Workology think they are doing something uniquely different for a careers site, combining community with recruitment, advice and collaboration.
The two founders, Sam Gyimah and Anuj Goyal, founded the firm last August with seed funding from entrepreneurs and individuals at Goldman Sachs and employs four staff, with a development team in Bristol. The site launched in beta just four weeks ago and are confident that the Web 2.0 world needs anew way to work.
Gyimah explains more.
Chief executive Sam Gyimah Anuj Goyal, creative director
• Explain your business to my Mum.
Workology is a peer-to-peer website that enables professionals to control the way they work.
There is no such thing as a job for life; freelancers, portfolio careerists, working parents, start-up entrepreneurs and retirees still feel they've got value to add and want to create and realise their way of working. They currently do this by relying mainly on the referral economy or the fragmented recruitment industries and that is hugely inefficient.
Workology simplifies the current process by offering people a free platform to create work opportunities and gain support to suit their individual work styles.
• How do you make money?
Workology is free to post work opportunities, create a MiniSite, and to generate work leads from referral networks on the site. Once we are firmly established, we will be rolling out a number of value-added features which members could pay for.
• What's your background?
We met at Oxford and cut our teeth at two of the country's biggest institutions (Goldman Sachs and the BBC). I left to start up a business and Anuj to become an independent filmmaker, but we started thinking about one place to go that addressed all the individual and fluid work needs we face.
We wanted to develop one place for people to create unique work opportunities to suit their different working styles - a place that would enable people to control their workstyles efficiently and that idea evolved into Workology.
• How many users do you have now, and what's your target within 12 months?
We've been in public beta for only four weeks and traffic numbers have been doubling every week. Our plan is to have over 100,000 users by the end of the year.
• What's your biggest challenge?
One of toughest things we face across the board is finding the best people who can thrive in a fast-moving, bootstrapped, start-up environment.
• Are we in the middle of a new dot com bubble?
Obviously not. During the last bubble, any idea ending in .com could attract funding. Now most investors are a lot savvier - they want to see a sound business model with clear revenue and profit paths, and a management team that can deliver the business plan.
• If you had £10m to invest in another web business, what would you invest in?
Zopa.com - we think peer-to-peer lending is a revolutionary concept, and better than getting fleeced by the banks.
• Where do you want the company to be in five years?
We want Workology to be the site that any knowledge worker can go to to create their own way of working. We want Workology to redefine the world of work.
• Are you the next big thing?
We've got a unique product, with further plans for development and expansion, so - definitely.
Will it work? Would you use it? Or is it just too tricky to organise career opportunities in this kind of open environment?
