Frapp Is Now Futwork
The What, Why and Why Now.
For the many who have seen our journey for the last 5 years, you would know that our single driving force has been to build a quality ecosystem for India’s youth to get access to opportunity and benefits.
During this time, we built India’s first automated digital student validation system which got the global concept of student discounts to Indian e-commerce. This evolved into Student Identify, APIs for ID validation to run student discount programs used by Flipkart, Amazon, Gaana, Samsung, Lenovo amongst many other businesses.
As we started developing insights about how we can create larger impact for the youth, we realized that while offers were a great value add, the core issue was with respect to:
- Availability of disposable income
- Access to jobs, internships and getting introduced to the profession world
At ~Rs.780 in average pocket money and with a 20%+ youth unemployment rate, the worlds youngest country didn’t seem to have enough opportunities for the youth to flourish.
While access to education was being democratized with some great platforms, the lack of access to quality work opportunities for the youth was something that came up with every user interview we conducted.
We started offering internships on our platform but soon discovered it to be a lose-lose-lose proposition.
The First Lose: Make sure people who are working get paid
Our focus had to shift to getting them ‘paid’ in cash and not in experience. Keeping this in mind, we launched gigs on the platform. These gigs were called Missions and were mainly marketing and content creating jobs for the youth. And while this helped us get to our audience, it wasn’t the answer we were looking for.
In the last year, we got a chance to onboard users from 11,000+ pin codes who have used our apps and given us feedback. What we learnt about their life, their core issues and their needs encouraged us to move from a platform for youth to earn their pocket money to an employment generator.
We had to democratize jobs. For us, that is the future of work.
To do this, we identified three critical areas we needed to address:
- There is a skilling issue
- There is a job availability issue
- There is a trust issue
We had to make sure that we train gig-workers on our platform and get the supply of jobs to them. Moreover, we had to ensure sure they get paid.
The Second Lose: Getting the output required
For companies, gig work has been a question mark because of output. One of the game-changing insights we got from our interaction with our customers is the transition to being output focussed than resource focussed. The idea that a resource is a means to an end and not the end itself means success is now not measure in ‘hours’ but ‘output’. For eg: Actual sales made, actual stores merchandised, actual audits completed.
Our solution had to make sure that it gets companies the best suited gig workers to get the job done. It had to be
- On Demand
- Cost Effective
While a lot of jobs in companies are going to go towards gig workers, we feel massive scale can be achieved in jobs which:
- Are standardized
- Have binary output
These typically fall under what are now coming to be known as grey collar jobs. Low-medium skill, standardized work.
We will help companies save 30% of their human resource costs by moving to gigs
The Third Lose: Not controlling output
Internships and job placements meant not controlling output, and to make our future of work hypothesis work, controlling output was the most critical.
We built the product in 2 parts:
- Project Management Tool: To help companies hire, manage and pay gig workers
- Marketplace: To hire gig workers
This meant control over the process and the output delivered too. We are and will remain committed to make this work for the customers. We have launched training modules within the app to help achieve this objective.
Gig workers are now getting pre-trained and the training modules are completely digital and scalable.
A lot has changed since we began!
Our goal, vision, target audience and customers have evolved. With Frapp, we aimed to build the largest platform for student benefits.
We are going one step further. We are gunning to be the largest employer in terms of active gig-workers in India in the next 5 years. Our goal is to train 500,000+ people and give them access to gigs and projects, not only as a side hustle, but as a way of life.
What are we changing?
- Skilling with courses: We have already trained over 10,000 users. Training is going to make us a pure on-demand market place
- New type of jobs: Moving from just marketing to a broader range of jobs which impact critical company objectives such as sales and research. Check out our first product — Tring to set up distributed tele-calling teams for sales and operations. We are targeting the $28 billion call centre industry in India.
- A broader audience: From being student only, to being for anyone who wants to make a livelihood by putting in effort and time. This includes the underemployed youth, at-home moms and everyone else!
From lose-lose-lose to win-win-win:
Everyone wins in Futwork by ensuring guaranteed earnings and guaranteed output!
Like we always say at Futwork, the future of work is here.
You can know more about Futwork from our website.
