Joblist co-founders Brittany Earl (left), Gerard Molloy (centre) and Taylor Abernethy-Newman. Photo / Supplied
In a small, cold office downstairs in an old warehouse in Kingsland, an Auckland tech startup is treading New Zealand's fast-growing gig economy waters with established international giants Uber and Airbnb.
"We're talking hot waterbottles and I think Taylor's got his slippers in the office," Brittany Earl said.
"It's very cold, it's a cold concrete block underground," Taylor Abernethy-Newman quickly interjects.
Earl and Abernethy-Newman are the co-founders of Joblist, an online marketplace that allows people to list everyday jobs from lawnmowing and gardening to moving and delivery, while those wanting to earn a little extra cash can apply to complete the task.
It's been a year since Joblist became the latest addition to the gig economy, and while it's been a challenging journey to get there, the company has quickly grown momentum over a short space of time.
Earl, a former lawyer, says the idea for Joblist was born out of her personal dislike for what she calls "life admin".
"[I was] trying to think of business ideas so that I wasn't going to be working as a lawyer forever," Earl said.
"I was surrounded by people who were also spending their weekends washing the car and doing household jobs, so I started brainstorming really and that's where the idea came from."
After coming up with the idea for Joblist three years ago, Earl spent six months researching the gig economy before approaching some friends about the idea.
"I spoke to some friends about it and they became business partners and we continued to progress the concept into what Joblist is now," she said.
One of those friends was Gerard Molloy, a senior partner at a law firm in Auckland who is also a co-founder of Joblist. Molloy took a sabbatical to work closely on the project but has since returned to his role.
But Joblist moved from concept to business when Abernethy-Newman – a creative technologist – came on board.
"I said to someone 'I'm a creative technologist' and they said 'what does that mean?' and I said 'well I don't actually know'", Abernethy-Newman jokes.
"Basically I came out of university and there was no jobs for a creative technologist and I couldn't quite figure out what to do so I started a number of companies."
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At the time Abernethy-Newman was transitioning from a software development agency – Black Software – where he was the director.
"I was sort of looking for something a little more inspiring to do with my life and I put the feelers out and a week later Gerard came to me with this idea.
"I thought it was great. The initial concept idea was exciting and then once we explored the possibilities of it and moving from general household chores to anything and everything that you could think about getting done, it started to really excite me."
It took roughly two years to get Joblist from concept to market.
"It's a big beast. It's not something you can just template and put out into market straight away," Earl said.
"When we first laid out the roadmap for Joblist we had this absolutely grand plan to make it amazing like Airbnb and what we did was we slowly stripped back functionalities … [which] was a bit hard because we had to pull out some of the features that we thought were going to be really beneficial to the users," Abernethy-Newman said.
"We certainly didn't reinvent the wheel, but we wrote a lot of it bespoke so that we could have control and that we could be able to offer more of what customers want."
But before Joblist could get off the ground, the company ran into money troubles as software development and delays saw costs blow out, forcing the co-founders to capital raise.
"Our intention was to self-fund between the three of us, however, maybe somewhat naively, or I prefer optimistically, we thought we could get the whole way by ourselves but unfortunately the costs blew out as did the timing," Earl said.
The trio were able to raise a couple of hundred thousand dollars from friends and family just to get them over the start line, in the first of several capital raises.
"I remember the day when our costs blew out very clearly and then to have people step forward and believe in a dream that you've worked so hard on to get to a certain point. It was massive.
"It's quite overwhelming when people support something you believe so much in," Earl said.
"It's been a lot of hard work and a lot of blood, sweat and tears," Abernethy-Newman said.
Having launched in May last year, much of the efforts of Earl and Abernethy-Newman has been ploughed into gaining awareness and trust of the public.
"There's an education piece in the sort of space where we are working in where people are trusting enough to throw their credit cards down on a service and get a random person over to their house," Abernethy-Newman said.
"Airbnb and Uber have paved the way for the gig economy and made it more accepted."
The pair have come up with some novel advertising campaigns – most notably the time they had someone sit in a bathtub in Auckland city during the middle of the winter with a sign saying: "He got his jobs done on Joblist. What are you going to do with your free time?"
Earl said since their TV campaign things have started to pick up momentum and grow quite quickly.
In its first year, Joblist has paid around $100,000 to workers and currently has more than 11,000 registered users.
"There's so many people who are keen to earn extra money," Earl said.
"It's pretty hard when you start a business, especially when it's so novel in the market, to know where you should be sitting after a year but on the whole we feel very positive about the direction we are heading."
With 69 per cent of users in the Auckland region, Earl and Abernethy-Newman say expanding Joblist to other areas of the country is high on their priority list.
"We want to expand to the far reaches of New Zealand so that people can help to employ each other and build up their own economy, especially in smaller areas," Abernethy-Newman said.
"[It's] scaling it up and replicating it to get in front of more people."
And the pair, though remaining tight lipped, say they have some pretty cool plans for the coming year.
"Watch this space," says Abernethy-Newman.
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