It’s now been a month since we started our ICO. As others have observed, it’s a crazy process. A lot of traveling, responding to hundreds of emails from people all over the world, and interacting on Telegram, Facebook and other channels.
But at the end of the day, it’s about telling a story, and seeing if that story resonates. So let me use this space, and this time, to try to put down in paper the core argument for what we are doing.
We’ve all heard of the gig economy. What most of us don’t realize is the size of it. An estimated 57 Million people are Freelancing now out of 120 Million full time workers. Basically about half of working Americans.
It’s a long term phenomenon. It’s growing. It’s not something that is going stop. And it includes everything from Uber Drivers, to people doing scientific work, freelance, over the Internet.
#Point 2. There does not exist an open search engine for Freelance talent.
Yes, there are marketplaces for Freelancers. The largest one is Upwork. But Upwork, like all other marketplaces is closed.That means they hide the identities of all the people on the network. If you need an Ethereum programmer on upwork, you get the following search results:
You cannot check out the real background or code base of Roman L, because Upwork does not want you to contact Roman L directly. You can’t check the identity of the people recommending Roman, because Upwork doesn’t want you contacting them.
They do this for one simple reason: credit card fees, chargebacks and buyer fraud are too big to allow them to exist at lower margins. High margins and cost imply hidden identities. This severely limits the usefulness of these marketplaces.
#Point 3: If the entire process was based on smart contracts and crypto, variable costs would essentially be zero.
The “ah-ha” moment for me was 6 months ago, when I realized that crypto could dramatically change this equation. If you don’t deal with fiat, credit cards or paypal, marketplaces can become ultra efficient. This will allow a Google for Freelancers to be created. I repeat. will. This is, in my opinion, 100% sure to happen. Somebody will execute.
At the end of the day, the entire thing boils down to a search engine. You want to be able to search, vet, and buy all in one place. With crypto, this is theoretically possible. There are no technical constraints.
#Point 4: Because Crypto does not have mainstream adoption, this will take years to fully penetrate.
In pitching this idea to some Investors, people countered, quite logically, that most people do not own crypto, at least not in the US. (Korea has 40% market penetration.)
Getting the ball rolling is obviously the hurdle. But, clearly, if the ball does start to roll, like a snowball, it will get bigger as it rolls. There are 30 million people who do have some crypto, and know how to get more. The community and usage are growing. And once they “figure out” how to use crypto, the adoption curve starts.
#Point 5: Even without complete mainstream adoption, penetration of the crypto community is a very interesting proposition.
It’s worthwhile remembering that Facebook started with one University: Harvard. Craigslist and Uber both started with one city: SanFrancisco. Starting with one market, the crypto community, is the logical starting point. Throughout meetups all over the world, people doing ICOs, people investing in ICOs, people advising and servicing ICOs are all congregating in increasingly bigger numbers.
These people need a directory, a search engine. This is the place to start.
#Point 6: WorkCoin has essentially built a 1.0 version of the above product.
It is not fully on the Blockchain with smart contracts (that will not happen until EOS launches and we have coded the escrow part with smart contracts), the ability to take in and exchange ETH for WRK is still in its first iteration, but we do have a proof of concept.
So that is the thesis. If we are right, and we can get the ball rolling over the next year or two, we will be able to prove the thesis correct. That means lots of people finding services over the Internet on our platform and using this platform to transact. For this, the UX has to be simple and clear, and probably most importantly, users will need to accept our token.
It’s a gamble: on one hand, it’s pretty easy to see that with enough ammunition, one can start agglomerating a critical mass of sellers. With enough sellers, you have a useful product for buyers. With enough utility, buyers and sellers will adopt the token.
#Conclusions
That is the core thesis of the project. It may work, or it may not work. Many things need to come together for it to really work. But if it does, the vision of “Google for Gigs” will come to pass.
My bet is that with enough iteration, somebody will succeed with this vision. I want it to be us.
