gigturbo

Problem:

Everyone knows the gig economy is disrupting work, but few realize the actual impact it has had upon participants. Work service platforms based on tasks are bottlenecked by legalities surrounding worker dissatisfaction and experience a lack of skilled on-demand staff during surges. Independent workers need a platform to easily understand how to best capitalize on their strengths and skills in order to achieve a fulfilling work-life balance towards career oriented roles. 

Market opportunity:

● TAM: $4.5T Global Total Addressable Market for the Gig Economy

● SAM: $1.7T U.S. Market Share 

● SOM: $5B (Gross Volume on digital gig platforms connecting freelance contract workers in the US.) 

● 65M+ US gig workers reported (2020) 

● 58M+ US based freelancers (2020) 

● By 2023, over 50% of all US working adults will be in the gig economy 

● 80% of all US corporations plan to switch to a flexible workforce by 2024

Timing:

- Independent work is here to stay

- Gig based service platforms are bottlenecked by legalities surrounding worker dissatisfaction and experience a lack of skilled on-demand staff during surges.

Gigturbo is the platform empowering anyone navigating independent work to hit goals.

It’s a cross-service a.i. guide to matchmake personalized work and learn options based on member preferences. The recommendation engine taps into +300 work platforms paired to scheduling optimization for a more productive day. Alongside productivity tools and finance management, Gigturbo provides members the ability to up-skill and level-up towards personal goals such as working towards an aspirational career, learning a new language, obtaining a hard skill or certification.


The mission is to provide members with a simple, intuitive way to hit personal or financial goals while enabling them for the future of work based on lifestyle and life-stage. Through trust and transparency, Gigturbo will grow alongside the workforce of the future accessible wherever they need us (voice, chatbot, etc.) as their quintessential partner.

Geared at a future demographic (think late teens/early adults) responsibly earning and up-skilling while managing their independent careers and finances. They need to obtain various skills depending on their passions, which can be self-taught or via online coursework and certifications to qualify for better opportunities. We’re arming the workforce of the future by combining time management, education and finance tracking through one's own personal support guide. 

CEO/founder: Ali Sammour 

CTO/founder: Gowtham Sundar

Team has founded startups with successful outcomes and acquisitions. Have scaled technical operations of +20 members to build publishing and distribution platforms for venture backed companies and enterprise clients (Omnicom, CAA) with AI/ML modeling.

As for community, we are representative of being 1st generation Americans as the offspring of immigrants alongside our product officer actually representing the target market we are focused on - young, bright future workforce participants independently navigating career paths through experiential learning. Our goal is to better empower those members looking to skill up and track their success based on the combined experiences of those we are serving - recent high school graduates and new college entrants that we've been surveying through our collegiate partnership program. 

1,000 universities with over +50,000 applicants that have requested career guidance and support.

We're specifically interested in supporting communities in the metropolitan cities and states that need the most support. The team has experienced the social differences in access to personalized support and learning in underserved communities across Los Angeles and Texas. We have a personal interest in supporting the success of individuals across these various communities through this support mechanism that enables social mobility to future generations willing to work towards their goals. 

We are innovative because we have been taking this in a completely chat like experience. There is no app, but the users completely interact with us all through the ChatGPT-like assistant we provide across all channels of messaging such as SMS, FB Messenger, Whatsapp, Telegram etc. This means we can immediately start providing value to any user (whether they are a gigturbo member or a prospective user) and get them immediately started. We can then leverage this data to be able to hyper-target the most important commands/information/scheduling/finance services to our users as they start on their journey.  

Gigturbo can be a source of truth for our members from beginner to expert level. As our members work towards better opportunities, the track record they build through us, gives us the ability to provide fintech products that no other platform could. Remember they are using Gigturbo from beginning to end, so their data allows us to uniquely help them financially, every stage of the way (whereas traditional fintech companies simply don’t have any data on the younger/immigrant demographic). By building this long-term relationship with our members, we start to build data points on the user’s earnings and up-skilling so that they can eventually save towards a Health Savings Account, Retirement policies, and many other specialized Financial products. 

We are really trying to get a lot of consistency from our users to hit their goals. We win as a company and a mission by helping them successfully work towards an independent career. 

[1] Some of our most important goals is to make sure that at our users are actually hitting and achieving their goals consistently. 

[2] Secondly, we want our users to graduate from this earning/upskilling cycle (as mentioned in [1]) to being able to fully have an independent freelance business of one on Gigturbo. 

[3] Finally, we would like our users from [2] to be able to make their money work for them in the long term. Effectively positioning them up for helpful fintech products that bolster their lives brings them ever closer to true financial, career, and personal independence. 

[i] To address [1] above, we want least 50% of our users achieve their initial earning / learning target within +- 1 week of their original end date. And we also want to repeat this cycle for at least 3 months so that we can be more confident that we are actually helping the user hit their targets (UN Goal 8). 

[ii] Getting at least 85% of beginner Gigturbo users (from [1]) to be skilled enough (through our scheduling assistant) so that external users are willing to pay time on their calendar is a key goal for us. Providing our users with quality education platforms is the principal way we can help reduce wealth inequality (UN Goal 4). 

[iii] Getting every one of our users from [ii] to be able to build credit through their work, setup a Health Savings account, and a retirement account. We want our users to attain good longterm health support and wellbeing by avoiding overwork (UN Goal 3 & Goal 8)

[iv] Making sure we penetrate into marginalized communities and close the wealth and inequality gap (UN Goal 5)

(Initial Survey):

We surveyed around 20,000 college students across 1000+ universities and collected interview videos from (age 18-30) demographic on: 

[1] Their desire to be more independent/secure in a future of AI automation

[2] Their biggest pain-points in being able to transition into a future of independent work

[3] Their time commitment, constraints, and desired opportunities in the future of work space. 

(Initial Data):

- 85% of students want to move away from a 9-5 job into an independent career where they control the hours and career. 

- Most however have a very busy schedule and are only willing to work maximum 20 hours per week (i.e part-time).

- They are looking for an average of $450-500 per week.

- They lack any guide to help them balance their schedule/give them advice/point them in any direction towards an healthy financial future.

- They want to also up-skill on online courses during their free time on high-growth jobs like (ML Engineering, Graphic Design, Social Media Manager etc.)

- 25% of our applicants are college juniors, 10% are sophomores, and 15.2% are college masters. 

(Theory of Change):

We clearly realize that our demographic is the younger college age student. If we can put them on a 5-6 year plan where:

[1] they can support themselves consistently week after week for around $500 in living costs

[2] Study 4-5 courses on high growth career tracks such as ML Engineering, NLP Engineering, Banking, Finance, Software engineering, Blockchain engineering

[3] Measure success by seeing applicants in [1] & [2] work towards a sustainable independent business using tools provided by Gigturbo

[4] Put them on track to having an HSA and retirement savings account by age 35.

Our custom built scheduling algorithm which is using Graphical substructures which is binded within our LLM NLP chatbot. 

We trained our V1 & V2 versions of our chatbot using T5 and the BERT Transformers. Our V3 bot was trained in 2021 using GPT-3 (we got into the OpenAI beta 2 weeks after GPT-3 was released). Now our V4 bot is using open-sourced LLM models.

We use vector storage DBs and we use graphical algorithms to find connections between the user's constraints and new scheduling opportunities.

My co-founder and I are from ethnic minorities and we constantly strive to hire and foster people from all across the world. Whenever we bring someone into our team, we seek to find people from different backgrounds and experiences. A majority of our team are from marginalized communities and are part of ethnic minorities. 

Our business model originated from work platform referrals but evolved into financial services and support.

We are however planning on becoming actually monetizing our premium SaaS services to our power users for a fixed fee per month.

We are striving for a subscription based model where our premium scheduling/chat/up-skilling/talent based financial SaaS products are all monetized for a fixed fee per month.

Our business model originated from work platform referrals but evolved into financial services and support.

We have been operating very lean and we have had $0 burn so far. We are still trying to achieve a dedicated power-user base where we know we can provide them a premium suite of tools to help them achieve their goals. 

When we are supporting 100k members with financial inclusion products with our proprietary datasets, we are then able to adapt the platform to further scale across additional demographics and under served communities.