The Russian online ordering service for household services YouDo.com raised $6.2 million from Sistema Venture Capital, a venture capital fund of AFK Sistema, and its current shareholders, Flint Capital, United Capital Partners (UCP) and Qiwi owner Sergey Solonin. This was told to Vedomosti by a representative of Sistema VC and confirmed by the other participants in the transaction.
YouDo.com is an online platform that allows you to quickly find performers to perform household tasks or one-time assignments. The service is monetized at the expense of performers who pay the platform for the opportunity to leave an offer for tasks and contact the client, explains Alexey Gidirim, co-founder of the service. According to him, more than 80,000 private specialists and companies are currently registered on the service. The gross market value of the project, that is, the amount of the cost of services provided by the contractors through the platform, for 2015 amounted to 1.5 billion rubles, Gidirim said. At the same time, for the contractor, the cost of working with the platform depends on the profile of services. Now the service has more than 800,000 registered users, of which about 200,000 have made at least one order.
The household services aggregator YouDo has about 5.5 million registered users, 500-600 thousand of them are service providers. As part of a series of lectures by the Russol online startup school, YouDo founder Denis Kutergin spoke about his mistakes when attracting the first investments, about the fight against user fraud and about his main competitors - ads on poles and in mailboxes.
How to make mistakes and correct them
Immediately after the launch of YouDo, we realized that we had completely misunderstood the market. We were sure that no one would order services through a mobile device. But these turned out to be the majority, and I had to urgently do it. mobile app. We made a mistake with the choice of categories. About 30% of tasks immediately began to fall into the “Something else” category. They had to be sorted by hand and at the same time analyze which categories should be added. We believed that we would earn on customers. That is, take a commission from them when creating a task, as, for example, Booking.com does, where the hotel shares a commission with the aggregator itself. But it turned out that it is much easier for the customer to write: "I need to do this and that - suggest." And the prices began to form performers.
We had no experience - neither in marketing, nor in the product, nor in fundraising. To draw attention to ourselves, we decided to constantly generate newsbreaks. It took a lot of strength. Half of the time was spent developing presentations and communication - what is now called networking. But it paid off. We didn't go around the market with the words "look at our business model, give us money." On the contrary, investors themselves began to contact us. And here I can give advice, although I really don’t like it.
We need to develop at our own expense as long as possible. And attract investments only when you clearly understand that you urgently need to scale up or that there is not enough money.
We met one well-known Internet entrepreneur, agreed on a very good assessment for the company and signed a term sheet - an agreement of intent, where the assessment is fixed and the main conditions are spelled out.
And at that moment we made a mistake. During due diligence, we almost doubled the team and began to use risky marketing strategies- based on the money that should have been allocated in 2 months.
By turning down offers from other investors, we were in a vulnerable situation. And for an investor who already had one foot in our company, it was a cool state. The deal has not yet been signed, the money has not yet been transferred, but he has already come to our office, talked, looked at all the statistics, assessed what is happening inside the company and knocked out additional conditions.
At that moment, we had no experience in raising money, we did not have great lawyers. Each new requirement forced us to coordinate everything anew from the very beginning.
About 4 months passed, we were running out of money, and we had to say: “OK, we agree, just fulfill your obligations” - or “No, we are not ready to work with you, because why do we need such partners?”. In the last option, we took extreme risks: we did not have alternative partners at that time.
At this point, our mentor helped us a lot. He said: “Guys, if an investor wants to give you money, he will definitely give it. If every time he finds some excuse and tries to delay it even longer, then he wants to take you cheaply or he has no money at all. Refuse, go to others whom you have already slowed down, do not waste time. We refused, and a month later we were found by Flint Capital, who became our first investor and still supports us in every round. These are guys with a completely different expertise, who helped us not only with money, but also with experience.
The first 1 million rubles. we made a lot of money very quickly. At the same time, they somehow imperceptibly launched monetization and - hop! we immediately had a revenue of 2-3 million there. But the first 10 million rubles. - For several months we directly stormed this mark. Since then, I have not liked this figure, because we were a whole block late on the business plan.
If you ask me how many users we have now or, for example, our daily attendance, I will honestly tell you - I don’t know. I measure my business in two indicators: the number of orders created and completed per day. Next, you need to look at the percentage of outstanding tasks or tasks left without offers. There is another metric that I also monitor daily - the average number of offers per order. If in some subcategory the number of proposals for the task falls below 3, we turn on the siren.
How to deal with user fraud
All experience - both foreign projects based on this model, and Russian - suggests that it is impossible to overcome deception. We assumed that at least top performers value ratings and reviews, that 2-3 negative reviews can completely cross out the work that they have invested for several years, earning a reputation. But it turned out that it was the top performers who cheated the most. Their logic was something like this: “I brought a lot of money for YouDo. If they burn me, in any case I will be able to agree, they will forgive me for the first time.
Deception schemes: after a personal acquaintance, the contractor says to the customer: “Let's write the cost of the order not 10 thousand rubles, but 1 thousand rubles, for this I will give you a small discount. And I myself will pay a commission not 1.5 thousand rubles, but 500 rubles. Or the task is canceled with the wording “we didn’t agree, the contractor didn’t come”, but according to the geolocation (it was allowed by the contractor himself so that we show the tasks next to him), it can be seen that he was at a certain point for 3 hours.
We tried to call such performers, then we started blocking them: “Sorry, we are not ready to continue cooperation. We're sorry, you really were a very cool performer, you have wonderful reviews. But you have a lot of cancellations.”
But at some point, I felt embarrassed and disgusted, instead of developing the product, to breed some departments that collect evidence of fraud. We changed the model, removed the commission and told the performers: "Gentlemen, now you pay for access and there is no guarantee that you will earn." Of course, some part of the performers will spend more than they earn, but such are the laws of advertising. Ideally, we want to create a system that will not only be easier, but also more profitable for the performer: I bought access for a month - and within a month for every 1 thousand rubles invested. you earn 10 thousand rubles.
Where not to work and with whom to compete
Until recently, we worked only in Moscow and St. Petersburg, but since the end of last year, we began to add million-plus cities. By the end of 2019, YouDo should become a de facto federal service - we will work in all major regional centers.
And in small towns YouDo, most likely, will not work. The consumption model in the regions is different, people there think much less about how much their time costs. There are no traffic jams, constant lack of time, everyone knows each other well. If you need to connect a washing machine, just ask a neighbor, friend, acquaintance, classmate or relative and you will definitely be advised someone. And in Moscow I feel sorry for my time. It’s easier not to go to IKEA yourself, but to pay 500-1 thousand rubles. a person who will buy everything, bring it and collect it. And I will save 3 or 4 hours of my life and spend it on family and friends.
Now YouDo has an average of 5,500-6,000 orders per day - very few, in fact. According to our estimates, only the Moscow market is at least 10 times larger. But if we unite us, Profi.ru, Remontnik, Clean, Lucky Everyone and other multi-vertical and mono-vertical services, then all together will have about 3% of the consumer services market.
When they ask who our main competitor is, I answer: announcements on poles and in porches - in mailboxes. There are too many masters, performers and companies using such offline tools, and this is more profitable for them than aggregators like YouDo. Looking at this, I understand how much work we still have to do.
Services built on the Uber model penetrate into all areas of the economy. Almost any problem - from fixing a crane to selecting a top manager for a large company - can be solved through online platforms for freelancers
YouDo founders Denis Kutergin and Alexey Gidirim (Photo: Monika Dubinkaite for RBC)
The volume of the “digital economy” created thanks to online platforms for freelancers, according to the Boston Consulting Group, will amount to $4.2 trillion in 2016 in the G20 countries. In the US alone, the volume of the household services market from individual to individual is $600-700 billion a year.
In Russia, this market is estimated at tens of billions of rubles, says Alexey Gidirim, founder of YouDo, launched in 2012, through which more than 2,000 orders are now made per day, and the total amount of tasks passed through it in 2015 amounted to 1.6 billion rubles. . “The volume of transactions that took place offline, when people negotiated with friends or acquaintances about this or that service, is slowly moving online,” says Gidirim. Now over 70 thousand freelancers are registered on the YouDo platform (in the spring of 2013 there were about 1 thousand of them). “The incomes of the population fell, and people began to think how to free time earn,” explains the second founder of YouDo, Denis Kutergin.
On YouDo, anyone can create a task in one of the categories: courier services, household repairs, cargo transportation, web development, and even legal assistance. The task receives feedback from performers, who, unlike customers, undergo verification and a telephone interview with company representatives. The customer can choose the contractor, focusing on the proposed price and reviews on the site. Until February 2013, the service took a commission in the amount of 5 to 15% of each transaction, then switched to a model in which the contractor pays a small amount for the opportunity to send his application to the customer. “With this approach, the customer immediately receives the contractor’s contact and can call him, and our profitability increased, although the majority of the contractors were against it: they began to pay more,” says Kutergin. Direct income from users forms about 80% of the company's revenue, the rest comes from b2b and joint ventures. advertising projects with partners. The founders do not disclose revenue, but they say that over the past year it has grown by 2.5 times, and the company has reached operational break-even.
YouDo in numbers
2500-3000 rub.— average cost of one service
50% performers have higher education
45,3% The performers are between the ages of 25 and 34. Back in 2014, almost the same proportion of performers were people aged 18-25
44% performers combine freelancing with full-time work
$5.5 million is the total amount of investments received by the company
By 2025, digital platforms will boost global GDP by $2.7 trillion and provide new job opportunities for more than 540 million people
Source: YouDo.com, McKinsey
What makes users resort to YouDo and similar services? Firstly, the rating system has repeatedly increased the level of consumer confidence in ordering services online: unlike an ordinary plumber from a housing office, a plumber called through an online platform cares about his reputation and strives to do a quality job - his reputation and earnings directly depend on the customer's feedback.
At YouDo, ratings are taken seriously: the one who did not leave a review on the site receives a call from the call center and writes down the review from his words. After three negative reviews or even with one negative with less than ten positive performers are removed from the system without the possibility of recovery. In addition, reviews are the best defense against competitors, Kutergin is convinced. “Anyone can copy a website engine, but making a reliable system where there are trusted people and reviews about them is much more difficult,” he says.
With the crisis, the need for savings grew, the founder of YouDo notes: “Before, the multicooker broke down and there was no point in repairing it - it was easier to buy a new one at about the same price as the repair. Now everything is different.” There are currently 14 categories available on YouDo, in which the customer can submit a task, and competitors have already appeared in almost every one of them. New platforms are developing especially rapidly in the segments with which the service began - courier delivery and cleaning of apartments.
Couriers, cleaners, recruiters
With the growth of online commerce, online stores have increasingly outsourced delivery, so the demand for such services has risen. However, it is still difficult to find a good courier, Dmitry Petrov, the founder of the Peshkariki delivery service, told RBC.
Peshkariki has a kind of theft protection system: before starting work, couriers deposit their own money to the balance and can deliver orders worth no more than the amount of the deposit. “Over the past 50 thousand deliveries, we have not had a single loss,” says Petrov. The quality of the courier's work was tied to his material gain: in the case of a large number of positive reviews from online stores, the courier's deposit gradually begins to decline and can drop to 30% of the value of the cargo. In addition, Peshkariki relied on urgency (thanks to the extensive database, it is easy to find a courier who will deliver the goods on the same day) and low prices: in Moscow, one non-urgent delivery costs from 199 rubles, urgent - from 299 rubles.
Dmitry Petrov, founder of the Peshkariki courier service“A courier is a temporary profession, no one dreams of being a courier permanently. There's a big turnover. Therefore, our platform is an option for a person to earn money when they need it.”
Since its launch at the end of 2013, more than 20,000 couriers and 2,500 customers have registered on the platform — these are mostly online stores, but there are also individuals. Now Peshkariki, when placing an order, take a commission from each courier in the amount of 15-22% of the delivery cost. There are additional services, such as trying on clothes or a delivery notification message (without it, the information is simply updated in the application). Revenue from additional services the company shares in half with the courier. In this scenario, the Peshkarikov courier, with 100 deliveries per month, can earn about 40 thousand rubles, says Petrov, so the company does not lack performers.
In the apartment cleaning segment, Qlean, which entered the market in 2014, is growing rapidly. Now it unites already 600 cleaners who fulfill about 500 orders per day, and the revenue for 2015 amounted to 200 million rubles. Launching at the very beginning of the crisis was scary, says Qlean marketing director Roman Kumar Wias, but the founders made a bet that people would begin to value personal time more. “You can clean the house yourself and throw 3.5 hours out of your life, or you can for 1590 rubles. order cleaning,” Wias says.
The founders of Qlean approached all the little things with the utmost bias regarding cleaning and cleaners - the so-called cleaners. The company provides them with inventory, and in return takes 30% of the cost of cleaning (on average in Moscow it is 2,500 rubles). Each performer goes through a multi-stage selection - a group and personal interview, an internship at a special training ground, and then also a training in communication with clients, and only after that he is allowed to the first cleaning. This approach leads to the fact that over 80% of the cleaners, although they remain freelance, work only for Qlean. “People who get a job with us can receive about 50-60 thousand rubles. per month, says Kumar Wias. “And our top performer, a woman who works very hard, gets about 100-110 thousand rubles.”
Such services are slowly uniting markets where there are now a lot of disparate companies and entrepreneurs. For example, in the smartphone repair market, iSmashed startup is trying to do this, which in March attracted several million rubles of investments from SmartHub, a Kaliningrad venture fund. According to the founder of the service, Alexander Pasechnik, approximately half of all smartphones and tablets sold in Russia (8 million units) annually need repairs, and the potential market size exceeds 10 billion rubles. The service made a bet that customers - mostly office workers - want to save time and ensure the safety of information on their phone, so iSmashed masters go to order and repair the device in the presence of the owner. The company recently partnered with Gett to get craftsmen to the customer within an hour. Unlike other services, iSmashed earns mainly on the difference in the wholesale and retail prices for spare parts - this is what remains with the company after purchasing spare parts, organizing a trip and paying a remuneration to the master (12-13% of the order value). So far, there are only six masters in the system, but the startup plans to increase their number several times over time.
Freelance marketplaces have also appeared in unexpected areas, such as recruiting. Startup JungleJobs, launched in 2015, has become a platform for information large companies with freelance headhunters. Service works more efficiently than traditional recruiting agencies, says Evgenia Dvorskaya, who founded JungleJobs after 11 years in recruiting. “On average, a client receives from five to 12 resumes per vacancy in the first week of work - this is three to four times more than in any other recruitment agency,” Dvorskaya said in an interview with RBC. Since the headhunter works for himself and receives 70% of the fee for a successfully filled vacancy (in 2015, he averaged 225 thousand rubles, of which 30% is taken by the platform), the average position closing rate and the percentage of closing are higher than in regular agency.
Evgenia Dvorskaya, founder of headhunting service JungleJobs
“If the client does not like how the performer works, he turns it off and connects two more. Therefore, our average position closing rate and closing rate are higher than in a conventional recruitment agency. There, the salary is from 30 thousand to 60 thousand rubles. and 10% of the fee, while our recruiters receive their two-three-month fee for one closed vacancy"
As with other services focused on the b2b market, freelancers on JungleJobs are rigorously selected. Of the 1,500 applications for cooperation, 300 people were admitted, says Dvorskaya, and all of them get the opportunity to fill vacancies for 50 large Russian and foreign companies that are clients of the site. JungleJobs also concludes an agreement with clients, after which the company places a vacancy on the platform, sets the amount of the fee (at least 100 thousand rubles for a vacancy in Moscow) and selects one or more suitable recruiters. The entrepreneur does not disclose the number of closed vacancies or revenue, however, according to her, in 2015 the company grew in revenue by 33% per month.
Since 70% of JungleJobs recruiters are employees of recruitment agencies, which do not always welcome such part-time jobs, the system guarantees their confidentiality: recruiters do not see each other on the site, and the company finds out the name of the recruiter only after hiring him for a project. At the same time, according to Dvorskaya, the transition to freelancing has already become a noticeable trend in the headhunting market. “In the agency, the salary is from 30 thousand to 60 thousand rubles. and 10% of the fee. Plus access to HeadHunter.ru and a computer. With us, recruiters receive their two-three-month fee for one closed vacancy, ”says Dvorskaya.
Where it didn't work
Not in all areas, online platforms work as a business idea. For example, an attempt to create an “Uber for Doctors” in Russia completely failed – this was supposed to be the “Ask a Doctor” application, which was launched in 2012 by Stanislav Sazhin, the founder of the Doctor at Work network. “We tried to make a network where patients write reviews for doctors through the application. There were also examples where patients call the doctor through the application, some tried to organize a video call with the doctor through the application or make an appointment at the clinic, but all these services are unprofitable,” Sazhin told RBC. According to the entrepreneur, such applications work in the West, but Russians, accustomed to the social state, are not ready to pay for medicine. “All attempts to make the business model profitable failed, because we consistently paid doctors for consultations out of our own pocket,” says Sazhin. Besides, Russian legislation does not imply the possibility of medical services through the Internet, so any attempt to take money for them qualifies as illegal business.
In December 2015, Yandex.Master closed down, bringing together repair and household services companies on its platform. For almost a year and a half, the service has not managed to become massive. As the head of Yandex.Master, Lev Volozh, explained in a column for vc.ru, the reason was the very structure of this market, in which the lion's share of orders is made directly. If we are talking about expensive, complex services like apartment renovation, the customer wants to contact directly, without intermediaries and commissions, Dmitry Balakirev, co-founder of the Remontnik.Ru platform, told RBC. Perhaps that is why Remontnik.Ru is doing well despite the crisis: the site brings together several tens of thousands of craftsmen who compete with each other for every offer, which allows them to keep prices low. At the same time, the feedback system allows you to choose the most qualified and adequate performer. As Alexei Sapkin, the second founder of the platform, told RBC, by the summer, Remontnik.Ru expects to reach the level of 1 thousand orders per day.
Alexey Sapkin, founder of the apartment renovation service Remontnik.Ru
“During the crisis, customers began to pay more attention to the repair of existing premises than to the construction of new ones. We have a hypothesis that the funds not spent by customers on tourism abroad are used to improve the home at home.”
Even in areas where customers are accustomed to ordering services from individuals, such as calling a manicurist at home, there are difficulties. The GetNow Beauty app, which raised $2 million in the summer of 2015 from an anonymous private investor, is now "on hold" for Russian market, the owner of the service, Anna Korona, told RBC. She claims that the project will be updated in the summer, after the issue with a new round of investments is resolved, but usually successful projects do not stop six months after launch.
A platform that simply connects the customer with the performer is doomed to failure, says Qlean's Kumar Wias: only a company that carefully controls business processes can become successful. Remontnik.Ru monitors the fulfillment of orders and all the reviews that appear on the site almost around the clock, JungleJobs trains headhunters, and the founders of Qlean wrote a 30-page book that describes all the nuances of cleaning and instructions for communicating with the client. In September 2015, the founders of Qlean launched a new platform, Shelly, a manicure-at-home service, and plan to apply the same approach to it. “The essence of such services is not to make money on the client once, but for the client to return to you and invite his friends without spending your money on it. That’s what quality service is all about,” says Kumar Wias.
Roman Kumar Wias, Chief Marketing Officer, Qlean
“More than 80% of our cleaners only work with Qlean. People who get a job with us can receive about 50-60 thousand rubles. per month, and top performers - about 100 thousand rubles. per month"
In addition, most services have to ensure that the site has a healthy ratio of customers and performers. “If we don’t have enough performers, we give a campaign to attract craftsmen. Otherwise, we attract customers with advertising,” says Alexei Sapkin. Even YouDo, which tries to interfere as little as possible in the agreements between the customer and the contractor, sometimes regulates the flow of both. “At the beginning of 2015, we limited the registration of performers in several categories, because there were a lot of them: at the height of the crisis, everyone panicked and started looking for a part-time job. They started dumping heavily, which we are not interested in, so we turned them off for a while, ”recalls Denis Kutergin.
Despite temporary difficulties, freelancers will completely transform the labor market in the future, his partner Alexei Gidirim believes. According to him, in the US, 40% of the population already provides freelance services, and the same awaits Russia. “People will position themselves not as employees of a particular company, but as professionals who work in the market, they can join a project, implement it, leave this project and join another,” the entrepreneur says.
How to make money freelancing
Alexey Aristov, former pilot of Transaero
Service: YouDo
Profile: home appliances repair
Income: 2-5 thousand rubles. in a day
“In general, I didn’t know how to do anything with my hands until I was 18, but after the army I had to live in rented apartments with broken electrics, broken plumbing, and wallpaper coming off. There was no money to hire someone, so I had to learn how to do everything myself. Since Transaero flights stopped in October-November, I have been looking for work and YouDo helps a lot. If earlier it was just a part-time job, now I began to take orders for the whole day. In terms of money, it turns out much less than at a permanent job, besides, it all depends on the season: in the summer it was possible to earn 4-5 thousand rubles a day. clean, now 2-3 thousand rubles. There could have been more, but I do not take large orders: in the main profession, it is necessary to maintain knowledge at the proper level. I can’t come to an interview and say: “Guys, I don’t remember air codes, but I can tell you how to properly wire an electrician.”
Leah Kohia, professional recruiter
Service: JungleJobs
Profile: recruitment
Income: 280 thousand rubles. per project
“I have been recruiting in the pharmaceutical market and the medical equipment market for more than seven years. Until 2015, she worked in recruitment agencies (Norman Consulting, Beagle). At some point, I realized that I had already realized myself within the agency. I wanted to try myself as a freelancer, to be responsible for the amount of work that I want and for those projects that interest me. JungleJobs found me on their own and offered to become their consultant in my profile. We signed an agreement, and since April 2015 I have been working as individual entrepreneur. So far, I have closed one project on JungleJobs, the fee for which amounted to 280 thousand rubles. Recruitment agencies, of course, had more clients than JungleJobs now. But the business is growing. I think soon there will be enough projects on my profile. The income of a consultant on such sites is greater than in agencies. Recruitment agencies should not forbid employees to work through JungleJobs - it’s better to become their partners, because this is an additional source of clients.”
Gennady Shchegirev, pensioner
Service: "Peshkariki"
Profile: courier delivery
Income: 50% of pension
In the summer of 2015, there was not enough money: the previous part-time jobs ran out. With the help of my sons, I began to search the Internet for others and came across the Peshkarikov. It seemed interesting to me, I applied, I was selected. I am a sports person: despite the fact that I will turn 71 in a month, I play football and try to walk at least 5 km a day. I am not interested in sitting on a bench or playing dominoes, so working as a courier is also a way for me to keep myself in shape. I don’t work every day, I don’t take orders to the region and in the evening. I love driving in the morning. There are two to five orders a day. This allows me to earn a good increase in my pension - up to half of its size. I learned how to work with Peshkariki through a mobile application on my phone. It turned out to be easy. I tried to attract other pensioners, but they are too lazy. But I like it: there is no collar around my neck, I work when I want. I'm satisfied."
With the participation of Vladislav Seregin
In 2012, a popular one-time job search service was launched in Russia in its current form. But gradually the conditions for the performers worsened, which led to the emergence, to put it mildly, of unscrupulous employers, and workers increasingly lost money.
History of success
The principle of operation of YouDo is very simple. The customer places the task in any of the 16 categories of the site. In it, he indicates the amount of payment and other information. Then he chooses a performer from among those who responded, and after completing the work he leaves a review about the temporary employee. In this case, the contractor must go through the verification procedure on the site.
The service quickly became popular, its services were used in the recruitment of personnel for the Afisha Picnic, the Bright People festival and other major metropolitan events. As of 2018, there were 2.5 million registered users. In 2019, Forbes magazine included YouDo in the top 20 most valuable Runet companies.
At first, YouDo charged a commission from the performers of completed tasks. Its size was 5-15% depending on the payment: the higher it is, the lower the commission. Then the owners realized that there were many more of those who were not chosen and changed the business model. Since 2016, I had to pay just for the opportunity to respond to an ad, the size of the commission, by the way, has increased.
Website scammers
Further more. In 2018, YouDo blocked the possibility of communication between customers and contractors through comments. In addition, employees do not see how many identical offers the employer posted, and whether he looked at his response. And by placing an offer, the performer tacitly agrees that the commission will not be returned to him in any outcome. This lack of transparency has created an opportunity for abuse and even fraud.
A very common pattern. The performer is instructed to download some application for testing on an Android smartphone. After authorization, the program allows the creator to remotely access the phone and transfers its data. Small amounts of 100-150 rubles are stolen from people, hoping that no one will go to the police because of such a trifle. Particularly gullible performers are "bred" from the site even for documents.
Photo source: TV channel "360" By the way, performers can purchase various packages on the site to save money on commissions. But this is not all, thank goodness. The number of complaints against employers with the same or fake tasks has sharply increased, for each of which someone responds, pays, but the order remains archived. Some believe that they are hosted by bots.
Livejournal user mazday909 entered a photo of one of the customers into the program to search for people by photo. Found 62, twins... triplets... monozygotic sisters.
Photo source: https://mazday909.livejournal.com Many employees respond, pay a commission, do the work, but the employer “goes into the sunset” with impunity, throwing performers.
Photo source: Photo source: public "YOUDO (YOU) +++ DISCUSSION" But customers sometimes cry too. Annetta06 told Pikabu that she found a team of wallpapering workers on YouDo. By nightfall, when the pregnant girl was falling asleep on the go, they were done. In the light of day, the future nursery looked terrible. The foreman stopped answering calls, and the administration simply banned him as a performer.
"Competitiveness Treatment"
Lawyer and expert labor law Galina Enyutina explained that fraud is a desire to get some kind of benefit and not pay for it. Therefore, if the performer has not received the task, and the commission has been written off, you need to contact the service and ask for a refund of the commission.
“The service takes money for mediation. In this case, he worked poorly as an intermediary. After all, they take a commission as if for an order, but it turns out that they didn’t track it, ”Enyutina specified.
True, on the other hand, we can talk about entrepreneurial risk. For example, a janitor responded to 10 job ads but found only five customers. “If out of 10 you pay for five left clicks, that’s the entrepreneurial risk associated with using this platform. In this case, we can talk about its improvement,” she said.
Cases when a customer places a lot of identical ads, and then changes his mind about hiring someone, theoretically, can also be considered fraud. But proving this is much more difficult. After all, such actions are not prohibited by law.
“If there is a specific scheme, how they operate, it could be called fraud. I would call this dishonest behavior, which can be qualified under certain circumstances as fraud. If you prove intent again, ”added the lawyer.
There are also questions to the service, in her opinion. Although the site cannot track all dishonest users, complaints can be investigated and money can be returned to both customers and contractors who have wasted their commission. And also introduce electronic contracts, where all the conditions will be spelled out.
The people are satisfied with everything and the site will be punished by competitors. If there is a service that takes into account the cons of a competitor, the army of freelancers will go there. In the meantime, even deceived people will now use this service. All this is treated by competitiveness, ”concluded Enyutina.
Choose where to look for work
The press service of HeadHunter "360" said that in order to find a permanent job, it is better to apply to specialized online job search sites, in recruitment agencies or professional recruiters. There, the risks of applicants are minimized. In particular, on hh.ru, all employers are identified, documenting that they are real companies in need of staff. And message boards like YouDo are designed for freelancers or people looking for one-time part-time jobs.
“Such sites are an integral part of the “sharing” economy and play important role in the development of “self-employment” of a part of the economically active population. In general, such sites try to take into account and level all the risks of fraud. Therefore, it has become profitable to use such a model for ordering services,” the press service explained.
On some sites, for example, HRspace, the customer pays for the service. After creating an offer, money is reserved from his account. Therefore, it is not profitable for him to produce thousands of identical ads, they will also have to pay for their placement.
“Many sites have a post-payment option, the so-called “secure transaction”, when funds are reserved by the site until obligations are fulfilled and a positive feedback from both sides. This allows minimizing risks for both the contractor and the customer,” the press service concluded.
We try to select performers as strictly as possible, because in fact we sell their work. There are two dropout levels. First, a person communicates by phone with our specialist and fills out a questionnaire. If everything is in order, we invite him to our office, check the documents again and conduct a personal interview. Then his data is checked by the security service. We look at everything: a criminal background, unpaid loans, administrative penalties, and so on. About 60% are eliminated already at the application level.
If everything is in order, we conduct an interview. There is a separate specialist in the verification department for each category. Verification of cleaners, for example, is carried out by a person who worked in the field of recruiting domestic staff. He asks questions that help to understand whether a potential performer really has experience, whether he knows some elementary things. A psychologist communicates with couriers, who during the conversation tries to understand whether a person can be trusted, whether he is prone to deceit. Everything is important, even whether the person is late for the interview. If there is even the slightest suspicion that a person is inadequate, he does not pass verification. At this stage, half of those who passed the initial selection are eliminated.
For all the time of work, the problem arose only once: the person who was supposed to deliver the goods said that he had been robbed. After our lawyer spoke to him, he admitted that it was his fault and made amends.
In the near future, we will begin to insure all tasks that are associated with some material values. In ordinary courier companies 2-4% are problematic. It's either theft or damage. We do not have this, but we decided to play it safe.
We never had any problems finding performers. True when we open new category, for which you need to quickly recruit people, I place an ad on Headhunter, and in two weeks we close positions.
For the entire time YouDo has been operating, we have verified about a thousand users, of which about 600 are active performers today.
We have examples when performers left work because YouDo brought more income. There is one guy who rides a bike all year round, delivering orders. Performing 4-5 tasks a day and working three days a week, he earns more than previous work, and, according to him, feels much freer and better.
Search for customers
Attracting customers is more difficult than finding contractors. Clients had certain problems with the fact that the service had to be paid in advance. In Russia, they generally do not like to pay in advance, and even online. Even in online stores, online payments account for less than 10% - people prefer to pay in cash with a courier. We cannot have such a model: money must pass through our system. Another problem that arose at the launch was trust in the performers: people were afraid to let a stranger go home to do the cleaning, and so on.
We decided that it was useless to fight this with the help of advertising: you can at least cover the entire Internet with banners, but this will not increase our reliability in the eyes of customers.
We are a lot worked above creation image of a company that invested
to verification.
Most of our clients are regulars. In the first months, one active customer gave less than two tasks per month, now - more than four. There are clients who leave 20-30 tasks per month, that is, they delegate any task that appears. Now we have more than 2 thousand active customers.
Promotion
An important direction of our work is B2B, cooperation with other companies. When we launched the "Promotions" category, one of the first clients was "Afisha", who asked to find 60 people for the "Afisha" Picnic.
In autumn, we launched a joint project with VTB24. They introduced a new card product that included a concierge service. This project was very important for us, and the point is not only that we received a fairly large profit. It is much more important that we have a partner of this magnitude, the trust in our company has grown significantly.
This week, together with Promsvyazbank, we launched the delivery of their gift cards. Among our clients are QIWI Bank, RAEC, online stores that use YouDo for express delivery of goods to their customers.
Clients
Our clients are typical residents of a metropolis where there is a social gap between people, constant time pressure, stress, lack of time. In Penza or Kirov, our project could not work: people have a different standard of living and a different psychology. There are no kilometer traffic jams, eternal rush, more developed personal connections: people communicate with neighbors and ask them for help.
Our clients are people for whom an hour of communication with a child, friends is worth more than the money that will have to be paid for completing the task. Their hour is more expensive, it is more profitable for them to delegate some urgent or routine tasks to YouDo.
Competitors
The market for providing temporary staff via the Internet in Russia has not been formed. Therefore, we are developing much faster than Western companies: there is very strong competition in every segment. In Europe, there is a small agency on every block where you can hire a person who will wash your windows in an hour and dig a hole the next day. In Russia, there are only concierge agencies for home staff, they work very poorly here. There is a courier market, but it is expensive, and it takes a long time to wait for delivery - at best, a day. On YouDo, everything is much faster and cheaper, and the services are personalized: you can send a person to IKEA on Friday evening so that he can buy a table with his own money and deliver it on the same day.
I follow foreign counterparts. There is a company in the USA TaskRabbit, which provides similar services in 11 cities. She's already raised $40 million., but we will catch up with them in six months in terms of the number of customers / performers, even without external investments. This, again, is due to very high competition in the West, where there are cleaning companies in almost every entrance. Each segment has its own players: companies that only provide dog walking services, so it is very difficult to break through there.
Plans
In 2012, we set ourselves the task of testing as many work models as possible: interaction with other companies, providing our services as social packages, and so on.
We do not yet have a goal to reach payback, the money is spent on scaling. The expansion is proceeding in several directions at once: we are introducing new categories, looking at new cities (YouDo office in St. Petersburg will open in February 2013), and looking for new options for interaction with other companies. The market has not yet formed, so we are constantly looking for new opportunities.
Create loyal customers. The first orders were placed by friends and acquaintances. We encouraged those who had already placed an order to return to the site: we gave bonuses that partially covered the next task. So people developed a habit: when any problem arose, they began to think that it could be solved through YouDo.
Be heard. New customers appear due to activity in in social networks, thanks to the fact that they write about us in the media. Participation in various competitions helped a lot: we won the Runet award, got into the top ten startups of the year according to Forbes, won the Golden Site Award and so on.
Look to the West, but don't be fooled. It is not enough just to take and copy the model, you need to work a lot on internal processes. The experience of working on the first version helped us a lot. YouDo, where we communicated with millions of users.
