Tim Fung (Airtasker): The marketplace for tasks

speaker-0: What's the craziest thing that someone's ever posted that they want doing? Man, we get like so much there was one I remember early on in the days, which was the title of the task was Pretend to be my girlfriend, comma make me a sandwich. And we're like, What ⁓ what what is that? It sounds sus.

So we're like digging into it. And it was a guy going, Look, my parents keep hustling me to find a partner, come over to my house and be in the kitchen and like make a sandwich for my parents so that like, ⁓ They they say that's my that's my partner. So you you get We've had we've had I think my husband's cheating on me. Can you just like go and like follow them around?

You know, all sorts of like our relationship type stuff. You go and talk to the people who post these jobs and they go, No, seriously I needed that. Like they don't think it's funny because they're like in their world like, no, I really needed that. You know, why are you making fun of me?

Like I just think I I really needed someone to, you know, ⁓ hand over the clothes. speaker-1: What do we stop? speaker-0: Back to my girlfriend because, you know, we broke up and I don't wanna have to go and see her again. You know, to go and hand over all her stuff to the house.

And ⁓ they're dead serious. It's kinda just hilarious, like, Yeah, I really need an air tasker for that and we'll let's like, sweet, I'm glad we could help you. speaker-1: Hey Tim Malcolm, how's it going? speaker-0: Thanks for having me, Jason and Charlie.

speaker-1: Cool. So let's begin. ⁓ I think the best place to start is to have you give the quick overview of what Airtasker is, ⁓ and how long you've been working on it, what your role there is. speaker-0: Sure.

Airtasca, Marketplace for Local Services. ⁓ doing things ⁓ with a bit of a twist. One thing is that we're an open community model, ⁓ meaning that it's a it's a platform. ⁓ we don't tell people ⁓ how to price their jobs and what jobs to do.

⁓ customers ⁓ ask for anything they want done, customers ⁓ and taskers ⁓ you know will make an offer to do that job for you. The second thing that's unique about us is that we're infinitely horizontal, meaning you can ask for anything on AirTasker as long as it's legal. ⁓ and that's what makes us a little bit unique compared to maybe something like Uber, which is which is more vertical. speaker-1: Cool.

⁓ do you wanna give us a sense for scale? Like how many roughly users have have been on the platform? speaker-0: Sure. So ⁓ we do over two hundred million dollars ⁓ in G and V ⁓ per year.

⁓ our biggest market is in the Australian market, but we've also ⁓ started scaling into the UK ⁓ and the US. Our UK marketplace is over twenty million dollars ⁓ in G and V annualised. ⁓ and at a global level we have over forty thousand ⁓ taskers who are earning money each year ⁓ through our platform. ⁓ many, many more ⁓ participants in the community, but really proud of the fact that we're actually putting money into the pockets of ⁓ that many people.

speaker-1: Yeah, that's great. That's major scale. ⁓ so let's talk about the story briefly. So you are the founder, right?

Are you a solo founder? Did you have co founders? speaker-0: Hi, I got a co founder, ⁓ John O. ⁓ so ⁓ you know, he was probably more on like the the ops and ⁓ technology side and and I was more on the marketing, biz dev growth ⁓ side of things.

speaker-1: Okay. so give us the the key inflection points of the story of Airtasker, kinda started from the beginning. What were the major moments where something shifted, the business started to grow faster, anything like that? speaker-0: You know the thing is, ⁓ so I've been on this we we launched the company in two thousand and twelve.

So it's like thirteen years ago. ⁓ and you know, I think that the the biggest takeaway out of that is, yeah, there's certainly been like sort of like various inflection points, but there's never been a silver bullet where at some point we just step back and go, ⁓ we're on the wave of growth. This is so good. And what I kind of realized is like when you're on a wave of growth, it's very rare that you appreciate it.

speaker-2: That's all. speaker-0: Frankly, like you kinda like if if you kinda have like eight weeks in a row where you're like up like four percent a week or six percent a week or something like that, you kinda just go, ⁓ shit, I gotta go on to the next week and try and do that again and you know, all that. But actually when you take a step back and you look at what four percent a week compounded looks like, it's like, that was the growth wave. I was on it.

I really those times and be like, this is awesome. So you know what I tell my staff, you know, they'll be like, ⁓ man, th you know, this number, this thing I'm working on, it only went up by like, you know speaker-1: Ha ha. speaker-0: 20 or 30 users a week or whatever. I'm like, yeah, you do that six times.

That that is the thing. You know, when Facebook or whatever was looking at something going like, that's what it was. I don't think anyone at Facebook ever just sat back and said, dumb, good. You know, it's it's always a bit of a a struggle.

So a few different inflection points, no silver bullets. ⁓ I guess you know, maybe a few that I can remember. Two years into the business, we completely rebuilt the app. ⁓ so we, you know, we had a first version of the app.

We completely rebuilt it a couple of years in. Another really massive one for us ⁓ was that we did a media, ⁓ a strategic media partnership with a big television network in Australia, where they took equity in our business in exchange for advertising our media resources. It seemed crazy to pump like ⁓ millions of dollars into like T V ⁓ when we were only doing about that much in revenue. ⁓ but it in hindsight that turned out to be a big play for us.

⁓ like building our brand and really investing into that. We IPO'd the business. so actually no, I would say the next thing was probably like COVID. We you know, COVID was disruptive.

We're an in person marketplace. Obviously, you know, when there were lockdowns, ⁓ we took a hit, but the hit was a little bit smaller than we thought. And actually what ended up happening is we ended up accelerating through COVID because of the ⁓ sort of flexible nature of our platform, i.e.

we couldn't do domestic cleaning. But we could do like, you know, draft a COVID policy, ⁓ set up home IT. ⁓ I need like an online fitness trainer for my staff. And it turned out that air task, because of the fact that we're a platform, it actually adapted really well to like a changing set of circumstances.

We OPO'd the business in twenty one. That was an interesting inflection point. ⁓ the you know, stock went up to like a billion dollar market cap ⁓ overnight. And that was kind of cool for a very short period of time ⁓ before realizing that, you know, actually having a high valuation and all of that kind of thing can actually really ⁓ change what part what things the business focuses on.

And it can be quite unhealthy in many ways. ⁓ so over the last few years we've been sort of dealing with that hangover, becoming a profitable cash generative company and then building back up ⁓ from there. So yeah, a few few ⁓ lots of ⁓ grey hairs on my head from those different moments. speaker-1: Yeah, that's perfect.

⁓ during COVID, I mean, I imagine it goes back to what you said about being a horizontal platform, right? It's like as the kind of market changes and, you know, certain jobs go fall out of demand and other ones come into demand, like you didn't really need to change the platform all that much. Maybe if you had been more focused on specific types of work, like you would have had to kind of f send your engineers like feverishly working to support these new types of of tasks. But I imagine there wasn't like there weren't really many changes needed to the product, right?

It was already there, it was kind of the same platform, just The p the task was adapted. speaker-0: Yeah, I mean, ⁓ it's it's so interesting because it's like a parallel to starting a company. ⁓ if you kind of think about what Uber is and like what a lot of these sort of gig economy platforms are, if you kind of looked at their analogue i in in the company world, it would basically be like the ultimate micromanagement. It would be like turn up at the office at nine o'clock, go and get a coffee at exactly nine ⁓ one, check your email at nine ⁓ two, answer the first three emails with the following response.

Like it it's it's very ⁓ It's ⁓ it's micromanaged work. Like they're setting the prices and the output the that that creates for a customer is very predictable, which is great. You know, you know the Uber driver's gonna come, they're being monitored, you know exactly what the price is gonna be and that's all great. But I guess Airtask is like the the extreme other end of that, which is like we're kind of like, ⁓ come into this platform, customers will ask for something and you can reply to those customers and you can, you know, respond in any way that you wanna respond.

And we don't control any o of that, other than you know, if it's illegal or it's a scam or something like that. But ⁓ but it's very open ⁓ marketplace. And what ⁓ what comes with that territory is it's kind of the best of humanity and the worst of humanity. You know, it's the best of humanity in that like during COVID, people are like, well I've got to be to make money in this changing environment.

So I'm gonna work really hard to, you know, satisfy my customers in this changing environment. ⁓ it can be the worst of humanity too, when, you know, you get ⁓ you know, people trying to do a scam or something like that and we've gotta go and ⁓ squash that. But open marketplace is ⁓ ha i i the empowerment model creates a lot of potential, some drawbacks too. speaker-1: Yeah, I have a lot of questions about that.

I think the first one is does this idea of having a horizontal kind of platform that can work for, you know, a million different things, is that something that you think could still be started from scratch today and kind of still work? Or has over time like all the the the emergence of highly specific networks and and specific platforms kind of make it more difficult for something that's really broad to to win the market because it has potentially like a better competitor in a bunch of specific ⁓ verticals or like use cases?

speaker-0: Yeah, so I think the best analogy here for like the, you know, the marketplace and platform ⁓ you know, thinkers out there. I think the best analogy is probably YouTube, which is like, ⁓ on YouTube, it's really hard to like segment out just a vertical of that and then go and and spin that now. There are verticals of that. There are sports, you know, there's ESPN, which is like the sports thing.

We're gonna do sports better than YouTube, could ever do sports, you know, the best sports coverage, et cetera. And there are these verticals you can take out, but The reason why YouTube continues to be so compelling is cause the long tail keeps growing as people's interests and things change. And so, you know, like, you know, we we we kind of think about it as like, you know, when television was around and it was, you know, in the nineties, it was like you could start a a sitcom, a rom com, a sports show or news.

That was the extent of it. And no one would have thought that like, ⁓ video of guy ⁓ you know, skateboarding over garbage can. You know, is that gonna take off? Probably not, right?

And it always seemed like silly. But what is powerful about the the kid jumping over the ⁓ the the trash can with a with a skateboard is it's the summation of all of these things that you don't that that the the the studio exec who makes the those shows back in the nineties, they couldn't have imagined it. And and and and by making a really easy way for people to be able to share a video, you could enable All these videos to get shared. And and granted, 99% of those videos are crap.

No one watches that to get the video. But 1% of them is like interesting. And then when 1% gets into people go, ⁓ geez, that that's a good thing. Like I never would have thought it like an unboxing video would be so compelling or like a reaction video would be so compelling.

Now I've seen that. And then once done on once, people go like, ⁓ geez, maybe I should post a video about unboxing something and it compounds. And it's the same thing I feel like with ⁓ with with human skills, which is like You know, ⁓ at the beginning of Airtuska, you know, it used to be ⁓ an interesting task to say, Hey, I want someone to assemble my IKEA furniture. That was actually quirky ten years ago.

That was like, ooh, that's innovative. What an edge case you're gonna now we all know it because air task is around and different platforms around w which enable that. But now there's like other new things that are coming up, right? Like, you know, it'll be like, Hey, want a Halloween costume that looks like Moana, you know, or whatever.

It'd be like all of these different ⁓ tasks that are coming up. And I think that just keeps happening, keeps happening over time. And and in fact with with AI and autonomy and stuff taking away a lot of like regular jobs, I think this is actually accelerated. Like there's more things now that like humans can be useful for and and humans can do.

So I don't think it's a ⁓ I think there'll always be a long tail. And I think that long tail keeps changing as as the world evolves. speaker-1: Yeah, that makes sense. So like there's always gonna be these kind of vertical errors where you'll have a specialized like you could say that Uber is actually a specialized version of of Airtasker, right?

Because it's like someone who's completing a task, which is picking you up and driving you somewhere. And you're the one who's consuming the tasks or using the app. So you could say that like Uber is an example of a kind of specific kind of vertical use case that could theoretically be done be done in something. speaker-0: Correct.

And and you know what's really interesting about that is what we kind of d or articulated is that there's a long tail of ⁓ things even within certain kinds of verticals. So if you look at the way Uber works is they're trying to like standardize things. So they'll say these are the ways it can work. You can have an Uber XL, a regular Uber, an Uber Black, or or whatever.

But let's just say you've got some weird thing where you're like, Look, I got four bikes and I really need someone to be able to put the four bikes, you know, and transport them. over to, you know, my auntie's place and you gotta drop off two of the bikes and then two of the bikes have to go elsewhere. Uber can't do that. Why?

Because like there's not enough people who are like specifically want bike trans or whatever to to do that. And so you know people then, you know, would always criticize us and go, yeah, but there's not enough of of bike moving jobs for Airtasca either. We'd say, no, that's true. Not just the bike job, but the fact that you can post anything on Airtasca means, you know, we unlock that.

And the Halloween costume making and the, you know, help me set up an AI model or, you know, help me use a 3D printer or whatever that long tail is. And I think the unintuitive thing about horizontal is that you don't know what you don't know people might want. And that's why YouTube at the beginning, no one was like, you know, no one thought YouTube was that good an idea at the beginning. But it turns out, ⁓ crap, that long tail is just so big because it's basically the power of human imagination.

You know, now YouTube is just filled with like literally anything you could ever imagine because over twenty years or thirty years just keeps accumulating and and growing. And I think that is the same thing, which is that like, once people get unlocked to like, ⁓ so I could get a person to kind of help me with that thing, ⁓ that's stuck in their head. And then they're constantly thinking about it. And, you know, it's on us to make it easier and less frictionful and simpler and safer and more trustworthy over time.

But I I think the genuine like trend is is our friend in in the sense that like the more people work out how they can ⁓ get help from other people in their community, ⁓ the better that is for us. What's the craziest thing that someone's ever posted that they want doing? Man, we get like so much like to put it into perspective, we get something between six and ten thousand tasks are posted every day. So I always say to people like if point one percent of people's things are crazy.

That's a lot of crazy things happening on Air Tasco. You know, just ⁓ just based on that scale. But, you know, it ranges everything from like really lovely romantic gestures. You know, on Valentine's Day, they'll be like, ⁓ I want you to do a flush mob for my wife, or like, my ⁓ you know, my husband really wants to, I don't know, relive his glory days in a top gun looking, you know, environments.

I want you to like decorate my whole house as top gun or whatever and you know, that that kind of like really nice stuff. ⁓ To some genuinely quirky stuff. Like there was one I remember early on in the days, which was the title of the task was ⁓ Pretend to be my girlfriend, comma make me a sandwich. And we're like, what ⁓ what what is that?

It sounds sus. So we're like digging into it. And and and it was a guy going, Look, my parents keep hustling me to find a partner, and I don't have a partner and I don't want like I'm not interested at the moment. So I just need you to like come over my house and be in the kitchen and like make a sandwich for my parents so that like ⁓ they they can say that's my that's my partner.

So you you get ⁓ we've had we've had ⁓ you know I think my husband's cheating on me. ⁓ can you just like go and like follow them around? ⁓ we have you know all sorts of like our relationship type stuff. But you know what the the the funniest thing about Airtascar is it's it's like a comedy movie.

You go and talk to the people who post these jobs and they go, no, seriously I needed that. Like they don't think it's funny. Cause they're like in their world, like, no, I really needed that. You know, why are you making fun of me?

Like I just think I I really needed someone to, you know, ⁓ hand over the clothes back to my girlfriend because, you know, we broke up and I don't wanna have to go and see her again, you know, so go and hand over all her stuff to to the house. And ⁓ they're dead serious. It's kinda just hilarious like, Yeah, I really needed air tasker for that and we're less like, sweet, I'm glad we could help you. Hmm, that's so funny.

If you try and like imagine Because it could the same person that like is making the soundways that is handing the clothes back in theory. Like if you try and imagine that person's weak, like they've probably had the most crazy week you could think of. So many people love doing tasks because it's a genuine way to like reconnect with your community. Like, have you noticed, like if you look at like how all of like most of our jobs are kind of coming, you know, it's more virtual, it's more automated, it's more like use AI to do this, then process this to do that.

And frankly, a lot of people love. Like even if they've got money and all that, it's just kinda like I just wanna go out and like I don't know, just mow someone's lawn. Like it's it's you know, it's pretty easy. I feel good about it, they feel good about it, and I'm mowing a lawn and it's just old school.

Or it's like I'm just gonna fix a fence for someone 'cause I can fix their their freaking it it it's actually quite interesting because I'm I'm actually really similar. Like it it's it can be quite cathartic, you know? Like I would love to like, you know, just fold origami cranes all day. Like if someone goes, Hey, I need fifty or a government cranes and like, that's great.

You're gonna pay me you know, two hundred bucks that or not? Great. But it's like kinda lost that as humans through all of this ⁓ technology and stuff. I'm not against technology.

I love tech the all the technology and stuff, but you want a mix of like, you know, ⁓ using your brain, using your hands like a like an old school person, I guess. Some people do speaker-1: And also maybe the community, like just the community vibes. Like my ⁓ my parents grew up in the US, but there was a Portuguese immigrant community, so there was always like a guy, you know, like you needed like ⁓ is your lawn mode, like there was a guy you'd call and he'd show up or whatever.

You need like a barber, you need s you know, electrician, like whatever. There was always some dude in the community who was there to to like do whatever you needed. And I think like as people move to new like at least in the US, I don't know if this applies elsewhere, but like everyone is moving. You leave you know, move to some new city, you never come back and like So all the networks kinda get jumbled around and there's no longer like that solid network of like there's always someone you can call and maybe AirTasker if it's focused on like local communities, like, hey, that's a way to restore s you know, a new network where you can now like always have someone that look that you can meet and who'll you know, help you deal with your your stuff.

speaker-0: Yeah, well mean, I would say that like in many ways Airtus is like the old schoolest, you know, eran model ever. Like it really just is, you know, how does it evolve, you know, from, you know, a literal community notice board, need help, you know, fixing my fence, put it up on the notice board, someone else comes and, you know, whatever, evolves, you know, through maybe Craigslist and Gumtree and then Airtusk is just another way to ⁓ to, you know, leverage technology to do the same thing that we've done before and speaker-2: idea.

speaker-0: That's why we kinda like it. It's kinda like it's old school. Like it's not even like it's not like some flashy AI ⁓ tech thing. It's more just like, yeah, we're like helping people like mow their lawns and clean house and and I take a lot of satisfaction in that.

It's pretty cool. Yeah. speaker-1: So let's talk about the challenges of that, because I think one big ⁓ tricky point for for working on a horizontal marketplace like this is you have to I mean, someone will probably hold you guys responsible if, you know, bad things are happening th via your platform. So, like, how do you make sure that illegal activity isn't happening?

How do you make sure that the platform's being used effectively? How do you make sure that people aren't like scamming people, like accepting tasks and and not doing them or whatever? Like what how do you approach all of those problems? speaker-0: Well, the first thing I wouldn't say is actually just talking about CTO then.

It's kind of incredible how little bad stuff happens at the scale that we're at. So, like, you we're we're sort like twenty thousand plus, you know, completed jobs away. That's like a lot of people like meeting together and stuff happening. And we would get like quite literally like a handful or something of like, you know, shit, that's pretty bad.

You know, w we're gonna go fix someone's, you know, flooded kitchen or something. That that's like a handful of times a year. Which if you kinda look at it, it's something like point ⁓ and why is that? We don't set a false expectation on air task.

It's like the customer posts their job. You're clearly typing out this is what I need someone to help me with. Taskers have to say, you know, they've got type out, I I want to do this thing for you and I will charge about this much amount of money for it. Customer then chooses that person ⁓ and escrows the money with us and then speaker-1: Yeah.

speaker-0: And then only when the job's done, the money goes out the back end. Now, to me, that's like the most simplistic of concepts. But basically, the customer's never under any illusions that Airtask is somehow pushing something to them. Like, it's not like we kind of go like, This is Bob, he's amazing, you know, 500 bucks, guaranteed to do all this stuff, do it.

We're kind of like, here's a bunch of data. You know, Bob has done 500 tasks. That is a true fact. We can verify that.

Yeah, Bob. does have an electrical license. We've checked his electrical license and it na ⁓ you know matches his name. ⁓ so we we'll give you the data, but we'll never sort of set an expectation and say this person perfect.

And so we're kind of telling the customer, please be aware, like make a choice. And I would actually say in that sense, it's kind of similar to like a dating website. The dating website should never say, Hey, go out with this person's gonna be amazing. Like they wouldn't say that.

They'd be more like, hey meet these people. You know, you choose if that person ticks your boxes and does all that and I think What happens when you do that is you treat people like adults. They've kind of got to take responsibility and go, well, I did in fact choose that person. So, you know, I've got to know where I where I stand and stuff.

And I think, you know, if you look at what the internet economy has done to like so many people, it's honestly just taken away people's responsibility or any kind of you know, like it's like you you book something on Amazon and it goes, this will turn up in 90 minutes to your house. And you're like, 97 minutes? Like, what the Just frickin' one roll of toilet paper. speaker-1: Well, speaker-0: You know, you said 90 minutes, I want a full refund.

Give me a refund for everything, you know. And it's kind of like the expectations that it's like, that's like, is that healthy? Like, ⁓ you know what my big vendetta is at the moment? Is like, or like my contrarian belief is like, you know, like free returns on e-commerce?

It's actually not really like a healthy vibe for society. Like it's cool as like a customer, yeah, do this. But if you think about how many parcels are flying around the world. Because people just like, Well, I I I I I bought four and I knew I could return it, so I returned three and I kept the one that was good.

And you're like, that do you know how much fuel we just burnt to to do that? And you know, Amazon or whatever is like just paying for all of that, because it economically it turns out that it it's fine. But like that's probably not actually a good thing. Like a better thing for society would be like, Look, if you make the wrong decision, you'd just have to pay like five dollars to, you know, make good and then I think customers would have a different level of responsibility.

They'd actually be like, ⁓ yeah, maybe I shouldn't just flippantly order four and return three. Maybe I should just think about it a little bit. So ⁓ yeah, our platform is more about responsibility. ⁓ and that causes that that's a bit more upfront friction, I must say, which is, you know, we'd love to be able to solve a bit more of that, but that's the trade off.

Upfront Well, ⁓ you have to pick the tasker. For example. Yeah. speaker-1: Might do.

speaker-0: And that's like, hey, pick from three people rather than, hey, we pick this person for you, you know, click a button and it's done. Yeah. Browse the three people, check out their profile. Only once you're happy you decide.

Or ⁓ another piece of friction on our platform would be like that three people give you three different prices. You know, like someone will like, Look, I'd charge two hundred for that, someone else be charge six hundred for that, and you gotta choose. So that that is in fact, that's friction. speaker-1: Yeah, I s I suppose like the main difficulty is just maintaining that market and making sure that there are there is demand to meet supply and so ⁓ I mean, how did it those those early days, did you like pick a particular niche and try and like go from there or was it really open and in and infinitely horizontal from the get go?

speaker-0: ⁓ so I think ⁓ in terms of like how platforms grow, I think that there's kind of two ways you can look at it. One is like opening the platform. And if you think about something like YouTube, it was always, hey, you can post a video about anything. As long as it's a l it's legal, you can, you know, post it on on YouTube.

But then in terms of like where you're putting like ⁓ marketing resources, like limited, you know, ⁓ resources or effort into you probably want to pick stuff. So my guess is, and I don't know if this is true or not, but like my guess is that YouTube would have said, ⁓ look, hey, it looks like people are putting up lot of skateboarding videos. Why don't we go and, you know, go to the skateboarding community and and run an event and and kind of go, hey guys, like if you want to post your skateboarding videos on a YouTube, here's how you do it.

So like you, you, you would keep the platform open so that all the opportunity can come in and you're always keeping that opportunity open, but you'd probably focus your efforts on the certain things. And that's essentially what we did, which is we say, you can post a task anywhere in the UK, but where we have limited marketing resources, we're gonna focus on London and we're gonna really drive it home in London and and make sure that that goes really well. Part of why we were able to do that is because we made the the product quite asymmetric in the sense of like posting a task is just not that hard.

And so, you know, it takes thirty seconds of your life. Like post up a task, need someone to, you know, dress up as a giraffe or whatever, post that task up and To the downside, it's like, ⁓ no one answered my giraffe, dress up task dam. You're kind of like, what else? Took me 30 seconds.

Someone puts up their hand and goes, fifty bucks or fifty quid. I'm dressing up as a giraffe for you this afternoon to promote your brand or whatever. And and it's vi it's viral. It's like, ⁓ my God, has anyone else seen this?

Like I've got, you know, I finally got that giraffe, you know, mascot that we wanted to get. And so ⁓ that's sort of like the I guess the unintuitive thing about like horizontal type platforms is you have that ⁓ that dynamic. But what is the parable in all that is you gotta keep the platform low friction and you've got to make it like really slick. And so like where did YouTube correctly put all of its efforts, I think they w they made upload speed like insanely fast.

Like it was like, you know, back in the day it was like upload a 20 megabyte video and on other platforms it'd take like 20 minutes to upload. And I think YouTube made it so it's like, yeah, 10 seconds, bang, we you know, we've uploaded your video. And for Airtask, it's similar to like how do you make it like super low friction to like express yourself and say, This is what I need? and that's where some of our innovation is.

speaker-1: Yeah, it makes lot of sense. That takes us right into user acquisition. So it sounds like you went kind of city by city or geography by geography. But when you let's say you decided like, okay, we're gonna we're gonna invest our time now in in London.

Do you go after any particular use cases or do you like I'm talking about your marketing, your maybe influencer marketing or or paid ads or whatever you do to kind of focus on that on that area? Do you kind of present it in the horizontal way or do you pick a c like maybe the three, four, five use cases you see as being the most used and the most compelling and make like ads and stuff targeted specifically for for those. speaker-0: Yeah, really a really tricky one and no one hundred percent answer in all directions on this.

I'll give you some examples of this kind of like ⁓ no one hundred percent direction. On Airtasco, we call it posting a task and making an offer. In the traditional, I guess, trades world, you would call it posting a job and receiving a quote. You know, that that's what now the question is like what's the right thing to do there?

Is the right thing to come to the existing ⁓ sort of way of doing things because it's easier to sort of talk about and pull people towards you that way. Or is it better to set your own standard and then talk about that? That's an example of like it's not either or, it's like different depending on the circumstance. So if you went to a tradey conference and you're trying to get, you know, tradespeople to like join your app, you probably want to use their language and then come to us.

But if you're putting an ad on to Google or on on meta or whatever and you're trying to get the general public, then maybe you actually want to use like our branded ⁓ terminology. ⁓ so and then you know another thing that's like not either or is long term stuff versus short term stuff. ⁓ SEM, like ⁓ you know, Google search, ⁓ really great for short term, terrible for long term. Like, you know, it's a very transactional thing of like someone types in, I need a cleaner, we capture you.

Maybe you book a cleaning task, maybe you don't, but you know There's no future value in that other than that one thing. SEO, though, you know, in a startup is kind of like, man, do I have time to go after SEO? Like I might be dead before SEO starts to do it. So again, I think that the the the probably the hardest thing about starting like a really open horizontal marketplace is that the choices, there's just so many choices you can do.

And so what you should do. is kind of difficult to to work out. Like it's not just like this one lever and then just drive down that lever. It's like everything's an opportunity.

And so you're getting propositioned with like, ⁓ you could market in this way, you could do growth in that way. And you're like, geez, I I prioritizing that is is pretty tricky. speaker-1: So what worked for for you guys in the early days? I know you mentioned that you partnered with ⁓ a media company.

I don't know how along how far along that that was, but was there other things that really started to work? Was it, you know, paid paid ads? Was it some kind of UGC like influencer stuff? I guess maybe this was kind of predated that whole wave, but what worked for you guys?

speaker-0: Well, I think ⁓ one thing that was pretty unintuitive was ⁓ search. ⁓ the reason why it's unintuitive is because the cost of it was so crazy high that the economics made absolutely no sense at the beginning. ⁓ so I think we were paying something like thirty dollars to get someone to post a task, you know, after all that, you know, the Google ads. And then it'll be like But only like one in ten of those tasks would actually get completed.

So that's like three hundred bucks to actually get someone to complete a task. And I think back in the day that that task was worth like a hundred dollars and we were making fifteen dollars of that. So then you're kinda like, okay, so if I spend three hundred dollars, maybe I make fifteen dollars and then I net off all my costs and stuff and I made like eleven dollars. And you just like that that's it's it's just ⁓ it's eye watering, you know.

You know, especially when you're a startup, you've raised, you know, your half a million. or whatever and you're trying to like put it to best use to show some runs on the board. ⁓ and one of the things that we learned ⁓ during that process is if you look at like a network effect business, as opposed like so if you look at like a SaaS business that doesn't have like much network effects, like someone's just paying for a SaaS product, the the you basically have an LTV, which is like static.

You know, like we know that these customers worth, you know, a thousand pounds to us over a year's of subscription or whatever. And then you're basically trying to get your CAC to be less than that thousand pounds. And if it is, go for it. You know?

And if it's not, you're an idiot if you buy it because you know, if you buy that customer because you you just lost money on them. The problem with a network effect business is that the network is the product. So in the first sort of like few years, you can't actually think of customer acquisition as like a profitable exercise on like an individual basis. Like When when we were buying that customer for $300, he gave us eleven dollars of gross margin back, it wasn't that we were like, ⁓ that's a good marketing trade.

Like we're not idiots. It's more that like if we could somehow work out how to get to like 10,000 tasks being posted and ten thousand task is doing it, then it wouldn't cost us three hundred dollars anymore. It might cost us, you know, in Australia cost us like ten dollars and the revenue that we make isn't sort of eleven dollars anymore, it's like fifty dollars because you're so valuable to your customers now. And suddenly that equation changed.

So what what we learned is CAC starts high, goes down as the network effect builds, L T V starts super low and builds over time. And it's actually only at that inflection point where those two things cross that you would sort of define that you actually have a network. You have a valuable network effect. And ⁓ I would say like one of the biggest motes in our business is that like no one wants to lose that money up front or or or you know, how do you find the capital to be able to That hard ⁓ at the beginning.

And and so now that we've sort of proven it that we can do it a few times, I think we've got the credibility to be able to say, Yes, this is looks crazy. You know, I'm gonna spend three hundred bucks to acquire this customer for eleven, but I know if I do that exactly this many times, I come out of it at the end and and and it's a profitable business. speaker-1: I think there's a a common thinking around building a network effects ⁓ type business is that you need to find kind of a very small network that you can like get fully kind of working so everyone's getting value out of that small network and then over time you can kind of grow that to bigger and bigger kind of networks.

Did you think about it in that way? And did you start like in a particular city and focus really hard on getting like people in that city to be using your Tesla and only after you like figured that out and you saw that there was active like tasks were being posted? Jobs were getting completed, the the network was working, everyone was happy, and only from there expand, or did you start right away kind of trying to be everywhere at once? speaker-0: We let the marketplace be open everywhere and then we really focused on, you know, ⁓ on London and really, you know, just ⁓ really focused in on So London?

In the UK, yeah. In Australia, ⁓ w we started with Sydney. and then and and really just focused on Sydney and and the same thing happened. ⁓ I think what we we have found that is incidentally really interesting about our business model is what I was mentioning before about the fact that it's quite asymmetric.

speaker-1: The first city? speaker-0: To give Airtasker a go takes no effort. But the upside, if it really works, is sort of like amazing. And and and the and if it doesn't work, it's actually like basically no cost to you.

And so what we noticed is that all around Australia, all of these communities just started popping up because when you had enough of those asymmetric things happening with enough people saying upside, it it grew by itself. And so We actually never launched most of the city we never launched most of the cities in Australia. We just sort of launched Sydney, launched Melbourne, and then the rest of it sort of took over. And similarly in in the UK, you know, we've really invested a lot into ⁓ to London and into ⁓ Birmingham and then into Manchester.

But now we're seeing just like Leeds and Liverpool are just like, ⁓ great. Like that, you know, people must have heard from someone, you know, in Manchester and, you know, they're probably just gone and ⁓ see, this works at home and ⁓ and it's self-propagating. The other thing is that we've got a really interesting two-sided dynamic whereby, although it's a two-sided marketplace, the deal that we give to our taskers is so unbelievably good that we really predominantly just focus on one side of the marketplace.

What do I mean by that is if you look at, say, how Checker Trade works or or or My Builder or Rated People or any of these kind of platforms, they're generally kind of like, ⁓ Hey ⁓ worker, ⁓ you pay me to subscribe as a member or something to the platform or pay an advertising fee, and then I'll give you the opportunity to get some jobs. And if you get some jobs, that's good. But if you don't, you know, you pay me anyway. And that's that's that's asymmetric, right?

That's basically like, you know, someone might be out of pocket. Many people are probably out of pocket because they they give it a crack and it doesn't work for them. Their task's deal is, hey, all the jobs are here. You can see them all, you can have a crack at them.

You can try as much as you want, as little as you want, all for free. Now, if literally this person pays you two hundred pounds, then we're gonna charge you about twenty percent. And although like nobody loves getting charged twenty percent, the real unlock in that is that we don't charge you to join the mem like marketplace, to take a look at all the jobs. All of that value is for free.

And that's really, really powerful, right? 'Cause like it's like if YouTube said, Hey, it cost you ten cents to upload a video. It'd be like Not doing that. Like sound like a lot of money, but it's like no one's gonna upload video of grandma blowing out candles on her birthday cake if it costs ten cents.

And so there's a big difference between ten cents and and zero. And that is what Airtasca ⁓ enables. And that is why I think we can really scale into these ⁓ you know, these new marketplaces without ⁓ having to invest that much. speaker-1: think that also like says a lot about the confidence of you having you know having confidence that that person will come to the platform and find something because if you're charging up front it's almost like I'm not really sure I'm gonna be able to monetize you so I'm gonna charge you up front and kind of gatekeep whole experience so that I make sure I make my L T V.

speaker-0: Totally. I think th there's a couple of things wrong with that with that kind of model. I think, ⁓ for one, to to your point, it creates like the wrong incentives. It actually kind of goes, Well, my incentive is to get you to believe that you can make money versus actually just I actually get you to make ⁓ money.

⁓ it also creates the wrong incentives on the other side of the marketplace, which is like on Airtasca, we ⁓ because we are incentivized on a successful, happy transaction, you know, we have that's the only time we get paid. We want the customer to find the best person. We don't want them to find the person that just paid the platform the most amount of money. You know, so like we are kind of like SEO.

We're like, hey, this is actually the most relevant thing. It's a very noble cause. It's just literally the most whereas th those other platforms, it's a little bit more like SEM. It's kinda like, well, this guy paid me a lot, so I'm gonna put them up at the top.

And if you look at like over the long run, why I think that model's broken is that It's all about aggregating customer demand because that's what the taskers want. That's what the workers want. They want access to job opportunities. And so that means that in order to be able do that, you've got to have a good customer experience.

And the problem with an advertising driven website is that they're not incentivized to create a good customer experience. They're incentivized to get you sticky enough so that they can put a bunch of ads and charge for that in front of you. So you know, like every model. has its pros and cons.

So don't get me wrong. I don't think one is like ethically or principally right or wrong, but I think that's the issue with that that sort advertiser funded model. speaker-1: So going back to Sydney and when you started ac kind of expanding there and you know, you launched there and you put in some actual like you focused on on growing it specifically in Sydney, were there any what were the specific ⁓ tactics that you used on the kind of marketing side to promote the platform?

Maybe some that worked, some that didn't work. speaker-0: Well, I think maybe unintuitively one of the things we did do at the beginning is we would do a lot of the tasks ourselves. Like we were we were really you know, I started doing this when I was probably twenty seven, twenty eight and so was my co founder, was you know, about the same age and so we weren't married, we didn't have kids or any of those kinds of things and so it was just like all on, whatever it takes. You know, we'd decided like this was our thing, we were gonna go do it.

⁓ so one example would be like it was just like we have to get more jobs into this marketplace. So one thing is like if a job's coming up No one else is doing it, let's go ahead and do some. Because we just gotta do something and and get it get it moving. Another thing that we did that was similar to that was that we would actually go to small businesses and say, Hey, if you need something like a letterbox drop done or like a promotional campaign doing, I will take responsibility of that campaign for you.

And then I would just go to Airtusk and I'd like post up like 50 jobs, you know, and that was a way to like in drive that traffic in. After about six months, ⁓ we absolutely stopped doing that because it's just like, ⁓ my God, that was the, you know, I was starting to become a letterbox drop expert, like literally like having to like, ⁓ people would call me on the weekend, like literally on my anniversary, and ⁓ be like, hey, I found a bunch of like ⁓ flyers thrown into a bin at this train station.

And I'm like there driving out, picking out flies out of the bin and taking photos of them and all this kind of crap. ⁓ But I think a lot of it was just like that resilience to go through that and being willing to do a crap load of small things of which nothing is a silver bullet. Like younger marketers and stuff, they're almost like looking for this thing that they can like ship it and then boom, I'm a billionaire. And I'm kinda like, I think it often doesn't work like that.

I think it often is just like, just get better a little bit better tomorrow. If you're doing that and you have faith in that process and just keep doing that, that's how you're eventually gonna get big. Don't get me wrong, there are viral products where that can happen and and that's that's that's a different kind of strategy, I guess. You know, try a hundred things and see which one sticks and ⁓ certainly the way we started AirTask it was more just with resilience and grinding and just do one step forward at a time and then, you know, you wake up after seven years and and maybe you built something, you know, moderately ⁓ that's working.

speaker-1: We go back. Cool. so I wanna talk a little bit about retention. ⁓ both of taskers and of folks that are posting tasks.

Do you do anything there like as far as the app's design or maybe kind of notifications and like just optimizing for getting people to actually post their second task or to to complete their second ⁓ job? Like how do you think about that or is the platform kind of naturally like once they have the magic moment of doing their first task and getting paid or posting their first task and having it get done, that people just like your retention is already pretty good, just kind of on the back of that?

speaker-0: Generally what I would say is we have very, very good retention, but we don't have strong enough frequency. What I mean by that is like we will often look at it and we're like look at our layer cake of ⁓ you know, cohorts of users and we're like, ⁓ that guy, you know, is actually from cohort, you know, from two thousand sixteen or whatever and they're still using air task. But if you look at how that person contributed to the layer cake over the years, it'll be like, you know Posted a task in twenty sixteen, didn't do anything in seventeen and eighteen, came back in two thousand nineteen, didn't do anything in twenty, came back in twenty three.

And so we don't have so much like of a churn thing where it's like, ⁓ they stopped using Deliveroo and now they've switched to Uber Eats and they're gone forever. We have more of an issue of the the it's more like the Airbnb or booking dot com problem, which is like you just don't repeat enough for you know, ⁓ the way we can increase value is by getting you to more frequently use. Right. And ⁓ There are two main vectors that we have on that.

Where we do get frequency from now is on ⁓ what we call like cross-selling, which is you'll use a plumber on Airtasker and then you'll say, ⁓ I need a photographer, I need an accountant, I need a surveyor, I need somebody to do a different thing for me. ⁓ but where we ⁓ and we're pretty good at that, we couldn't get better at that. ⁓ I think that's mainly to do with like inspiration, you know. People who bought this also.

wanted this and getting that right. It's hard to do, but that is an area where I think is a vector for growth. The second one, which is probably ⁓ more like under our nose, is that heaps of people use Airtascar and then they'll literally, you know, when I I'll I'll I'll go and call them or whatever and they'll be like, yeah, thanks so much for building AirTask. It's so great.

I get all these customers and then like, you know, obviously for the second transaction we don't go through Airtascar. You know, we just do it on the side and and that and that's good. And frankly, for the most part, I think there's no point in calling that leakage per se. Like some people call that leakage, but I actually think that that's like the wrong lens.

Cause it's like, hey, once someone's met, they don't owe it to you to come back to the platform. Like, you know, if you met on Tinder, Tinder can't be like, Hey, you married that person? Hey, come on, that's big value. Give me some more money, you know?

Like ⁓ I added a lot of value to you. and so we don't think of it that way, but we do think about like how might we do that? And The first thing that I think is interesting about that is ⁓ we have a profitable business model just based on the introduction. So we're like, that's good.

We're making money anyway and we've got a good enough business. Then I think about the second transactions and I'm like, hold on, the price value thing here does not make sense for us to charge twenty percent. Like we're charging twenty percent. Like how are you gonna demonstrate twenty percent of you know income like the rest of time?

Like that doesn't make any sense. So the first thing we do is actually acknowledge it, like look in the mirror and go, how much value do you think we're creating? And we actually only a couple of months ago reduced the price for the second tasks down to like four percent. For second tasks with the same the same task that you've already Correct.

Because what we realized is we don't deserve an introduction fee. There's no introduction. The intro is already made. But what we do need to charge you for is like the payments and insurance and, you know, all that kind of stuff.

So basically we charge 1.9% plus five bucks on that. speaker-1: What speaker-0: Second transaction, it's just a cover insurance and some of that. It it basically ends up being somewhere between two and four percent of the the task, which is, I think, pretty reasonable.

Then we kind of had a look at like, ⁓ why do customers keep coming back? And you know what's really interesting here? It actually turns out it's more to do with like sort of social dynamics than it has to do with like rational ⁓ pros and cons and costs and benefits. Like, The reason why we found out most people come back to air because we get like thousands of people come back to Airtask every month going, I want to book that same person, right?

Well like, you know, if you're a completely rational econ or like, you know, a rational economic thing, it's like, ⁓ yeah, you could just text them on the side and you don't have to pay anything ⁓ for that. But most people actually found that like it just is like out of context if I like text a plumber from nine months ago And go, ⁓ hey, plumber, do you remember me? My name's Jason. I had that like toilet that was a bit ⁓ broken.

And you know, you said that if I needed you again, I could call you. It's like that's just weird. And so what makes more sense is like, ⁓ actually, if I go back to air task, I've got this contextual window of like, yep, that's Bob the plumber. Jason, yep, need to rebook you again for that thing.

Cool. I remember all of your details. Great. I can good go do that.

And so between doing that and payments and providing the insurance and providing the speaker-2: I speaker-0: I guess assurance that someone, i.e. Airtasker, is monitoring and looking down on what's going on is actually very, very valuable. And so it's less about, you know, what do I get from my four percent?

And it's more about ⁓ making it convenient and intuitive to to go and do it. speaker-1: Well I imagine that four percent if that four percent was still twenty percent like it was, I I I have to think like that change made an impact, right? 'Cause I think if if I'm paying someone like five hundred dollars to do some task, right, and I'm thinking about paying you, you know, twenty percent versus four percent, that will probably change my my calculus on maybe I should just call the guy on WhatsApp speaker-0: ⁓ a hundred percent.

You would be you would not just be neutral, you'd be incentivized like how can I get around this 'cause I want to pay for And I I think one of the big issues is there was like a boom of these kinds of platforms between probably like twenty twelve and twenty eighteen or something. You know, we sort of grew up in that boom as well. And I think the issue was that the economics for most of those platforms, whether it was like Home Joy or ⁓ you know, ⁓ handy or like Uber 4X type models was they needed to charge 20% ongoing to make the economics work.

Like the business did not work. Because the cost of acquisition would be like five hundred bucks or something. And then it'd be like, we need to get fifty bucks out of this transaction at least 11 times just to be breaking even. And so I don't think anyone sort of sat back and said, Yeah, but you know, is is everyone gonna pay 20% a lot of times or this doesn't make any sense.

And so I think it's why it kind of broke because it would be like Okay, maybe you could make it intuitive enough that it's like I'll do it once, I'll do it twice, but eventually someone's like, Hold on. Like I'm paying, you know, I'm paying handy or whatever fifty bucks every time. Right. Now it, you know, pretty strong incentive.

And then also the trust between you and that person grows. So you're just like, you know, ⁓ yeah, th those economics just didn't really work. So, ⁓ I think that's why they sort of never came to that conclusion. Like, if you look in the mirror You know, as a founder or as a businessman, you in the mirror and like, What value do I bring to people?

You're kinda kidding yourself and you're gonna get twenty percent out. And that's why everyone hates the recruitment agencies and all that that have that model and sort of sort of entrenched themselves with it 'cause it's just like it's not worth it. It's the wrong it's the it's the wrong framing. speaker-2: structurally speaker-1: Well it's also a credit to you guys because I think ev like I I would imagine that a bunch of the companies kind of in that era were sort of blindly following the kind of Uber model or the Airbnb model where they do kind of take a consistent cut.

And like you guys had the ability to realize that these are not the same businesses, right? Like if I'm if I'm trying to get an Uber, way less likely that I'll call the last Uber that I had and he'll just happen to also be driving around like that day and be able to pick me up right then when I want in the same way that if you use, you know, you get a plumber through Airtasker. speaker-0: And speaker-1: you can kinda just call him up on the side and be like, Yeah, can you come tomorrow or two days?

And like there's a decent chance that he can make time for that. But it's just like a different like different use case and that requires a different monetization model, right? Like you can't just blindly follow the footsteps of some kind of related company ⁓ that has some similarities. You have to actually think from first principles and figure out like what works for your specific case.

speaker-0: Totally. And you know, it comes down to just like kind of stepping into the shoes of a user and just kind of being like, Okay, so, you know, I'm booking this thing and then it shows a fee that goes like, you know, this you're about to pay two hundred, you know, AirTusk is gonna keep forty of that or whatever. And just like, yeah, no. And by the way, I think this is the other tricky thing on it.

You gotta balance like having a profitable business and ha making the economics work. So you do have to be able to charge money and have a viable business 'cause speaker-1: Like not doing that. speaker-0: It's in everyone's interests that the platform can keep going and it makes enough money to pay the salaries of all its people and all those kinds of things. ⁓ so you gotta make sure that you keep that in mind and and balance, you can't make it like zero percent.

You know, even if you want to do that, you probably can't make it 25%. And this is why all of these decisions I think are really hard because it's never like a one-size, like this is just the exact right thing to do. Like basically, whenever I hear like people say those sort of like soundbitey things, like you just gotta optimize for this, I'm always like, Really? I don't I I bet it's not that simple.

I bet it's a bit of a this and a bit of that. It always makes for less compelling sound bites, but you know, like I think that's that's the issue. speaker-1: So I think the last bit I want to talk about is just expansion. We touched on this a little bit already as far as kind of moving to the UK and everything, but what we didn't talk about yet is just how did you make the decision to expand out?

And was it kind of like Airtasker was already available and open everywhere and you just saw that usage kind of was happening organically in London or in the UK? And that's kind of what pulled you there? Or were there some kind of active decisions of like, okay, we don't have much usage yet or any usage yet, maybe in a particular country, and now we're gonna put a bunch of effort into like actively expanding into that region. speaker-0: Yeah, so we did actually have to make the decision to to launch.

So generally like at a at a technology level, ⁓ we would ⁓ each new country is a tech unlock for us. Like as in we have to build a configuration layer on our stack that goes, Okay, if it's in the UK, it's gonna be in pounds, it's gonna be this time zone. Turns out that there's other interesting things like, for example, I think boroughs in London, they're not actual geographic polygons in Google. Like it's actually kind of like a burrow is like a general concept, but it's not like if you step over that geographic coordinate, you've now moved from this borough to it's it's more like a ⁓ you know, roughly, roughly in this.

And yet that is the most ⁓ intuitive way that people describe where they are, you know, they're ⁓ and so ⁓ there are lots of like tech consideration we had to do. So it was quite a big like, hey, we're gonna do this or not gonna do this. ⁓ I guess two things to say there. ⁓ At least one really important one is that I I think you can't overthink a lot of these things.

And I think overthinking is something that holds a lot of people back from doing shit. What I mean by that is like there's only so much analysis and thinking and planning that you can do to mitigate something, to know whether this is the right decision or not. And frankly, I think one of the things that we've sort of acknowledged over time is there's probably more s unknown unknown stuff that we don't know. ⁓ Well, then there is stuff that we can actually figure out here.

And again, I think it's kind of like being, you know, honest truths to yourself. It's like, of course, you want to have a paper that goes, I thought of everything, and now that's the exhaustive list of things to think about and it's done. And therefore I do this, and therefore it must be the right decision. It's like probably not true.

Probably 80% of things are outside of your control, 20% are in your control. Sure. Go and sort out the 20% and try and get them, you know, as good as you can. But like, Frankly, when we watched in the UK, it could have been that there was some unknown unknown that we didn't know.

Like, ⁓ I don't know. ⁓ Uber's decided to start air Uber Tasker or whatever. It could be, I don't know, everyone hates the name Air Tasker and it's just never gonna work. Or it could be, you know, like there's so many things that that ⁓ that you that are outside of your your control.

It's so I think like as a startup principle. Working out the low cost way that you can get into market and start learning about what's actually going on is kind of critical, you know? ⁓ versus all this time spent at your desk trying to like work out all these plans and all this stuff. It's mostly you can you can, you know, I usually say people like that decision that's gonna take you three months, you can probably make in forty eight hours.

Like honestly, you probably can. Like know what data you need to be able to make that decision. Try to work that out. Don't get me wrong, I'm not talking about being flippant or being being silly about things, but once you've passed it your ⁓ the diminishing returns on like more desktop analysis is probably just a massive negative.

⁓ so rather lower the cost, make it a two way door decision, don't make it a thing that is gonna kill the company if you get it wrong, all those kinds of things. And that's the the better way ⁓ to go. And you know, in choosing London over say I'm somewhere in America, you know, it was honestly just like, hey, it's a freaking big city. ⁓ that's probably pretty good.

⁓ like speaking English, all the same internet infrastructure in this ⁓ internet marketing infrastructure in the sense that it's Google based, it's Facebook based, it's Instagram based. So, you know, there's probably about six or seven things that we looked at. But I I do think that's probably the most powerful thing. Acknowledge what is not in your control and don't try controller.

speaker-1: And I think the big one the big one there that you said is structure in a way that it's a two way door and that you can experiment without a major risk to the business. I think that's probably the key, right? Because basically what you're saying is like you will learn the most by actually trying it in some way versus like spending a ton of time looking at the stats and the numbers and trying to come up with the decision with no like on field experience basically. And I think that setting yourself up to run that experiment properly without a major risk is is maybe the key.

Is that is that about right? speaker-0: Yeah, like I I think it's like I got a I used to play ice hockey when I was a kid and the number one thing our coach would always say is just take the shot. You know, like shoot the puck. Like because if you don't shoot the puck and you think about it and all that, you're definitely not scoring.

And if you shoot the puck, you're gonna find something out, shoot it, might go in, might not, maybe the goalie blocker, but then you you're learning something. You're like, ⁓ this guy, you know, he he moves to the left. Better than he l moves to the right. Or he's always using his stick to to knock the puck away versus his skate.

So we're like, you're learning as you go. And so it's like the best thing I think, you know, my advice to for like pretty much anyone who's like starting a business, like maximize shots on goal. Just keep trying. Because you're learning, you know, you're maximizing the learning.

And if you maximize the speed of that learning, you're gonna beat everyone just on the basis of you're getting smarter about your domain ⁓ faster than anyone else. speaker-1: Curious, ⁓ you mentioned a few things that could have been different between Australia and London, but ⁓ have there been any like significant differences that you've had to ⁓ kind of overcome or are we like a more difficult user to acquire or speaker-0: You know what's so interesting across Australia, the US and the UK?

The average task price is basically the same on an FX adjusted basis within like a few percentage points. The top five categories are the same. ⁓ the number the assigned rate or the completion rate on tasks is almost exactly the same, depending on the stage of life of that marketplace. ⁓ the number of offers per task.

Like how many offers go up against tasks? The average is about the same. And I think, you know, the reason for that on Air Task is we're a platform, we're kind of abstracted. So like I'm sure there are subtle differences at the like service level.

Like, ⁓ you know, like in the United States, I'm guessing that in, you know, some areas there's a lot of like snow shoveling and in other areas there's no snow shoveling. And maybe the way that people introduce themselves is different. Like, you know, I I we have seen that like some of the American ⁓ taskers, they're really good at presenting themselves. You know, they'll be like, I'm an ex-military veteran with 17 years of experience doing this thing.

I'm gonna be awesome. Whereas maybe in the UK it's a little bit more like, look, I'm a handyman and I can ⁓ you know, have assembled a few things together, but you know, I'm not the worst handyman you've ever met, you know. So there are things at that level. But you know, over tens of thousands of tasks a week, I think speaker-1: Yeah.

speaker-0: humans are all have a lot in common. And I think one of the most like really heartwarming things that I've found ⁓ to be true is that most people, if you let them do what they want to do, like you give them in the open platform model and you say, Go out and do what you want to do, vast, vast, vast majority of people just do the right thing. You know, everyone just wants to help, want to make a bit of money, they want to set fair prices, they want to do a good job. Like people aren't out there trying to screw each other and a lot.

Of course, you get the point ⁓ one percent that are that. But I think it's a really great thing about because most people ask us the questions like, how do you make sure people don't kill each other on air task? I'm like, no one kills each other on like a task platform that's like fully transparent and open. Like it turns out it's good.

Most pretty much every human is like a pretty good person and doesn't want to and doesn't want to do that. And our model just says, hey. We are ultimately able to hold you accountable because, you know, everyone on our platform is, you know, ID verified and all that kind of stuff. So we all hold you.

But we're not gonna micromanage what you do every minute of your day. We're not gonna be like, hey, you work harder and faster. You stop being so picky. You know, we're not doing those things.

We're just saying like, hey, everyone will see everything. Go for your lives, guys. And and and I think it's a pretty good I I feel good about humanity from that sense. speaker-1: Awesome.

I think that just about wraps up. Is there anything else that you wanted to talk about today that we didn't ask you? speaker-0: ⁓ no, I just think ⁓ you know, probably like the biggest thematic that's in in my mind is ⁓ you know, people the the fact that like this AI and autonomy is sort of coming in our direction. And I think that ⁓ it's both a good thing and a bad thing.

I do think it's gonna be a ton of disruption in the in the you know, short term is like you if you if you look at the Waymo's, if you ever capture one of those things, you're kinda like, ⁓ man, like this is good and it's gonna I think be very disruptive. But I think that one thing that is cool and I think Air Tasca really believes in and manifests is that humans are always going to be useful for that next frontier of things that are good to do. So we're always going to be looking back and and sort of automating and AIing the crap out of things we used to do.

But we're always going to wanna go on to more and more ⁓ things in the future. So I think that's also a good ⁓ good sign for humanity and hopefully we can be a part of that. speaker-1: AirTasker maybe has a has a particularly good position on all that because like you mentioned it's it shines on the long tail. And I imagine the long tail will also be the like hardest thing to be kind of automated away or whatever because it's kind of highly specific.

It's like people you know, the tasks that are being posted are much more they have very specific circumstances that are not perhaps so easily kind of automated. speaker-0: I think actually Airtask is literally gonna be the last thing that ever gets automated. Like once AirTusker becomes like humanoid robots only or whatever, that's sort of the end of jobs in general. Like it's quite literally like the irony of like, yeah, we can automate a complex assessment of some legal case, you know, blah, blah, blah.

Like we can automate that, but you are not automating fix my fence. speaker-1: Right. speaker-0: My toilet is clogged. Please fix.

Turns out that it's gonna be the final ⁓ the final frontier. Yeah. speaker-1: Awesome. Thanks, that was a great conversation.