Why the gig economy isn’t ready for gig-workers
By Philipp Toth
The gig economy has been built for customers at the expense of the worker. Modern gig-workers and freelancers are losing their potential revenue to outdated gig platforms that place a significant amount of financial and time consuming burdens on the gig-worker to create value for the customer.
Non-transactional gig-marketplaces, such as Craigslist, Facebook or Nextdoor, have extremely efficient client matchmaking capabilities, but every single step of the process for gig-workers to legally start a contract and to transact for work with a client is unformalized and painfully inefficient. The gig economy as is, has been built for the customer and not for the worker.
The following pain points are the key issues which currently hold the gig-economy back from being an efficient and reliable way for gig-workers to produce their income.
Pain point #1 — Deal Negotiation
Deal-closing in non-transactional gig marketplaces is an unformalized and inefficient process. Before every gig with a new client, the gig-worker must go through the process of communicating the terms and conditions of the offer-for-work, which includes emails, phone calls and in-person negotiations which can take days to finalize. There is no standardized process to do this, which means gig-workers must also learn how to do it in order to begin developing a reasonable cash-flow from their work. All these time consuming activities are unpaid and significantly reduce the average per-hour income side-hustlers and freelancing micro-entrepreneurs can make.
Pain point #2 — Job Preparation
Once a gig-worker has settled with their client on the terms and conditions for their work and created the contract, they are still in danger of major problems occurring before the work is complete. For starters, the re-scheduling process is unformalized, meaning all adjustments to the work time and place needs to be handled through more time-consuming communication with the client. Secondly, there are currently no enforceable cancellation or insurance policies for gig-workers in case of sickness, injury, or required delays due to inclimate weather.
Paint point #3 — Invoicing
None of the non-transactional gig economy marketplaces have an integrated system for invoicing, which means further time-consuming and unpaid work the gig-worker needs to perform in order to create and distribute the invoices for payment. There is also no integrated manner of financial status reporting nor is there a financial dashboard for the gig-worker to monitor. This, of course, means the gig-worker needs to handle all of this manually.
Pain point #4 — Receivable Collection
Once the gig has been completed and the invoice for payment sent to the client, there will be a substantial amount of time before payments are verified and collected in the gig-workers bank account. This can take as long as one to two weeks, which alone, could make the gig economy entirely infeasible for many prospective gig-workers. There are also no penalties to delayed payments from clients, which can further increase the amount of time it takes for gig-workers to receive income, simply for working for the wrong clients. 80 percent of all gig workers wish for an instant payment option, as opposed the current net-30 day procedure.
In order to get around this, and the, in many cases, dodgy under-the-table payments that many gig-workers are forced to do in order to make this process possible, there needs to be a system that escrows payment as soon as the contract is accepted and sends out payments as soon as it is completed.
Pain point #6 — Rating and Referrals
Every gig-worker needs to use multiple gig platforms to reach their full potential client-base. The problem inherent to this is that each gig platform has their own system of reviewing gig-workers and building a reputation for them. This means that a gig-worker will need to spend weeks or months slowly building a reputation on each gig platform before they can earn a reliable flow of good clients, because most potential clients are much more reluctant to trust a demanding task to someone with little to no positive ratings from past customers. However, being active on multiple platforms in parallel makes a platform rating only an average rating, by definition. In order to solve this issue, there needs to be a universal worker rating that can be inserted or ported into job listings on every gig platform, so the worker only needs to prove their value one time, and can then focus on their client funnel and earn a reliable and consistent income.
Heymate, the solution to the gig economy’s pain points
Heymate is a deal-closing tool for the gig economy generation that creates just as much value for its workers as it does for its customers. With the heymate app, gig-workers can create, negotiate and settle legally enforceable peer-to-peer contracts in under 20 seconds. Gig-workers can share their heymate offer-for-work on any available gig platform, as well as offline and in-person, and when a customer accepts their deal, payments are immediately escrowed until the terms and conditions have been satisfied, at which point the worker receives their income instantly.
The heymate mobile app also implements a universal worker rating history that can be shared anywhere the offer-for-work can, allowing gig-workers to prove their quality of work on any platform, even those they have never used before.
With heymate, the pain points of the gig economy can finally go away and gig-workers can stop worrying about all the issues setting back their flow of work, and can start earning their income when they want, and how they want.
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.
