TERAWORK Freelance Marketplace

Femi is the Founder of TERAWORK and he’s responsible for driving the company’s vision of connecting businesses with professionals for work, thereby creating economic opportunities. He’s passionate about solving the problems of businesses not having timely, flexible access to manpower on one hand and having talented hands idle because they cannot find work opportunities around them on the other through freelancing. 

Femi aims to promote competency, professionalism and excellent work delivery through his online services marketplace he leads teams of recent Nigeria graduates to build from scratch to a world class platform it is today. Within 2 years, he has successfully steered TERAWORK from a relatively unknown start-up to a brand that is championing the course of freelancing in Nigeria; enabling lean entrepreneurs get things done with ease.

He holds a master’s degree with distinction classification from the United Kingdom and first-class bachelor honours’ degree in engineering from Nigeria.

Lack of access to flexible source of competent manpower is a major reason 60% of businesses shutdown within their first 3 years, fund or no fund. Close to a million newly registered businesses across Africa countries are affected yearly, and this accounts for global loss of $443million annually. 

Yearly, 5million graduates are added to Africa existing unemployed; some because they live in remote areas or are women constrained to work from home. Systems that eliminate challenges like uneven availability of job opportunities, lack of trust while working remotely, skills gap etc. are lacking.

TERAWORK’s solution enables businesses conveniently hire on-demand vetted independent workforce within 24-hrs. Our end-to-end online freelance marketplace facilitates businesses and freelance workers trust working remotely with each other. With 6,000+ active users, 4,000+ jobs done already, we have a validated approach that if scaled will impact more lives. TERAWORK’s solution can scale to connect millions for work.

Sufficient fund or not, it is discovered that about 60% of small businesses in Nigeria shuts down before the age of 3 as a result of not having easy access to a scalable source of manpower, skills and expertise. Globally, spending too much time or money in hiring workforce at the onset is another reason SMEs die at their early years. Daily, businesses spend 200 million hours searching for competent professionals and over $443 million are lost annually due to failed projects as a result of skill shortage. 

Yet, geographical barriers, uneven availability of job opportunities, COVID-19 pandemic which now threatens existing jobs amongst other things, contribute to challenges faced by jobseekers. There are disadvantaged jobseekers in remote areas where jobs and training opportunities are both difficult and expensive to access. Many women with newborns face an additional barrier to employment in that they have to limit their search to workplaces that have childcare facilities either on-site or in close proximity. This limits an already narrowed window of opportunity for them. 

It turns out, while skills shortages and unfilled roles are ravaging SMEs growth, millions of people in the same countries are struggling to get or keep their jobs.

TERAWORK creates a digital hub, an online freelance marketplace, void of geographic barriers, where demands for professionals with certain skill sets by businesses or individuals are met by adequate supply of independent workers, with varying levels of expertise, experience and engagement costs, who are willing to offer their services via freelancing. We offer faster hiring process, where employers can search and filter profiles of thousands of professionals and engage them for their tasks in few clicks. TERAWORK offers flexible work pattern that accommodates nursing mothers and inclusion for Africans youth with traditionally high unemployment numbers.

We do not just connect businesses and individuals with professionals, but further leverage on technology to handle the process that facilitates efficient service delivery end to end. With our robust search algorithm, real-time chat, secure online payments, project management tools for collaboration, post work review system which enable both parties to rate each other, training opportunities for freelancers, we ensure that employers only pay for services that are delivered based on agreed terms and conditions.

Freelancers showcase themselves by building profiles that display their skill sets, experience, achievements, work history, reviews, ratings etc. Employers leverage on data to make better decisions about whom to hire.

Over 37 millions small businesses and aspiring entrepreneurs with lean budgets, requiring help of professionals in fields they have zero knowledge of but crucial to their businesses’ success, who often are not able to afford hiring top talent on permanent basis but would rather hire them when needs arise ‘on pay as you go basis’. 

Hundreds of thousands of businesses with varying manpower requirements, who can get things done quickly with short-term remote workers.

Tens of millions of individuals across Africa cities that need to outsource personal digital tasks they can’t handle on their own and can leverage on our pool of independent workers, with skills across wide range of services and different level of expertise, to achieve more with ease.

More than 5 million young individuals with marketable skills in Nigeria, and tens of millions across Africa who are willing to develop their skills and offer freelance services in various fields such as writing, communications, creative design, software and technology, audio and video productions, business, fashion, lifestyle, web development, social media, digital marketing etc. 

Reality of COVID-19 pandemic making work from home more popular, thus giving thousands skilled nursing mother chances to earn income via offering freelance services.

The problem of small and new businesses not having timely and easy access to flexible and scalable source of manpower and expertise; challenges of uneven availability of job opportunities for Nigerian and African skilled/semi-skilled are being resolved by our end-to-end freelance solution that efficiently brings both parties together in a manner to create economic advantages without geographical barrier. This directly link to our selection in that our solution elevates opportunities for all people, giving them chances to either offer freelance service instead of being out of job and also help aspiring entrepreneurs with lean budget access to flexibly manpower resources. 

The thought of creating TERAWORK came to me in 2015 after an unpleasant experience where I engaged and worked remotely with an unknown person I met online to help complete a tech project that I was running out of time on. While it is clear to me that I needed help of the so called professional for a few days, I didn’t get one. What contributed to my bad experience include lack of online platforms within Nigeria and African with an end-to-end process for employing remote manpower in a flexible and safe manner.

In response to this bitter experience, I decided to create a process I can always use to search and hire workforce, on on-demand basis, for my side hustles. Unlike before, the process I developed enables me and my independent worker trust working remotely with each other. Then I decided to build the process into a technology a lot of people in my shoes could benefit from.

2 years later, the technology becomes the foundation of TERAWORK, where businesses can conveniently engage, on ‘pay-as-you-go’ basis, freelance professionals across various digital services. Also, skilled and semi-skilled people can earn income from offering freelance services without geographical barrier.

After having a personal experience where I couldn’t safely hire an expert that I needed for my side hustle which adversely affected the outcome of my project and losing some money I could better relate to challenges that lots of businesses with lean resources face. Many of them watch their businesses destroyed before their own eyes because they cannot afford to hire workforce at the minimum required skill level on full time basis or they cannot just find anyone around them at all. 

Some that relied on referral from family and friends often get mismatched candidates which also bring disappointments and waste of time and money in hiring processes. Somehow there are good candidates they can quickly hire in neighboring cities or towns who may be willing to work flexibly and remotely as independent worker if there’s a technology platform that supports them. 

Every day, I see these types of people and scenarios playing out around me and I am strongly motivated to create a technology platform to solve these problems for all. With TERAWORK, businesses with lean resources can hire freelancers quickly to help build their businesses and people can work as freelancers doing what they are passionate about. 

With a master’s degree from Northumbria University Newcastle, UK and having had close to 10 years’ experience in the UK and Nigeria banking industry that span across disciplines including cloud computing, software engineering, security, IP network etc I founded TERAWORK. My wife, COO Titi Taiwo, a seasoned Human Resources expert with 8 years’ experience that spans across wellness, oil and gas and software industries joined the team. Also, my friend and colleague, Technology Director Abimbola Sarumi, alumni of Cyprus College, Nicosia Cyprus, an expert software engineer with 14 years’ cognitive experience in software development, enterprise storage and virtualization joined from inception. 

Prior to starting TERAWORK, I have successfully handled and managed numerous technology-based projects worth over 1 million USD and have consciously develop my leadership capabilities and relevant soft skills.

At TERAWORK, I encourage and nurture among all team members culture of continuous learning, application of knowledge gain to iterate and make all our processes and application better. I challenge everybody to be highly curious, to question status quo, set personal and team objectives, set key results, act and measure only what matters. 

These are already yielding results as evidence of continuous improvement of our freelance platform is seem, appreciated by all our stakeholders, and making positive impacts in our society.

I started TERAWORK with my personal savings, donations from my wife and friends in 2017. We felt we would not be able to develop our software in-house and decided to shop around for companies that could help develop one. After talking to about 5 companies in US and France, the cheapest offer we had was a company who would build a freelance marketplace based on our specifications and offer same to us as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) with initial one-off payment of USD50,000 and monthly recurring of USD2,000. Six month later, we were only able to raise about 5% of the cost. It was a hopeless situation and our dream of building African largest freelance marketplace plummeted. Our options were to either forget about it or do something radical. 

We resolved to hire a couple of inexperience but passionate guys who just graduated from University of Lagos, further train them and worked with them to develop our software from the scratch. Nine months later, we launched our MVP and have since then iterated our processes and improve our software severally. Today, TERAWORK is an end-to-end world class freelance platform capable of scaling to handle millions of users and transactions without problem.

The development of our platform software was a dramatic event I will love to share. While a company was willing to offer our needed solution to us as a Software-as-a-Service for a one-off fee of USD50,000 and USD2,000 monthly recurring cost, other companies were quoting an average of USD650,000 to implement for us. Our only option was to write our software ourselves or forget about it, and no one in my team including me ever think we could do this on our own.

Then I recruited two passionate but naive developers who just graduated from computer science studies few weeks then. I developed very detailed specifications of each component of the software and we begin to develop one step at a time. I motivated them from time to time, making them imagine the social impact and disruptions our solution will create especially in Africa. We stayed together, ate together, work together, failed together, learned together and they grew rapidly in skills, self-confidence, leadership and admiration of the beautiful work we were doing.

Today, seeing a world class platform we’ve built, all my team members believe there’s nothing they cannot achieve once they resolve in their minds to do it.

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Most competitions around in Nigeria like VConnect, Asuqu, Findworka, Oledo, etc. just provide listing of workers, and have little or no process in place to support remote work. Some of them first charge their clients non-refundable fees only to provide them with list of ill-matched or unvetted workers, which often lead to disputes and bad experiences for all parties.  

Unlike them, TERAWORK is the only end-to-end freelance platform that has created a process that makes clients and professional freelancers trust working remotely with each other, with ease, through our various highly functional features we built, tested and integrated into our model. Our process correctly matches freelancers with prospective clients, which are 90% small businesses and aspiring entrepreneurs. Also, we have process that ensures that freelancers only get paid for services they successfully delivered based on agreed terms and conditions between them and their clients. We have achieved job success rate of over 98% and have handled more job transactions than all our local competitions combine.

Compared with how new and small businesses conventionally hire, TERAWORK makes hiring process, which traditionally takes 10 to 60 days to complete, something that can be completed within 24 hours, eliminating or reducing geographical, informational and administrative barriers in the process.  

TERAWORK provides a highly functional and robust online freelance marketplace that is rich in relevant features and efficient processes to enable clients (individuals, small and new businesses) quickly and flexibly search, hire, work with and pay vetted professional freelancers in a very convenient manner. TERAWORK provides processes that enable freelancers deliver tasks given to them on time and at agreed quality, terms and conditions between them and their clients. To kickstart activities on the digital platform, TERAWORK carefully recruited handful of vetted competent freelancers handpicked through varieties of offline activities across several service categories in readiness to start offering freelance services. Lastly, TERAWORK creates awareness of its newly built freelance marketplace among relevant stakeholders including SMEs as well as aspiring entrepreneurs and individuals we perceived will need our solution. 

Our immediate goals are to enable businesses engage our freelancers on continuous basis to fulfill their manpower needs, ensure their businesses do not lack supply of needed professionals to grow their businesses. Also, we want to see that skilled or semi-skilled unemployed youths and work from home nursing women onboarded as freelancers on our platform get engaged continuously with short-term tasks given to them by businesses using our solution and earn income from time to time. Lastly, part of our immediate goals is to see new users voluntarily coming onboard to use our solution.

These immediate goals link to our long-term outcomes which is to see more businesses becoming successful as a result of having access to flexible, scalable highly skilled manpower to grow their businesses and create economic opportunities in the societies. Also, we want to see joblessness as a result of geographical barriers, uneven availability of employment opportunities or lack of required new skills disappear across Africa. 

To test some of these links, we carried out small-scale tests where few businesses continuously utilize our platform to fulfill their manpower needs. Results show that most of those businesses overcame their workforce shortage challenge, stand better chances of having their businesses succeed and become established. Also, few of our freelancers earn income doing tasks that give then new learning experiences.

Since launch, TERAWORK has more than 6,000 active users and over 4,000 freelance jobs (and still counting) have exchange hands between our freelancers and our buyers comprising small businesses, entrepreneurs and individuals. More that 60% of the orders are from same buyers making repeated purchases from same or another freelancer, which validate satisfaction on the quality of delivery by our freelancers and processes we have put in place. Our freelancers have achieved job success rate of about 99.2%.

With various ongoing automations, further engineering enhancements, marketing and expansion plans, TERAWORK intends to increase the number of transactions by at least 1,000%, (i.e. 60,000 active users) in the next one year and achieve 50% annual growth in subsequent years.

In the next one year our goals will be the following;

• Complete enhancement of our platform to improve users experience through implementing new relevant and useful features, increase intuitiveness, robustness, security and user friendliness of our app
• Launch TERAWORK Mobile Apps which will significantly improve usability and enable our users easily access their accounts to buy or sell freelance services on the go.
• Onboard more SMEs and affiliate established businesses and brands as clients in order to drastically increase volumes of transactions and activities thereby finding more opportunities for our freelancers
• Onboard more freelancers and improve on our partnership with major technology companies to provide more relevant trainings for new skills acquisition for our freelancers.
• Increase marketing campaigns and activities with Nigeria, and commence marketing awareness in other African Countries

Within the next five years

TERAWORK aims to become the defacto freelance platform in Africa and home to millions of SMEs and well-established businesses majorly in Africa connecting them to tens of millions of freelance professionals in Africa and beyond for work. Doing so will facilitate steady supply of competent manpower resources to businesses and ensure higher chances of success for new businesses while increasing productivity for established ones within African region and beyond. In addition, we aim to launch in countries in Middle East, Asia, Europe and America, and have local reps to facilitate growth and penetrations in major cities around the world.  

One major challenges TERAWORK faces is having businesses adopt using our freelance professionals, as there exist competitions who have flooded their platforms with unvetted freelancers and businesses that utilized them had encountered unpleasant experience. However, with continuous enhancement of our platform, continuous refinement of our processes, continuous vetting of freelancers and increased marketing awareness more businesses are beginning to adopt TERAWORK for their outsourcing and manpower needs. 

TERAWORK has tested on a small scales four key strategies to overcome our barriers, and will, in the coming years, intensify efforts and commit more resources in following areas;

• Continuous Enhancement of our Platform: Continuous deployment of new relevant technologies that makes our platform solution work better.
• Continuous Refinement of our Processes: Continue to refine and align our processes to become better fit for businesses and enterprise use. 
• Continuous vetting and Training of our Freelance Professionals: Continue to find better ways to continuously vet of our freelancers, and make available, through partnerships we will seek from various relevant institutions and academia, varieties of training courses that help them upskill and become better fit to handle tasks given to them by our clients 
• Increased Marketing Awareness: We intend to drastically increase our marketing campaigns and awareness, both through digital, social media and traditional (offline) channels.

TERAWORK currently has the following;

IBM West Africa: partners with TERAWORK to provide free online and classroom base training courses for our freelancers in acquiring skills in the field of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML), Blockchain technologies, Internet of Things, e-commerce etc.

http://ibm.biz/terawork-dna

Google Business Group Lekki: a non-profit community of business professionals to share knowledge about web technologies for business success, and with over 150 local communities in various cities across the world. TERAWORK has strategic partnership with GBG Lekki where we co-sponsor events and speak at their various events. Recent community training events jointly organized by GBG Lekki and TERAWORK include, Business of Content and Standing Tall (Int'l Women's Day events amongst others. The events give our freelancers opportunity to learn and also provides TERAWORK with opportunity to on board competent professionals

Amazon Web Services (AWS) Activate: An Amazon Web Services (AWS) program that provides grants in the form of credits for AWS cloud computing resources usage, trainings and support to promising startup companies globally. On the strength of our project and our commitment to build an online freelance marketplace that meets international standards, Amazon gave TERAWORK a grant of USD10,000 that covers our AWS cloud computing resources usage, technical support and one (1) year free access to their training courses.

TERAWORK’s business model is a two-sided freelance marketplace. We generate value by enabling buyers (businesses & individuals) interact with our freelancers, in the most convenient way, with the aim of hiring them for their one-off or short-term tasks. TERAWORK ensures that clients’ jobs are delivered on time and to their specifications, get value for their time and money; and freelancers promptly get paid for services they delivered on agreed quality, terms and conditions. 

TERAWORK earns income on the following;

• Charges transactional fee between 7 and 13% of each successful transaction and
• Clients’ premium services

The market for TERAWORK’s business is heavily dependent on scale; having millions of active users, thousands of new orders for freelance services on daily basis, and not less than 98% success rate on service delivery.  

TERAWORK is using combination of income earned from our services – commission and clients’ premium services earnings, grants, donations and capital investment to fund its business. 

TERAWORK has raised USD250,000 from Angel investor, earned USD10,000 in grant and has earned about USD11,000 in income in the last 12 months.

TERAWORK will seek investment of USD2million in 2020. 

About USD120,000

With the Elevate Prize media and marketing campaign our marketing awareness drastically, both through digital, social media and offline channels to enable more people discover us, use and benefit from our solution.

Continuous enhancement of our processes, platform, mobile apps, and continuous provision of free training courses for our freelancers are key to enable us better serve our new and existing users (businesses) and increase their number drastically. The Elevate Prize cash award will go a long way helping us in this regard.

Beyond financial support, becoming a ‘Elevate Prize’ finalist would give us access to some of the most intelligent minds, professional management and access to a dynamic network of Elevate Prize Global Heroes and partners. In addition, Elevate Prize would provide priceless validation of our vision of connecting businesses with freelancers for work, would further attract and convert more established businesses.

We require supports in areas selected above to help us rapidly expand our brand awareness, reach out to acquire more users within the shortest possible time, who will benefit from our solution. 

Access to the entire Solve, MIT communities of intelligent minds for business mentoring, supports and resources that could help us add more values to our users, including free online trainings courses across variety of services we offer on our platform 

Oxford University: For freelancers training support

Google: For freelancers training support

Microsoft: For freelancers training support