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The coronavirus has given Africa’s growing gig economy a boost with outsourcing and remote work embraced more because of the need for social distance. In the past few years, Africans have begun taking advantage of several remote work platforms modelled after popular ones like Fiverr and Upwork.
As established in this article, many of these platforms have either failed or are struggling to scale. They are often plagued with funding challenges, buyer-seller distrust, securing user data, and sorting out payment methods, to mention a few.
However, the region is believed to be outgrowing some of these challenges by adopting collaborative tools and technologies. On the one hand, using gig workers’ online and offline services is cost-effective because fees can be negotiated based on schedule, unlike full-time employees. And on the other hand, sellers have more options.
Nevertheless, people have bad experiences now and then. Femi Taiwo, a tech enthusiast and professional who often engages freelancers relays how one such experience cost him a fortune. He, however, admits that it was because he failed to do his due diligence.
He decided to join the gig marketplace by building a product to save clients from disappointment and afford talents more choices.
By the end of 2017, he launched TERAWORK, an on-demand talent marketplace that focuses on digital services and encourages non-digital professional services to provide value for others.
“I began to put the things that I’d practised offline into building a platform called TERAWORK so that people like me, who are doing side hustle business or need expertise they can’t give, can come to a place where they can hire talents on demand and add value to everyone.”
Building from the ground up with two Co-founders, Titi Ogunsina-Taiwo, Chief Operating Officer (COO); and Abimbola Sarumi, Director of Engineering; Taiwo says it wasn’t a smooth ride from the start. However, he attributes the current progress to taking feedback and refining the processes.
At the centre of the product and processes is a credible team that he reveals was built deliberately. He adds that the team that has grown to ten includes a few people hired through the platform.
“Everything you see on TERAWORK is built in-house. We bring talented and passionate people together. We have developers, digital marketers, and persons in growth, sales, and operations.”
To further validate their work and credibility, the company uses the services of the talents on the platform.
Similar to the likes of Fiverr, talents sign up and are verified on TERAWORK free of charge. After opening an account and building a profile, the team carries out a vetting process before users’ profiles are made public. After users go live, they can give or receive jobs.
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