TapChief 2.0 — Work with Experts On-Demand!
Collaborate with Experts for Consultations, Projects, Workshops, Training & more, on-demand
It has been nearly 18 months since we rolled-out the first version of TapChief as a platform to consult Experts via phone calls. We have come a long way, from 3 people in a hostel room office at BITS Pilani to a team of 15 people and a community of makers, doers and innovators.
We set out to build TapChief to be the easiest way to access and leverage expertise across the globe. The ability to speak to someone who has been there & done that, over a phone call for any form of help was the first step in this mission and our users validated our thesis with some glowing reviews.
However, sooner than later, we realised a telephonic or video consultation can only achieve so much for a TapChief user. The wonderful community of users & experts we had built on TapChief wanted more of us and our Experts.
“Our focus on consultations alone, as a medium to share expertise, turned out to be a bottleneck.”
Our mission with TapChief was to ensure people can share their expertise & skills with one another beyond all kinds of geographical & infrastructural boundaries. We strongly believe that information exchange empowers and encourages a greater sense of interactivity, creativity and more importantly, results in wonderful things which couldn’t have been if not for the mutual collaboration between people from diverse backgrounds.
“When our beloved community, who has been with us every step of the way demands something, we figure out a way to make it happen!”
We decided to open up TapChief, through a variety of new engagements, to a select group of users & experts in a closed beta over the past 6 months.
From helping a small business store go online with their own e-commerce website, to setting up a global marketing strategy for a B2B SaaS product, to helping a young AI startup draft their patent application, to facilitating multi-national EdTech companies develop their curriculum, to enabling market research studies for some of the largest consulting firms — in a very short span of time, our experts have been leveraged for a variety of engagements.
To be honest, we viewed this as us going out of our way to solve some of our beloved users’ pain-points but the results over the past few months have astounded us. Here is what transpired —
- Our Experts collaborated over 5000+ hours for a variety of engagements.
- The kind of Expert Engagements varied from Short-term Projects, Training Programs, Workshops, On-Site Contracts, Brand Evangelising amongst others — both online & offline.
- These projects touched multiple industries such as Education, E-Commerce, Healthcare, Consulting, Finance, Manufacturing amongst others, validating our thesis on building a one-stop platform for all kinds of expertise.
- One of the things we least expected was the varied breadth of users who participated in this closed beta which included Individuals, SMBs & Startups, Large Corporates & Multi-National Companies.
While the numbers above are definitely encouraging, as a startup known for expertise, our constant quest is to learn from our own & users’ experience and weed out critical obstacles when they engage external expertise.
When we spoke to our users who worked with us on this closed beta about their previous experiences in leveraging external expertise…
All of our users shared three primary concerns.
“Who would be the right person for us?”
For users, finding external expertise was a painstaking task as it involved sourcing the right professional either through personal contacts or cold LinkedIn messages. This resulted in imperfect matches resulting in sub-par quality and more often than not, the turn around time was significantly larger than expected.
“How long should this take & how much should it cost?”
The other biggest pain point was to clearly define the scope of work & accordingly setup payment terms for the same. Users who have never hired in an area outside their personal expertise didn’t have the required information on if the time required for an engagement is justified & more importantly, are the rates being quoted in tune with the market? Basically, every user was worried about the effort & resources required for an engagement.
“What happens if things go wrong?”
A simple google search will show up numerous results with terrible tales from unfinished work to difference in expectations and unpaid projects on the Expert side. Essentially, when you collaborate with an external resource whom you have not known for a long time, quite a few things can go wrong and thus far, there has been no foolproof way of avoiding this.
Problems open up doors of innovation!
Our top priority was to solve for each of these critical concerns with each engagement and arrive at the ideal solution for every form of Expert Engagement out there.
While we are aware that we are going to hone this for years, we are absolutely certain about the 3 things that are going to be relevant, even 20 years down the line, as we build TapChief to be synonymous with Expertise.
1. Perfect Match
At TapChief, once you post your request, we leverage various Machine Learning algorithms to curate 3 Expert Profiles for you within 48 hours. You can interview or talk to any of the them, before finalising them for a particular engagement. As a customer, you are no longer searching for a needle in a haystack and you will also be certain of the expert that you are engaging.
Unlike in the past, your engagement now takes off within days as opposed to weeks or months.
2. Seamless Delivery
Every project begins only once both, the user & the expert, are in agreement on the detailed Project Brief which includes specific milestones and respective timelines. You are also consistently connected to your project & the expert through the TapChief Dashboard where you can share files, messages & make calls to each other.
In order to make it further seamless, every project is treated uniquely with sufficient flexibility on Fixed & Milestone-based pricing.
This ensures timely feedback from the user, clear direction for the Expert and achieves Price Protection for the engagement.
3. TapChief Secure
Ensuring their money is safe, their work is being done on time & according to their expectations is the biggest concern for users engaging external expertise. This is something we hold accountability for on every engagement on the TapChief platform through a combination of proprietary technology & human assistance.
We also facilitate full refunds if the deliverables are not upto mark and not on time.
Our belief is that organisations will no longer be restricted to the talent within their walls. New-age organisations & entrepreneurs realise the value of enabling their existing resources and talent through external expertise. While small businesses & startups gain multitudes from the experience of a veteran, a large organisation gets to view the world from a new lens every time they seek external help.
Professionals on the other hand, want to have easier ways to monetise their expertise and skills and have work that not only pays them but excites them everyday.
We are now open!
So today, after a long wait, we are opening up this opportunity to work with some of the finest people in multiple industries to every organisation & consumer out there.
At TapChief, we are excited to play an active role in the growth story of a variety of organisations & entrepreneurs as our Experts continue to share their knowledge & expertise beyond boundaries.
