Airtasker’s crazy idea

Can Airtasker’s crazy idea redefine local businesses?

“Anyone who says something is crazy these days is crazy themselves,” says Jonathan Lui, the founder of Sydney based startup Airtasker.

The crazy idea Jonathan shares with co-founder Tim Fung is to create a global marketplace for small tasks.

If you need someone to walk your dog, do some gardening or be an extra in elaborate marriage proposal then Airtasker is a site to find the right person.

Since launching last year Airtasker has advertised more than 54,000 tasks with users looking for everything from dog walkers to computer repairers and actors.

Tim and Jonathan came upon the idea of a site for small tasks when moving house with the various hassles of cleaning, moving and packing. Instead of relying on friends and relatives to help out, they saw the opportunity for connecting willing workers with small tasks.

The site turns around how traditional classified advertisements work by paying on results rather than advertising. Lui sees it as “de-centralised social commerce.”

It’s not just small household tasks either, Jonathan sees Airtasker helping out larger companies with tasks like market research, mystery shopping or even local council inspections of street signs.

Unlike many of the crowdsourcing sites, the Airtasker team want to keep away from commoditising labour, instead seeing their ‘runners’ providing valuable local services.

One of the interesting aspects about the internet is how two opposite forces are working against each other – while the internet creates globalised marketplaces it also gives people new channels to discover local services.

Jonathan sees Airtasker as being at the forefront of hyperlocal marketplaces, with a global website enabling small traders and microbusinesses to deliver services locally.

That may be a crazy idea – but we live in crazy times.

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Cheap coffee and the changing service sector

The rise of cheap automated coffee machines in service stations and convenience stores shows how the assumptions about the service economy are being challenged.

I noticed the queues one morning when calling into the local service station to grab a carton of milk at 5am.

There was a line of tradesmen out the door waiting to buy a $1 self serve coffee. Freshly ground with your choice of espresso, latte or cappuccino.

No messing around, no being patronised by snobby barista – just a cheap, decent quality cup of coffee.

For the last few years these machines have been popping up in convenience stores and service stations, freshly grinding beans to order and delivering a reasonable cup of coffee for a dollar or two.

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Cheap coffee at the local convenience store

None of the machine made cups will beat a coffee made by a good barista, but are half or a third of the price being charged by many cafes whose product often isn’t much better (and sometimes worse) than that made by the machines.

With the rise of the service economy in the 1970s it was assumed employment would move from factories to jobs like baristas and serving in cafes, now we’re seeing automation taking over those jobs as well.

The 1970s assumption that the service industries would become the mainstay of the economy turned out to be true with over two thirds of the workforces in countries like the US, UK and Australian employed in them them by the end of the Twentieth Century.

Now industries are restructuring again and the assumptions that worked well for the last fifty years are being challenged by automation and increased outsourcing.

The idea we could build an economy based upon us all making coffee and waiting tables for each other was always problematic and so it is proving to be.

It’s worth thinking about the opportunities this presents for your business.

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