Adam, the painter/decorator hiring platform created by two former managers at Bolt, sprung out of an idea co-founder Roman Sysel had during a holiday while working at the ride-sharing app.

Sysel asked why platforms that connect professionals with paying customers don’t work as well as they should and Adam, launched in Ireland this week, is his and long-time colleague and co-founder Jakob Dvořák’s attempt to correct that.

The pair hope to turn Adam into the “next European unicorn,” believing they can replicate the success of Bolt, which now has 100m users and 4,000 employees across 20 European countries.

“We have seen the magician doing the trick,” says Sysel of Bolt, adding that success for Adam will require hard work, a hungry team, a focus on what they can offer professionals and users alike, and the global ambition of a company founded in a small country, like Bolt in Estonia.

The pair were two of Bolt’s earlier hires – Sysel was one of the first 20 employees, and Dvořák one of the first 50 – and they worked out of the firm’s Czech office from 2015 until last year, when they started Adam.

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Dvořák left Bolt a year ago to work on Adam full-time, and Sysel following earlier this year after finding his successor as manager for central and eastern Europe at his former employer

Adam is operational in Sysel and Dvořák’s native Czech Republic as well as Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, the UK, where it is available in London and Birmingham for the time being, and now Ireland following a successful pilot scheme in Dublin and Cork.

The co-founders ultimately intend for Adam to become a platform for a wide range of domestic services, but they have decided to focus doing “one thing correctly” before adding more services, Sysel says.

“The plan for us the first six months was to expand to as many countries as possible with this one simple profession [painter hire] and do it as well as possible, so really bring the people the best product we can.

“Right now we are in six countries, and we plan to expand to 15+ in the next 12 months, and then we would like to start integrating a second profession. Again, in one market only, and then once we have agreed it is [performing] like we want, expand to 3+ countries, and prove we can replicate the same model in multiple countries, and so on, adding more and more once your perfect the vertical.”

“We see every single vertical or every single profession as individual units in the beginning,” Dvořák adds, explaining that each one has to function and be profitable on its own to make sense to the business.

Available as a desktop website, users a submit a form outlining the work they need done for painters to consider, and Adam takes 20% commission plus VAT from the professional’s end for every job they complete using the platform, which does not serve advertising.

The site differs from traditional service platform providers like Craigslist and Fiverr, where users ask for a quote and then pick from an unlimited number of professionals, and takes a lot from Bolt, providing a small pool of quality assured professionals.

Painters on the site offer same-week service, and the company’s experience in the UK has helped to ease the transition into Ireland. Although prices aren’t fixed, they have settled at  “fair” estimates as decided users on both sides.

“We keep only the quality painters. Similar to Bolt – you know there is like no driver who is below a 4.5/5 star rating, and the same with us. We keep the quality at the highest possible level, and [users hire the painter] that is most available at the best price,” says Sysel.

Dvořák adds: “The market finds itself, and obviously we need to find reliable painters. It’s always the same in every country. You basically start with a number of painters, but no matter what you do, you always face a risk of lower quality.

“In the beginning, you might face some quality issues, and you filter out the worst ones, so you can keep improving the product.”

Adam tends to weed out underperforming professionals in the first couple of months of operation in a new market, and Sysel claims it will help painters to increase their “utilisation“ by 50-80%, with “tens” of painters currently using the platform in Dublin and Cork.

Thousands of jobs have been completed through Adam to date – finished orders being the company’s key performance metric. Hundreds of jobs were completed in Dublin and Cork during the pilot, and the Irish arm has already achieved net profit.

Going forward, the Sysel and Dvořák hope Adam to become the top performing platform of its kind in the UK and adding “as many cities as makes sense” in Ireland before adding another profession to the site – something “home or construction-related”.

Adam is currently in negotiations with investors over funding for its next year of operations, with an announcement expected imminently.

Photo: Roman Sysel (left) and Jakub Dvořák.