Chambeando

Chambeando is a web platform that provides a list of qualified and reliable workers willing to meet your needs as soon as possible. 

Informality is one of the most significant issues faced by developing countries. In Latin America, close to 60% of workers are considered informal. These workers have no secure contracts and are forced to rely on short-term or one-time jobs (which we will call gigs) that they find through word of mouth in a low-technology ‘gig’ economy resulting from economic fragility. Technology is slowly reaching the region, but security problems have hampered its penetration, especially for home services, where people have the biggest trust issues.

In a survey of 128 people in Lima, Peru, 87% answered that they hired home services workers according to personal recommendations (from family, friends, or neighbors), while 34% quoted ‘recommendations’ as the most crucial factor when hiring these workers. ‘Gig’ economy platforms are struggling to adapt to these trust issues, and there are no established platforms for home services. 

Chambeando will massively offer word of mouth. Our platform works with homeowners on one side and home services ‘gig’ workers on the other. The key to generating trust is the creation of small communities of families, friends, and neighbors that will vouch for the ‘gig’ workers that are offering their services on the platform (something that they are already doing in a very disorganized way through ‘WhatsApp’ groups and Facebook posts).

Tight-knit communities will generate trust by recommending and giving reviews to the gig workers they rely on. Our search engine will scour through ‘gig’ workers profiles showing key information about tasks they have completed in the past with members of the community.

In 2021, we launched an Alpha version of Chambeando’s Web Application in a small community of neighbors (5,000 people) in Lima, Peru, as a successful reality check.

Because of the tremendous political instability that our country is facing and the immense impact of the pandemic, more than 6 million Peruvians are struggling to find a job on their own because the government does not show a reliable way out of it the economic crisis. In this situation, Chambeando was born to combat the current unemployment and help Peruvians overcome the pandemic and the huge informality problem in Peru. We focus on the people who depend economically on short-term or one-time jobs and struggle to maintain a consistent, or any, source of income for themselves and their families. 

Our solution not only impacts our country's unemployment rate but goes much further. Chambeando influences the economic situation of workers and families by giving them more opportunities to get a job and increase their financial stability as well as their abilities in their specific service. In the long run, we aim to create a much more economically stable and capable community in Peru by building work or gig opportunities for those who need them. 

Chambeando will lead to a network expansion for homeowners and gig workers, reducing the uncovered demand for home services in Peru and benefitting the groups mentioned. Finally, we aim to help workers build a good reputation by letting and encouraging previous clients to write recommendations about them as well as through the creation of the small communities mentioned, as being part of one will likely lead to a worker being trusted in it.

Our team is composed of four members. Mateo and Renato are candidates for Bachelor’s degrees in computer science, and Alonso and Derek are candidates for Bachelor’s degrees in business. We have experience in business start-ups in the fashion and technology industries. Our programmers (Renato and Mateo) are proficient in programming languages and frameworks used to develop the Alpha version of the Web Application. Finally, through the early development of the business idea, all our team members have demonstrated responsibility and leadership by managing each task successfully according to the plan.

To create a solution that impacts our community, we first considered the official statistics on the number of unemployed people in Peru, the unemployment rate in the last two years, and the economic impact on Peruvian families caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. While developing and creating our platform, we constantly did surveys in different groups in diverse social networks to consider the needs of our potential users. Similarly, now that the platform is published, we receive comments or suggestions to continue improving and constantly be updated on what our potential customers require. 

Chambeando has a unique approach to home services that focuses on creating trust by providing a social graph. We leverage existing social groups to develop micro markets that generate the social graph we use to let homeowners find informal workers that their friends and family trust. Our unique approach sacrifices transaction fees since the social graph make it hard to keep transactions within the platform. However, we think that the social graph is the feature that maximizes revenues for informal workers by generating trust.

For this year, as a team, we have four main objectives:
1. Improve the platform's functionality and the quality of information for our employees and users. 
2. To increase the number of workers and users in our database.
3. To get more communities or groups that want to join Chambeando.
4. For Chambeando to be able to operate at a regional level. 

We will achieve these goals by expanding our team and incrementing the hours we work on the platform. As we accomplish these goals, Chambeando will always seek to help its community during difficult times. 

Chambeando, being a web application, relies 100% on technology. We have used different programming languages, such as JavaScript or SQL, to build our web application. This does not force us always to monitor our source code and optimize it whenever we can. In addition, we are looking to implement AI to improve our search algorithm to provide much more personalized results to our users. 

Currently, Chambeando has around 100 gig workers and 33 active users, which has guaranteed us more than 2000 visits to our website in the last six months. This year we are looking to position our project at a regional level, which would imply obtaining more than 300 new users and more than 600 new workers minimum. This would translate into more than 15,000 visits to our website. 

Currently, we have two main obstacles that could make it difficult to achieve our objectives. On the one hand, Peru's political and economic situation is critical and unstable, reducing the capacity to hire people and investments. On the other hand, being a team of people between 18 and 19 years old, we have an economic limitation, which leads us to use our few resources in an optimal way. As well as this, all our team members are full-time college students, leaving us with less time for the development of Chambeando.

Currently, Chambeando is partner with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sandbox Innovation Fund program, which provides mentoring, business training, and seed funding. 

Chambeando is a two sided platform that connects home owners and informal workers. Connections happen through a digital platform that includes informal workers' profiles, a social graph of home owners (initally created through groups of home owners from the same neighborhood or building), and a database of previous jobs completed that links workers to home owners.

The main value provided to home owners is the ease to find workers that are trusted by friends and family, which implies between 2 and 10 hours saved each time a home owner needs to find a new worker. Home owners can find home workers that have previously completed jobs with other home owners in their groups, using an efficient search engine.

The main value provided to informal workers is additional demand (90% of interviewed workers are looking for new clients) and higher revenues (home owners are willing to pay 50% more for a trusted worker) from the customer base that uses the platform. Additionally, by giving home workers more opportunities to offer their services, we will contribute to their formation in their specific field, so it will be easier for them to get formal jobs.

Home owners and workers use phone calls and whatsapp messages to communicate through the channels they already use, without any restrictions imposed by the platform.

Additionally, Chambeando provides value to retailers. One first group of retailers are those that require professional services to assemble or install home improvement products they sell. If they are willing to pay Chambeando a fee to provide a customized platform with Chambeando workers who offer the services they seek, they can benefit from an easier way to provide professional services that helps them increase their revenues.

One second group of retailers are those that can benefit from targeted ads to high income home owners that have shown intent to spend money in their homes. They can benefit from increased revenues from their ads due to better conversion rates, if they are willing to pay Chambeando to serve those ads in the platform.

Finally, our cost structure consists of the maintenance of the online platform and adds, as nowadays we are the only staff we have and we are not taking any form of payment. However, in the future, we will hire a lawyer to formalize the business in Peru as well as to redact the terms and conditions of it. It's possible we also hire a programmer to enhance the web page even more.