Self-employed, you deserve better than platforms
Take back your digital destiny, be free, be prosperous.
One by one, your trades are seized by platforms. To access this new economy you must bend to their rules and sacrifice freedom and profitability. Now there is another way…
Whether you are artisans, freelancers, consultants, independents, sel-employed, you are nearly 3 million in France. You are our home cleaners, our plumbers, our home manicures, our home teachers, our chauffeurs, our delivery men, the photographers and DJs of our weddings, our nannies, our physiotherapists… As well as our pediatricians, our lawyers , our architects, our nurses … and in businesses, our editors, our accountants, our press officers, our designers, our translators, our couriers…
Let’s take our hat off to all those who have chosen individual entrepreneurship. Because they know the price of freedom.
Whoever looks for to develop his client portfolio every day knows what we are talking about. For entreprises, it’s easier: tasks are distributed. At every moment, the entreprise serves its customers and seeks new ones. But when you are one-man-band, it’s a perpetual dilemma: taking care of your customers or take the time to find new ones? And we know who wins most of the time. You are therefore committed to serve to the best your few customers, crossing fingers every day not to see them leaving. In these circumstances, it is not always easy to set decent prices and even less to focus on the most profitable customers. These are the privileges of entreprises.
Then digital economy appeared. The progress: facilitating the meeting of supply and demand. Finally giving to self-employed the same means as entreprises. The promise: an easier and more prosperous life. Well, is it really the case?
It certainly didn’t escaped you, Uber inspired many copycats. Thus the platform economy was born: each business its mobile application and some predict that no businesses will be kept uncovered.
At first sight, this seems to be a perfect example of the digital economy applied to services. This makes it easy for customers to find you and for you to get jobs. Some see the fall of sectoral rents and the advent of self-entrepreneurship.
However, the benefits of this platform economy are very poorly shared: for freelancers, labor, for platforms, prosperity.
These platforms boast about bringing jobs to thousands of people. They always forget to state the cost of it.
You should be free to set your prices.
Even though the motives may be different from one platform to another — impose a market attack by low prices, simplify the offer, take advantage of price changes to the customer — most impose their prices. You have to bow to it and leave with the feeling of being so often sold out.
And who can say that it is true market prices since de facto the market is not free?
You should not pay such high commissions.
In addition to depriving you of your freedom, these platforms deprive you of your prosperity: they charge ridiculous commissions, generally around 20% of your turnover. When at war prices, platforms make you pay the costs by lowering prices without lowering their commissions, or even by increasing them.
When prices are artificially low and when the cost of the platform is practically siphoning your margin off, you have no choice but to heavily extend your workdays hoping to find profitability.
You should be considered as customers.
It is you who are paying to sell your services (via the commission that you consent to the platform). Yet you are considered as subcontractors and not as clients of these platforms. In their eyes, it is the one who places the order who is customer and you are only the one to whom the platform subcontracts the execution of order. Besides, these platforms claim the property of customers since they prohibit you from dealing directly.
You should be free to work with multiple Apps and even outhout.
These platforms require exclusivity. Not explicitly when the law forbids it but not necessarily in a subtle way either: they favor those who connect the most or even disconnect those who refuse too many orders. Even better, some Apps, for “technical” reasons, refuse to work if a competing App is present on your mobile phone.
Customers should be able to freely choose you.
Many platforms impose on the customer the service provider selected for him. Sometimes simply without letting him choose, sometimes more subtly by putting forward those who have paid for better visibility. You lose the direct relationship with customer. And you do not necessarily get it back later since many of these platforms do not allow customers to bookmark their favorite service providers.
You should be able to work as you want.
Many of these platforms impose their “branding” and this can be very restrictive. The clothes to wear, the behavior to have vis-à-vis customers, the wording, the complimentary services (eg bottle of water and sweets). This goes with the logic of considering you as subcontractors and it is finally a common practice of outsourcing. Except that in the normal world of outsourcing customization of service to customer’s brand is paid by a price supplement, not here.
You should be able to work whenever you want.
Many of these platforms offer on-demand services and want resources to be distributed in their schedules accordingly to the expected demand. You are therefore required to set in advance your availability periods, to stick to it under pain of penalties and to notify well in advance your holidays or even take them preferably when it suits the platform. This is still the logic of outsourcing and you have no choice but to comply.
These platforms go against the very nature of independent: his taste for freedom.
The problem with all these platforms is that they have not chosen to integrate independents in business plan by taste for individual entrepreneurship but by opportunism. What motivates them to “give you jobs” is the flexibility offered by the outsourcing model. Much better than having to recruit as many employees. Moreover, they can rely on the isolation of each of you and your economic dependency to benefit a docile workforce. We are far from the ideal of individual entrepreneurship.
To platforms model we want to respond with the marketplace model.
We use here two concepts that one can see as identical but that we will oppose one against the other on the following principle:
- The platform is an opaque system linking its customers and subcontractors.
- The marketplace is a transparent system creating direct relationship between buyers and sellers.
It is the self-employed who pay for business linking service via commissions paid to intermediary. Yet platforms consider you as subcontractors and not as customers. The marketplace is not mistaken and considers you sellers as its customers and buyers as your customers.
We need to go back to the very essence of the marketplace.
The marketplace creates a minimal framework that ensures each and every one of you a fair chance to sell your services. In the marketplace, you keep your freedom. To offer the services you want. To fix your prices. To come whenever you want. The customer is also equally free. To compare prices and quality. To choose the service provider he likes.
The marketplace must respect neutrality.
It can not intervene on prices or restrain freedom of contracting between you and your customers.
The marketplace must be fair.
Each provider must be treated equally. Only the quality-price ratio perceived by customers must guide their choice. It should not be possible for a service provider to pay more for higher visibility.
Such a market place did not exist so we built Komunn.
Komunn is the new mobile application that wants to free you from uberisation.
With Komunn you keep the complete control of your business.
When you build your service catalog, you set prices yourself and you can change them at any time.
You personalize offers with photos and description. For each service, you choose available options and set their prices.
You can extend your service catalog with new offers or withdraw some of them (the service may be out of season or not profitable enough for you). You are not required to stay within the boundaries of your trade. You can discover services close to your skills or try something completely different.
You set your own time slots. You can change them at any time. Each order is final only when you have accepted it.
You are free to use other Apps or even to do business outside of Komunn.
With Komunn, customers also keep their full liberty.
The customer places an order with the independent he has chosen. To make his choice, he was able to sort offers by price or by rating. He looked at photos and description made by each of you and reviews left by other customers. The customer was able to base his choice on the quality-price ratio that suits him.
The customer can go to his favorite suppliers’ boutiques and place order again.
The customer can cancel his order at any time and without penalty (up to 2 hours before the beginning of rendezvous, excluding services with immediate command).
Komunn creates conditions for each of you to prosper.
In addition to giving you freedom of prices back, we have set the commission at a level that should allow you to maintain your profitability: 5% (to which must be added the usual 3% for transaction costs).
For an independent with €3,000 monthly turnover, it’s €360 each month that stay at the bank.
We want that thanks to Komunn, you take back your digital destiny in hand.
