, says that since April when it opened, the website has been getting over 1,000 visitors a day, and has signed up several thousand users. The numbers might not be mindblowing, but it’s a good start.
“It’s to help people to have income. Once they have income, we can think about what we can provide. We are very agile. We want to be guided by what people want,” says Furman. “We have various options for the next stage but we will only make the final decision down the line.”
The business was launched largely thanks to Alexander Forbes, the broking giant, which financed Betterwage.com through an incubator.
Furman himself worked as a senior product development specialist at Alexander Forbes, while his cofounder, Rudie Shepherd, was an IT expert.
It all began because Alexander Forbes CEO Edward Kieswetter pushed for his company to create an innovation hub. Furman and Shepherd saw how companies like Uber and Airbnb had revolutionised their industries using the notion of the “shared economy”. So, if you have a car, you can become a taxi driver; if you have a spare room, you become a landlord.
Shepherd says that to some extent, this is a reflection of the fact that the employed economy has changed. With GDP growth at less than 1%, people are eking out a living however they can.
“The way people work is rapidly changing and we need to understand that,” says Shepherd. In the US, for example, experts believe that by 2020, more than 40% of the workforce is expected to be people who work on demand without a fixed schedule, known as a “contingent workforce”.
But how does Betterwage.com make money, if its service is entirely free?
Furman says it doesn’t yet turn a profit. But he is betting that once it gets sufficient traffic, this will change.
“Once people start making money we can offer savings products and various other profitable extensions,” he says.
Shepherd says part of Betterwage.com is its independence from existing financial companies. “You don’t see the Alexander Forbes brand all over it. We wanted to do an experiment and find out if this could stand on its own feet and not be jaded by the traditional financial services message.”
He says Betterwage’s starting point is that “we don’t want anything from you, it’s free. What we want from you is to understand what drives you; your goals; and to help you achieve them.”
But building a start-up is no picnic, even with Alexander Forbes behind you.
“When we started, we were told to behave like a start-up. There was no budget, we were told we didn’t have resources, and had to make a plan,” says Shepherd.
Furman says one of the difficulties of the business is that no fees are required.
“We joke about how we might have to introduce a premium product because people are not used to getting so much without having to pay a cent. We don’t believe you should be charged to work,” he says.
Already there are some success stories.
Lauren Bird, who used to work in the marketing industry in Johannesburg before ditching the big city to be a stayat-home mother in the sleepy town of George in the Western Cape, is perhaps the perfect candidate for the service.
Last week, Bird was paid $108 for two hours’ work, uploading invoices. Last month, she earned $570 writing about wedding venues for a website. The money is paid to her using PayPal, the online service cofounded by perhaps SA’s most famous export, Elon Musk.
“It really did open my eyes. We all know you can make money online. It’s just taking the time to sign on and try, and keep trying. Persistence does pay off. There’s so much out there,” she says.
Still, there are a lot of scams out there too, so Bird had to reject a few. “People must take time to investigate the provider and the job thoroughly before taking it on.”