Guest: Tim Fung, CEO and founder of Airtasker
Original publication date: 4 June 2021
Original description: Sean Aylmer speaks to Tim Fung, the co-founder and CEO of gig economy platform Airtasker. Airtasker listed on the ASX in one of the most exciting IPOs of the year, having grown from humble beginnings in just 10 years.
Update: Airtasker's share price has come off since this interview was recorded - from around $1.20 at the time of publication in 2021, to below 40 cents. This interview is general information only, and you should seek professional advice before making decisions.
Welcome to Fear and Greed Sunday feature. Oh, Michael Thompson. We love a good entrepreneur story on this podcast, and this one fits very neatly into that category. Back in June of twenty twenty one, Sean Aylmer spoke to Tim Fung, the co founder and CEO of air Tasker, and this conversation took place not long after air Tasker listed on the ASX. Now, the company, which we'll hear more about in a moment, is based around odd jobs, essentially finding and paying strangers to do all those little things that you either can't do or won't do yourself. The share price has come off a lot since this conversation. Back then it was a round a dollar twenty Now it's under forty cents. But it is still a fascinating story of coming up with an idea, building a business out of it, and taking that all the way through to an IPO and beyond. It is a great chat. I hope you enjoy it.
Welcome to the Fear and Greed Daily Interview. I'm Sean Almer. The most exciting IPOs this year was the listing of gig economy platform air Tasker. It was founded back in twenty twelve as a way to connect people who had odd jobs with those who could do them for a negotiated rate, everything from assembling it of furniture, good babysity. Since then, it's grown significantly, acquiring competitors and culminating in the listing on the ASEX. In March, the issue price was sixty five cents, but by the end of the second day shares an air Tasker closed up one hundred and seventy percent. They've settled back a bit now but are still well above the issue price and an incredible ride and opening up opportunities now for major marketing campaigns and expansion. Tim Fung is a co founder and CEO of air Tasker and my guest today, Tim. Welcome to Beer and Greed.
Hey Sean, thanks for having me tell me.
The air Tasker story.
Well, as I mention, back in twenty eleven, we came up with the idea for air Tasker. So it's been almost a ten year journey and it all started when I was moving apartments and I asked a friend of my own ivan to help me park all my boxes and move them. He has a truck which he uses to do deliveries for his frozen chicken nuggets business, and so we packed everything in his truck moved it across to my apartment. And then that just got us thinking, is why don't we ask friends and family to do all these kinds of jobs when there's so many people out there who are looking for a way to be able to earn some additional income. And what we realize is that just isn't really a fit purposed way to do local services. And we thought this is kind of crazy because if you look at platforms like Amazon and Ali Baba and Cogan that are making buying physical products so easy, yet take a look at services and it's still you to ask a friend put it on a classifieds. We thought, you know, there's got to be a simple way to do e commerce for local services.
Great idea in this great story. At what point did you think, actually, we're onto something here.
It was a hard slog for quite a number of years, actually, and the reason for that is that the way air task is built is it's truly a community marketplace. We describe ourselves as being open and horizontal, which means that the way that we build trust on air taskers through transparency and accountability rather than doing the jobs ourselves, and the types of work that can be done through air task is really infinite. You can get anything done on air Tasker within our community guidelines. But what this means is you do have this chicken and egg problem when you start, which is, you know who comes first, the people who want to do the work, other people looking for someone to do the work. And it takes a long time to do that. And you know, we tried a lot of things, failed at a lot of things, and you know, it took us quite a few years to get up and running.
Okay, So how does air Tasker make its money?
We found this really really important what our business model is, and that is that we don't do advertising, and we don't charge subscription fees or anything like that. We align ourselves completely with our customers and our taskers by only charging a percentage of the completed task value when the job is completed, to the satisfaction of both parties. And this is really important because it means that you know, taskers, the people who do the work on air Tasker, don't have to pay anything upfront and they simply just get you know, only when they receive income into their bank account. Does air task earn anything and the same thing for customers. We charge nothing unless you get the job done.
Okay, So let's take a real life example. I need a babysitter on Saturday night. You know, I have two kids and they're five and seven, and I'm going to be out from seven till twelve, and so it costs one hundred and twenty dollars for argument's sake. So I go on air tasker dot com dot AU, I look for a babysitter. There's someone in the area. It's going to cost me one hundred and twenty dollars. I pay the babysit at one hundred and twenty dollars and then a percent of that goes to air task Is that right?
That's right. So there's a small fee which is applied on both sides of the market. So if the job value is one hundred and twenty dollars, the customer will pay a slight booking fee on top of that, and the tasker will pay a percentage of that. All in all, a percentage of the amount that you pay through to air Tasker goes to air Tasker, and that is about seventeen percent of the task value.
Okay, So what is typically the amount of money that is being paid for a task and what are the typical tasks?
Such a great question. So one of the things that we've been seeing is the types of work going through air task are evolving over time. So, as you mentioned, when we started, we're all about you know, odd jobs and errands, and primarily people would use air Tasker for packing some boxes or doing some light gardening work. But actually over time that the types of jobs have evolved so that now we have tax accountants, lawyers, architects, surveyors, all these other kind of work is coming and as a result of that, the average task price on air Tasker has been increasing. Where it stands today, it's around one hundred and ninety four dollars is the average task value?
Okay, And it's tax time coming up. So if I want an account and I go to air Tasker, potentially.
Absolutely So, as I mentioned, we're an infinitely horizontal marketplace. So it's one of those things where anything that you need done as long as it fits within our community guidelines. And so there are some things that you know, we certainly protect the community from. But in terms of whether It's anything from packing boxes through to professional trades plumbers and electricians, all the way to accountants and lawyers. That's all available on Air Tasker.
So do you rate people or how do I know I'm getting someone?
Okay, it's a great question, and I think it depends on the different kinds of jobs that you're doing. So you mentioned there, for example, babysitting, So if I was choosing a babysitter on Air Tasker, I would look for a verified working with children's check, which Air Tasker displays on the profile of the tasker. I might also look for a police check badge on that person's profile, and then also be looking at the ratings and reviews that that person has earned on previous jobs. And you know that can be anything from one to ten reviews, all the way to some of our taskers which a thousands and thousands of reviews for the services that they've done before.
Fantastic. Now, look, you've created partnerships with companies like KM where shoppers can book to put together those infinitely difficult cupboards and tables and chairs, many of which I've done myself. How important is that sort of partnership to get Air Tasker where it is today.
It was very interesting because in the early days of Air Tasker we had a very small marketplace, and so when we would go and speak to people like Akia, there'd been less interest from them because our base of active taskers were smaller. But as Air Taskers really grown and grown and grown over the years, we built up this national workforce of tens of thousands of active workers every month, and so that makes it easier if you want to go and partner with someone like Jia. They see that as incredibly valuable and so that has gotten easier over time. But I can tell you this was very hard in the early years.
Okay, and everyone's a contractor. So I'm coming at you from the idea of the delivery decision recently, where it was the Fair Work Commission that ruled the food delivery writer was an employee, not a contractor and shouldn't have been dismissed. Now does that decision affect you and are you confident everyone remains a contractor?
Well, I think this is a really interesting area, which is this idea of the umbrella term of the gigga. And one thing that Air Tasker we like to emphasize and stress about our business model. The differences in the different kinds of platforms that exist underneath that umbrella. And you know, when you think of something like the food delivery platforms or the ride sharing platforms, what's common about them is that it's the platform that is deciding who's going to do what job, and it's the platform that decides the price and what kind of work that you're going to do. Air Tasker is completely different to that, which is that it is the tasker, the service provider and the customer who independently, between those two people agree on what is the job to be done. And also it's the tasker who determines what is the price that they need to be paid to do that job. That's not determined by Air Tasker, that's entirely driven by the community. So it's quite a different model.
They have very significant difference there, that's right.
And so I think we do believe that in some of these spaces where the platform is deciding who's doing what and what they're going to get paid for doing that, you know, regulation is absolutely something that should be a consideration. But in a community marketplace, you know, it's actually more similar to something like the Yellow Pages or Google or gum Tree, So it's a slightly different scenario there.
Stay with me, Tim, we'll be back in a minute. My guest this morning is Tim Fuhn, co founder and CEO of air Tasker. Now I'm trying not to talk about COVID nineteen anymore. However, it must have had a real impact on your business, even in terms of the jobs that people needed being done.
In the early days of COVID, we saw an initial depression in the marketplace, and you know, we were pretty concerned as a business as we watched the numbers drop, and they dropped by about fourteen percent month on month, which is pretty large number for us at the scale that we've thrown to. But what we saw was quite remarkable out of that scenario, which is that we started to see that customers we just started requesting different things on air Tasker. For example, they started requesting shopping deliveries, they started requesting at home personal fitness trainers. Bite repairs increased about one hundred and sixty percent week on week, and so what we saw is the mix of jobs start to change on the platform. And then at the same time, our taskers started getting really creative with the way that they were going to deliver those services. So for example, we have some of our top taskers do things like home organization, and I would have thought that that's an in person job, but actually they were able to start doing that remotely. And as a result of that, twenty twenty was actually the largest year of point to point growth for air Tasker, and it was something where we really saw our community show their resilience and how they could adapt to the situation, which was a great signal for our business model.
So twenty twenty was strong a good time to list. Then in March this year, so you've been mean, I suppose why did you list? What was the reason for that and how have you found it?
There were two promary reasons why we decided to list, So I think whine is that we see the opportunity for air Tasker, particularly in international expansion, to be absolutely ginormous. You know, if you look at the US markets and the UK markets, Singapore Island and New Zealand where we operate, there isn't anything like air Tasker in those markets, and so it's really a blue ocean opportunity and it will require some upfront capital investment so to be able to have the agility of being able to access the ASX investors was definitely a very appealing point for us. The second is that it gave an opportunity for our employees and our taskers to be rewarded and to own part of air Tasker, and we thought that was really really cool. When we listed the company, we actually created a special offer for our taskers, our most foundational and early taskers, and the response was absolutely massive. It ended up actually getting linked onto a Reddit forum and we opened up our bank account the next day. There were millions of dollars in this bank account, so we had to actually do a confirmation backcheck against whether they were all actually taskers on the air Tasker platform and actually return millions of dollars to people's bank accounts. So it's a great response and it was great to have task as being part of the journey with us.
Okay, and did you look at the share price. I mean, you had a huge jump of those first couple of days and then it came back, but it's been fairly flat since in the last couple of months. Really, it's fairly flat, being about a dollar ten or a dollar twenty or so, which is not that far off twice what you listed at. Are you happy with how it's gone so far?
I think it's fair to say that if you watch the share price every day, you're going to probably start pulling your hair out. Yeah, you know, and you've got to really focus on the long term of the business. I mean, from my perspective, I'm here for the long term, and so I certainly don't sort of look at the share price every day, and I certainly don't want to react to that or any of my employees, our team members to react to the share price. But certainly point to point, you know, if we look at where we started in March to where we are now being almost seventy percent up on the listing price, you know, massively exceeds any of the expectations that we had before we listed.
There are plenty of other IPOs in the last six months who would be extremely happy with that result.
Tim, absolutely, And you know, I think as much as you have to. You know, we're founders and entrepreneurs and we want to keep pushing and pushing and pushing. At the same time, I think it's important to smell the roses and counter bit of success and recognize those milestones.
So the future is all about international expansion.
I think there's two main areas which we are focusing on at the moment. One is that we are building new ways for customers to be able to connect with taskers. So for example, we've just launched a new marketplace model called air Tasker Listings. But what this does is allows taskers to prepackage services and put them on the shelves of the air Tasker store, so that we can inspire our customers about what else they could use air Tasker for. So, for example, you know, if you want to have a comedian come at perform at your birthday party, you can book that on air Tasker Listing, So opening up whole new services categories. So that's one area to the marketplace models. The second is international expansion. As you made seen in the news, we recently acquired a company, Gonzali in the US, which we're really really excited about and that's going to give us that massive jump start into the US market, which is just an absolutely enormous pluation for.
US, very exciting. Now, if I go and buy IQ thea tim would you be able to come out over and put it together? Are you handy? Look?
I don't mind doubling a little bit, but actually what I did experience on their tasker is a very perfect example is I was trying to put together about fifteen of these stools with a handscrewdriver and it has taking me about ten to fifteen minutes per.
Stall out of a very sore rist as well.
H absolutely, but I had a task to come over and put them all together in about one hour with you know, a drill and a much better process than me, and I just realized, Wow, this is you know, the value of being able to connect people with skills in their local community.
You know that story there, Tim, you don't own a drill, therefore you're not handy. I'm sorry, I'm sorry to put that t sae bluntly, but if you don't own a drill, you're in trouble. Tim, thank you for talking to Fear and Greed.
Thanks so much, Sean.
That was Tim Fuhn, co founder and CEO of Air task Cup. This is a Fear and Greed daily interview. Join me every morning for the full Fear and Greed podcast with all the business news you need to know. I'm Sean Almer. Enjoy your day.