Max Brun discusses why gig marketplaces struggle to match supply and demand. Companies like Shiftkick and Upwork face a core tension: employers need last-minute flexibility while workers want predictable income. The playbook that works is starting with a few category pillars to improve unit economics.
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You know, we do have quite a few, I would say, gig economy marketplaces here in the community, though. And, you know, what are some kind of specific challenges that, you know, you experience when it comes to gig economy marketplaces?
I don't know if this is a challenge, but it's something I wish I'd paid more attention to for sure. So when you think of, you know, the value you're providing, the supply side and demand side, right on the demand side, you're filling an emergency need in that, in, in, in the realm of ShiftGig. And there are many other companies, right, who are providing, you know, traveling healthcare workers or like Workrise, like NRG. Like there's specific vertical marketplaces now that are providing contingent market workforce, uh, services. So the nature of the work, is it's last minute. It's hard to plan. So the dichotomy of like what, what our clients needed was that flexibility and the instant like flex up and down. And on our supply side, our talent, at the core of it, they want predictability. They don't, like, of course we all want flexibility in the new realm of work, but people wanna know like, how much am I gonna make? from this app for a week, can I count on that? And I think we chose to like focus a lot more on, on the worker side instead of making that less frictionful, like removing the friction from that end goal. We focused on things like how do we like push notifications to remind them to do this and this and like these extrinsic triggers and whatnot that weren't the core sort of what they needed. So that gig work itself, it's local. When I moved to Upwork, I felt this so much where at Upwork it felt like liquidity was easier because you're not bound by the geography of the work being performed. And I think in a way at Shiftkick, we made it more difficult for ourselves because if I could go back really and redo it, the sustainable path would have been you pick a few pillars of categories and you build an amazing experience. Hopefully those pillars have some, you know, cross-sell ability between them. You get to the right unit economics and then you expand from there. I think that's really the playbook for the hyperlocal ones. But the global ones where the knowledge economy is, it's a little bit different.
