What’s preventing gig-workers from earning a liveable income?
By Philipp Toth
Make no mistake, working in the gig and side-hustler economy is hard. Despite the promise of being one’s own boss and choosing work hours, the gig economy requires its own set of skills and discipline outside of the specific type of gig-work being done.
Potential gig-workers who don’t take adequate precautions to set themselves up for success in the field, run the risk of losing potential revenue and not gaining sufficient enough income required to make their gig worthwhile.
Keep clients coming in
Creating an efficient client pipeline is integral to being successful in the as a micro-entrepreneur. The worst case scenario for gig-workers is if they finish working for a client and don’t have another already scheduled and ready to go. Gig-workers need to always be finding and communicating with potential clients to have at least two-weeks to a month worth of gigs lined up to ensure that even if there’s a period where no new clients are incoming, the gig-worker will have the buffer room to prevent them from spending time without income. There are a number of online tools to make managing a client pipeline easier, but it is currently underserved within gig platforms themselves.
Lost time and money
One of the biggest problems in today’s gig economy is unpaid administrative work. The way non-transactional gig marketplaces such as Facebook, Nextdoor and Craigslist are designed cause gig-workers to spend a substantial amount of time before and after every gig, as well as wait one to two weeks for the payments to process through PayPal or their bank and arrive in their wallets. Most non-transactional marketplaces have perfected their core feature: peer-to-peer matchmaking via profiles. However, engaging with their “match” in a P2P deal needs to be done informally and offline. The sad truth is many people are financially incapable of getting started in the gig economy.
For those that have enough money to sustain them through the first couple months however, need to appropriately set aside time every work day to keep on top of their administrative work. If they don’t plan ahead for this, it will just keep piling up until they are no longer able to continue working on their client pipeline. Just as with scheduling hours for a work day, gig-workers need to schedule hours for their administrative work.
The problem with the current tactics for streamlining the gig economy process and increasing the flow of revenue, is that they all need to be handled manually. The top gig platforms don’t give gig-workers all the tools they need to succeed on their own, so for many of them, when they start out they are in the dark on what it takes to actually succeed.
Heymate, the gig economy streamlined
There is a solution to the manual unpaid work problem in the gig economy, which is a mobile deal-closing tool called heymate. Heymate is the first app for the gig economy to offer gig-workers the ability to create, negotiate and close on legally enforceable peer-to-peer contracts in under 20 seconds. The app streamlines the unpaid administrative work each gig-worker previously needed to spend their working hours completing and allows them to focus on producing income, rather than wrestling with out-of-date gig platforms.
The platform launched its invite-only alpha version in Sept. 2018, and will release to the public in Q1, 2019.
To learn more about heymate, please visit our website at heymate.works or join our Telegram community (@heymate_official) to keep up to date on recent developments!
Philipp Toth is the CEO and founder of heymate, a portable deal-closing tool designed for the gig economy generation. Philipp has 12 years of experience in corporate value creation and operational excellence design and implementation, accumulated during his careers in management consulting and investment management. Heymate seeks to solve the gig economy’s efficiency gaps and payment deficiencies by allowing users to create legally enforceable peer-to-peer contracts online or offline within 20 seconds.
