The Need For At.Business

Armand Poonawala
Nov 4 · 5 min read

Our 2 year journey with At Social, a social media marketing solution for small businesses that is both affordable and quality-assured has led us to a learning that is far more profound than anything we were expecting.

At Social has grown 400% in the last 10 months, and despite this growth trajectory we’ve decided to launch At Business (www.at.business).

Why?

Basically from the time we’ve launched we’ve actually changed our form almost on a weekly basis in order to consistently improve and adapt to simply what works best. Since it happened with just small tweaks at any single time, it did lead to a complete change of the model itself when comparing it to any form that came about 3 months before it.

What happened as a consequence was that explaining what we were doing in social media became fairly complex..even to ourselves! The model had almost taken on its own form after month on month tweaks based on what works best. It definitely wasn’t simple as explaining a regular platform model like Uber, Airbnb etc. or an agency model.

After all of that molding and bending, we basically just asked ourselves again, “what are we really doing?”

We knew that something that we were doing was working but what was it? And why was it working?

The only way to answer these questions was to break down what we were fundamentally doing and take a hard look at it once again-

1) Filtering out the best social media professionals we could find.

2) Training them

3) Creating insanely good processes that they would have to work within.

4) Giving them the tools and resources to work with. For example, giving content creators in Mumbai the ability to use a photographer in NYC to capture images for them.

5) Quality checking the work.

6) Doing this all in such a way that it can scale easily and provide businesses with a solution that is both affordable and quality-assured.

At Social Model

So after closely observing this we asked “so why does this work?”

To answer the question we had to see what would happen if we didn’t exist. We knew that agencies charge too much for small businesses for the quality of work we provide, and so the only thing left to look at is what would happen if businesses just used Indian freelancers. Now in order to do this, they’d have to use platforms like Upwork, Fiverr or Freelancer.com. So we had a look again in the context of what we were doing.

Their model is simple, freelance platforms like Upwork, Fiverr & Freelancer.com only connect businesses with freelancers.

But how are platforms like this really doing? And what does their future look like?

We were pretty surprised to see the below statistics ourselves. It’s clear that the platform model works well with U.S. freelancers where more than 33% of the workforce is freelance. If you look at India though, it’s only 2% of the workforce that is freelance.

Then, looking at how this is going to change is even more startling- the U.S. freelance workforce barely grows further and the Indian freelance workforce is going to grow so fast that by 2035, the amount of freelancers will go from 11 million to 172 million (from 2% to 24% of the workforce) which is almost as high as the total US workforce combined. Here are the stats-

So there’s clearly a problem here and something that is stopping the Indian freelancer from successfully using these platforms.

Using our learning from the past two years, the problem is clear. Just connecting the average Indian professional with a business over the internet is not enough. They’re just not ready yet and here’s why-

The problem is that the Indian freelancer can’t simply be connected and must instead, be integrated.

We realized that these were exactly the problems we were solving for just social media marketing [if you scroll up to our model] and that this was actually a systemic problem that must be solved for all work that can be done remotely, not just in social media!

That’s what At Business aims to do- integrate the Indian workforce into the future of work. How? By applying the model we learned worked for social media, but just for everything else as well! Just what OYO Rooms is to platforms like Booking.com, At Business could be to platforms like Upwork. We’re not just aggregating, but also doing all the stuff needed in the middle too.

It’s actually a whole new way of working that we’re creating which is neither working for a company nor freelancing. For the lack of a term, we came up with “Atlancer”-

What this means if you’re a small business owner- we’ll be a solution that you can trust with almost all of your business needs (that can be fulfilled remotely) where we just do what you need done affordably and with assured quality so that you can go back to doing what you love.

We mean this quite literally. Just go to www.at.business and tell us what you need done along with a phone number.

An Atlancer will then message you on WhatsApp with our solution and a potential free demo too.

Armand Poonawala

Written by

CEO of @, NYU Stern $300k Entrepreneurs Challenge Finalist, NYU Comp Sci graduate.

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