The Covid pandemic has been good and bad for Gigable, John Ryan’s venture that has been operating for just over a year. Gigable is a platform that businesses can use to source freelance workers, while for gig economy workers Gigable is a channel to sourcing income.
The good aspect of the pandemic is that Gigable has been inundated with freelancers signing up to offer their services. Restaurant owners who have started delivering meals to turn a crust have also been signing up for the platform in search of drivers.
The pandemic negative is that Ryan (pictured) had moved to Manchester to start developing the Gigable proposition in a much larger market. Lockdown made that task tougher, though Ryan recently inked a deal with takeaway app Foodhub to bring Gigable to the attention of its 11,000 restaurant members.
Kerryman Ryan (35) studied finance in college and worked with at Goodbody Stockbrokers before doing a nine year spell with the Defence Forces. After scratching that itch to Captain level, Ryan embarked on an MBA at Smurfit Business School. The inspiration for Gigable came to him during a gym workout.
App Development
Ryan funded his startup with €25,000 equity investment and hired Jack Fiallos to develop the Gigable app, which took only four months to bring to the Google Play store. Then it was down to finding businesses that might want to use the service while at the same time persuading freelancers to sign up and use the app to check that gigs are available.
In Association with
Integrating the latest technology in the app has also been important. Using API documentation, Fiallos was able to adopt the Revolut open banking platform, which speeds up payments and cuts down on fees. The company also built a calendar and scheduling system from scratch.
“The secret sauce of Gigable is the payments integration,” says Ryan. “We've integrated a payment solution with Stripe, and the Revolut banking and payments solution into our calendar. It’s a very unique product and extremely valuable, especially if you're managing large teams of workers, whether they're ad hoc or on demand.”
One person who appreciates the value is Dermot Berkery, a partner in Dublin venture capital company Delta Partners, which invested last December, in tandem with €250,000 taxpayer funding through Enterprise Ireland.
Gigable Ltd's inaugural accounts filing for the year ending December 2019 discloses total equity investment of €350,000 and Loan Notes funding of €400,000.
Ryan secured his Delta introduction through EI’s New Frontiers course for rookie entrepreneurs, while Linked Finance founder Peter O’Mahony, who became a Gigable director in August 2019, clued in Ryan about persuasive seed decks. “Dermot Berkery is interested in the way work is evolving and he likes our approach,” says Ryan.
Gigable Commissions
Gigable takes a slice of both ends of a freelance transaction. The business using the service pays 10% on top of what it’s paying the freelancer, while the gig worker pays 5% of the payment. To keep business users happy, Gigable has to ensure that there are sufficient gig workers (mostly drivers these days) available to fulfil advertised tasks.
This it achieves by monitoring open gigs. If there aren’t sufficient gig workers committed to a specific task, such as weekend deliveries for a restaurant, Gigable will incentivise platform members in the locality to make themselves available, or advertise on social media to drum up more drivers.
Ryan claims that the completion rate for open gigs is 95%. “When we were starting off we had to do a lot of work and building the community. And that's the hard part of what we do and it’s hard to replicate.
“Building an active and engaged network of people who rely on you sounds easy, but it's actually very, very difficult. We're quite happy now, and at the moment anything that is posted for in and around Cork or Dublin and into Kildare and Wicklow will be over-subscribed sometimes 10 or 20 times.
“We have 22,000 members now and 10,000 have been added since May. The network exploded overnight because people were interested in picking up work. I have great admiration for our freelancer community. They are an amazing group of girls and guys who will work whenever they can get the opportunity.”
Pic: Gary Roberts
