Most tech companies are designed to make some aspect of our lives simpler. But even with such a booming industry, some segments of society haven't been catered to.
One such area is the blue collar staffing industry. Joe Nigro, a startup veteran and founder of Work Today, has built a system that makes finding a job for the day as easy as sending a text. With the LA-based app, workers can simply respond to a text about a potential job and businesses are able to pick through a list of applicants who might not possess a Built In LA or LinkedIn profile.
Having been responsible for developing communities of contractors at Unsully, a mobile car wash service he built and sold to Handy, and LA-based HomeHero, Nigro called upon a combination of his professional and personal experiences to develop his latest venture.
“I was raised by a single mother, two little sisters, and I saw what my mom had to do on a daily basis to put food on the table, and from a young age, I had an affinity for helping people find jobs,” Nigro said. "In my experience in building these labor-based marketplaces, I was really drawn to the workers, and I saw the biggest issue being the engagement using a native OS. They want a lightweight, native kind of experience, using the medium they love: text messages.”
His desire to help solve the problem prompted Nigro to create a bit of an experiment. Before work every morning, Nigro would go to Lowe’s and Home Depot’s all over LA and hand out business cards prompting the recipients to text a number if they wanted work. Soon the Google Voice number he set up was receiving hundreds of text messages a week.
“At the time, I was at HomeHero, and I knew I would be leaving soon, and I wanted to start a business,” he said. "But I'm an entrepreneur; I'm definitely not employable, but I wanted it to reach a huge market and impact people's' lives. After a few weeks of doing this, I realized I needed to find a way to automate this product, because it definitely wasn't scalable with many running around in the streets."
In the world of blue-collar staffing, jobs last in hours and days, as opposed to more established periods of times we’re used to working in the tech world. Work Today’s platform allows companies to create jobs for free on their website, and a text is blasted out to a number of workers based on their expertise and location. The companies can then review each potential worker and book, insure and pay those workers instantly on our platform.
“We do a great job of acquiring a lot of workers because they get paid at the end of their shift,” said Nigro. “Businesses have an insurance policy that protects the workers, and allow them to communicate with the business via text.”
Today, the company officially launched the platform out of beta. With more than 50,000 workers across the US and more than 150,000 connections to date, the company also announced it had secured a $1.1 seed round of funding from Mucker Capital, Social Capital, Hone Capital (formerly CSC Venture Capital), E-Merge and GAN Ventures.
While Nigro and his team expand the platform’s reach to Orange County and San Diego, his goal for the product has not changed. With an average payout of $14 an hour and more than 85 percent of employees returning for a second job, the workers will always come first to Nigro.
“Our real goal here is to democratize the labor market,” said Nigro. “One of the ways we do that is by paying whatever the businesses wanted to pay the worker. We only charge the business, never the worker.”
Images via Work Today
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