We are in the home stretch of completing our first full year. Since our launch in March 2022 we have discovered opportunity while working against the challenges of a start-up including customers, cash and code.
Here is a quick re-cap:
Customers
Finding companies that need to grow and connecting them with individuals that need work has proven to be a lot harder than I originally anticipated. Why? The OndeWork.com platform is a great idea and requires a behaviour change that we are learning how to work with. What is the behaviour change? For companies it’s the idea of trying out a worker before hiring them and for individuals it’s the idea of trying out a company before working for them permanently. Over the long term I don’t see this challenge being harder but easier as companies are forced to change their hiring practices. The labour market is changing and I believe we are on the leading edge of a trend that will be commonplace in the coming years.
Cash
In March 2022, we launched OndeWork.com to help a related company find construction workers needed to complete projects. On the strength of the results, the platform was opened up to non-related companies and I hired some help that I thought would contribute to our success only to realize that the decision was premature. Our initial investment in the company was spent without a corresponding result in revenue and resulted in decisions I made to right-size the business to ensure our survival. It took more than 90 days to correct the decisions and actions made in 60 days and as we finished out the year we were finally in a position to cash flow our growth and look to leverage our platform into other cities.
I have not been looking to raise money for OndeWork.com but have listed the platform on Microacquire.com (now acquire.com). I had more than a dozen interactions with various investors and interested purchasers however as of this update, none have been appealing enough to pursue. The work done over the past 90 days has enabled OndeWork.com to run incredibly lean and I am confident that we can use our own margin to expand and don’t require outside capital yet.
Code
Once our platform was made available to a broader base of customers we quickly realized that our code base needed some tweaks which included building a portal for companies to manage their profile and cleaning up the onboarding process for workers. OndeWork.com is not a difficult technical concept but it certainly has required paying attention to some nuanced requirements which has drastically changed our cost per job and margin. In the coming months we will be looking for a mobile-first solution that builds upon our web application to make it easier for companies and workers to interact, track their data and manage their money.
General Updates
This past week we announced that OndeWork.com (click here for the announcement) will be opened up to a limited number of companies and workers in Vancouver, BC and Edmonton, AB as a result of some requests made by companies in each of those cities. I am excited to see how this works out as it is another step towards helping workers connect with growing companies. Our marketing campaigns to individuals in Vancouver and Edmonton was launched this week and in the coming week we will continue our strategy of finding companies that need to grow their team this year and want to try using on-demand workers.
What started as a solution to my own problem has now become a very meaningful opportunity that has already had a positive impact to a few companies and to a few dozen individuals. I am excited to leverage our results into something greater.
DG
