Jitjatjo – Balancing the Scales

‘For an industry that is all about people, it cares little for its own’

Introduction

It was the 28th February 2019, Tim Chatfield, Ron McCulloch and Dominic Esposito, the co-founders of Jitjatjo, had called for a meeting in their main office space overlooking Soho. As teams gathered around a table with three packs of beer, two bottles of champagne and one miniature gong, there was a palpable buzz of anticipation in the air. Today, Jitjatjo beat out many competitors, both large and small, to close a 3-million dollar business deal with Compass group, one of the world’s largest hospitality retailers. With each strike of the gong representing 1-million dollars of revenue for Jitjatjo, the gong was struck thrice, once by each co-founder, followed by the sounds of popping champagne and congratulations.

Despite the merry mood, this lucrative deal is but a small victory for Jitjatjo. In the larger scheme of things, demand for Jitjatjo’s talent amongst clients remained frustratingly low. As Tim Chatfield, the CEO of Jitjatjo turned from his conversation to the large TV screens adorning the office, the monthly metrics of revenue and shift volume seemed to illustrate his point by being still far from their projections, in spite of the month nearing its close. Whereas, Ron McCulloch, the Chairman of the board, excused himself from conversation to take yet a call from his fellow board members requesting an update on Jitjatjo’s future strategy. Meanwhile, Domonic Esposito, also the head of product was already preoccupied with drawing out mental plans to reshuffle his product team to support Compass Group's adoption of Jitjatjo’s proprietary platform and technology. As the celebration died down, the co-founders excused themselves and convened in a conference room. They agreed that they had to secure Jitjatjo’s success by determining its strategic future, choosing between investing in the technology behind its platform, improving day-to-day operations through automation, while also strengthening its SaaS offering, or investing in operations by rectifying pressing operational issues brought about by rapid growth and rebranding Jitjatjo to better reflect internal beliefs. The co-founders had to leverage their strengths, working together as one cohesive unit to discern the best path forward.

Origin

Ron McCulloch was a veteran in the Australian hospitality industry with 25+ years spent in hospitality. From dealing with no-shows and call outs to managing a high staff turnover and constantly fluctuating staff requirements; he had personally experienced the challenges of staffing the various hospitality establishments under his preview. Such experiences lead him to believe that there was a need to address contingent hospitality staffing, however at this point, the technological framework to support his venture is not yet widely available. It was almost 10 years after he had helped established Viostream (A video streaming service he was a co-founder and chairman at) when he revisited the conundrum of contingent hospitality staffing. At this point, the success of Uber and other similar platforms evidenced the viability of on-demand services and Ron saw how technology could be applied to disrupt a sector he was intimately familiar with, the hospitality industry. Seeing this opportunity, he shared his views with Tim Chatfield, a friend and also the then CEO of Viostream. Together, they began to develop a remedy for contingent staffing in the hospitality space. In 2016, Tim and Ron crystalized their ideas into Jitjajto, a technologically enabled means to connect hospitality providers (Clients) to hospitality professionals (Talent), providing each customer with on-demand services and gigs respectively. Supported by the rising ubiquitousness of smartphones and an almost 3 trillion dollar contingent labour industry, Tim and Ron saw great potential in their fledgeling company and decided to leave their posts at Viostream to dedicate themselves to Jitjatjo full-time. After fleshing out their ideas, seeking seed investors and extensive research into the hospitality industry, the co-founders decided that New York City with its startup culture, an abundance of seed investors, and booming hospitality industry was the ideal space to kickstart their venture. With pre-seed funding from Australian based investors, they migrated operations to the States and begin the arduous journey in building a talent community and acquiring clients from scratch. This was where they met Dom Esposito, initially a product consultant to Tim and Ron, he too saw the potential in the business they were building and after working closely with the two in developing a working prototype, he decided to come aboard full time as a co-founder. Thus the three co-founders made up the founding core of Jitjatjo.

Jitjajto’s value proposition

Jitjatjo connects hospitality providers to hospitality professionals. Improving on the function of traditional staffing agencies, through creating responsive access to an experienced and vetted talent pool of hospitality professionals for its clients. While providing talent, flexible work, instant payment (within 72 hours, given meeting of prerequisites and possessing an eligible bank account) at favourable rates and W2 employment.

W2 employment refers to workers who are in the direct employ of the company that hired them, as a result, a W2 employer has to assume greater responsibility(and risk) for their employees. Responsibilities include:

Taxes

Paying for the employees' payroll taxes while withholding Social Security and Medicare taxes.

Employee benefits

Upkeep of employees' benefit programs such as health insurance, retirement contributions, and flexible spending account.

Minimum wage

Worker compensation must comply to minimum wage (federal and state) laws, which in New York would mean $15/hour.

Employee Training

Provision of necessary tools, training, and supplies as required to perform their duties.

In particular, Jitjatjo's decision to be a W2 employer runs counter to the industry-standard 1099 independent contractor employment most other gig-based platforms (Uber, Lyft, etc) opt for. This decision can be understood in a number of ways but largely W2 employment is seen as a more responsible, even appropriate, employment class in the growing market of gig work.

Despite its similarities to its predecessors, its application of technology allows Jitjatjo to automate many aspects of staffing, delivering a responsive service and freeing its change agents (Jitajtjo’s internal full-time employees) to focus on engaging with clients and talents, allowing Jitjatjo to scale unhindered by labour constraints faced by other traditional staffing companies.

Core Competencies

When drafting out Jitjatjo’s business plan, the co-founders saw the need to establish a business structure by identifying the key activities the company had to fulfil in serving its clients. They condensed Jitjatjo’s key activities into 6 main core competencies of onboarding, scheduling/booking, fulfilment, service delivery, reconciliation, and payments. These core competencies would come to guide the creation of departments, hiring of staff, and overall business strategy. The competencies are covered below. Refer to Exhibit 1 of the Appendix.

Onboarding

Defined as both vetting talents through skills assessments, background checks, reference checks, and in-person interviews and educating customers (hired for talent and activated for clients) on how to use the app and to communicate with Jitjatjo to achieve their goals in the platform.

Scheduling/Booking

Scheduling refers more so to talent setting their availability to work their gigs after they have been onboarded while booking refers to clients placing a booking in the app.

Fulfilment

Fulfilment refers to filling each of the client’s open spots per shift with talent that are best suited for the client's needs/preferences.

Service delivery

Service delivery entails in a talent working the gig they committed to, this includes their travel to their site of work and the standards of work provided by the talent, positive behaviour is incentivised.

Reconciliation

Reconciliation encompasses activities that ensure Jitatjo’s compliance with labour/Human resource laws as well as conflict resolution between talent, client, and Jitjatjo.

Payments/Billing

Payments refers to distributing talent their pay through instant pay or more traditional means, while billing refers to billing clients for the services they’ve requested.

Competitor Analysis

With a 3-trillion dollar contingent labour market, Jitjatjo isn’t the only company that wants a slice of the hospitality pie, below are the key competitors Jitjatjo are up against. Refer to Exhibit 2 of the Appendix.

Wonolo

A Series-C Tech-staffing company operating out of California. Key differences include a 1099 independent contractor status for its ‘Wonoloers’. While similar in principle to Jitjatjo, their areas of focus include warehouse support and merchandising. Being a larger company they have operations in Vietnam and the Philippines. Although not in the same direct markets as Jitjatjo, they could easily expand into the hospitality industry and present to be a strong competitor.

Shiftgig

A Series-C Tech-staffing company, Shiftgig operates out of Chicago and regionally in various states across the States. One of the earliest movers in this field, Shiftgig is a job board/mobile marketplace with a manual double commit model (employees must apply and employers have to approve of their application). Recently pivoted to a SaaS model, launching ‘Shiftgig Deploy’ functionally similar to Jitjatjo's products. Shiftgig targets the foodservice, hospitality, retail, warehouse, and experiential marketing industries, despite their long-standing status as a direct competitor, their recent pivot to become a SaaS company has shifted the competitive dynamic between these two companies.

Shiftpixy

One of the few companies in the hospitality space that has released an IPO, albeit to limited success, such a move is indicative of its size. Operating out of California, ShiftPixy targets the human resource and compliance aspect of the staffing industry. Clients of Shiftpixy move their workers over to be W2 employed by ShiftPixy, which then acts as a staffing agency for the customer. This benefits client in two ways, one, it eases the administrative burden for customers by managing the filing of taxes, benefits, insurance, and more HR functions; second, by pooling employees from various clients together they have access to a larger purchasing power and volume enabling lower prices for clients when purchasing worker compensation and insurance, they then charge clients for this service. On 1st May 2019 they have launched their first mobile app that operates under the same principles as Jitjatjo’s own, despite its early stages, ShiftPixy could eventually come to pose as a direct competitor to Jitjatjo.

Pared

A series-A tech staffing company operating out of California with a focus on the culinary aspect of hospitality, hiring and supplying hospitality operators with chefs and cooks. Modelled similarly to Jitjatjo with a single-commit marketplace powered by smart matching technology, ‘Pared Pros’ are 1099 independent contractors as opposed to the W2 of Jitjajto’s talents. Despite their smaller size and niche focus in one particular aspect of the hospitality industry, Jitjajto keeps tabs on Pared’s activities.

Disrupting antiquated staffing (SWOT)

When designing the initial prototype for the Jitjatjo talent app, the co-founders understood they needed to create features that would differentiate Jitjatjo from other gig marketplaces. These differentiators could range from employment contracts, product features, and even payment schedules.

‘Clients want a simple solution’ was a phrase that Ron strongly believed in, born from his time managing hospitality establishments, he understood that clients are averse to investing time into sifting through hundreds of applicants for temp staff. With that in mind, the co-founders jointly developed a ‘Single-Commit-Pull’ model for Jitjatjo’s clients. This helps to not only reduce time wasted by both talent and clients to shifting through job boards for the ideal gig or staff that fulfils their needs but also allows Jijtjatjo a higher degree of control over how talent and clients are matched. This approach to staffing simplifies and improves the process of filling and working gigs for its customers.

Given the importance the co-founders placed on ‘human betterment’, they decided to employ talent under the W2 scheme as opposed to the 1099 independent contractor scheme. This allows Jitjatjo a greater degree of control over its talent’s activities at the cost of increased employer’s liability. Talents enjoy employee benefits, health insurance and avenues of professional development as Jitjatjo takes responsibility for their talent’s well-being. Whereas clients enjoy a reduced employer’s liability and reduced hassle by being able to leave the filing of payroll taxes to Jitjajto. Additionally, due to increased employer liability and employee cost of acquisition, Jitjajto aims to hire only the best to its platform, further benefiting clients with high-quality talent. However, the tradeoff would be higher taxes levied on each transaction, leading to higher bill rates for clients, less take-home pay for talent and lower margins for Jitjatjo. Beyond monetary considerations, the co-founders have also observed the financially favourable 1099 employment scheme backfiring on other startups, such as Uber. Keen to avoid legal missteps led the co-founders to decide on the W2 employment scheme for both pragmatic and idealistic reasons.

Given the liability taken on by Jitjatjo as an employer, the co-founders had to devise a means to ensure that talents perform well during their gig, hence they developed ‘Instant pay’ as one of the key features in the talent app. ‘Instant pay’ is payment credited to their bank account under 72 Hours if the talent links a compatible debit card to their account, uses the ‘On My Way’ function and receive a positive rating from clients. This is in contrast to collecting a cheque or bank transfer schedule every Friday. Powered by Stripe, Instant Pay functions as a reward for talent who perform well during their gigs. This system incentivizes a higher quality of service that serves to benefit not only Jitjatjo and its clients but also bolsters the repute of Jitjatjo talent as a whole.

The On-My-Way and Team Chat are trust-building functions that enable clients to communicate directly with Talents. On-My-Way tracks the approximate location of talent when they are on their way to the gig, clients will receive a push notification when the talent and nearby and when they have arrived at their destination. This enables better service delivery and allows for clients peace of mind knowing the talent they are counting on will turn up for their shift. Another aspect of communication is Team Chat, an in-app messenger that provides a convenient way for talents and clients to communicate. This keeps Jitjatjo in the loop for the shifts they manage and when needed change agents will have access to the chat’s transcript if necessary, aiding in reconciliation when necessary. Refer to Exhibit 3 of the Appendix.

Adversity

Between August 2017 to Jan 2019, was the hardest 18 months for Jitjajto. After receiving seed funding from NYC-based investors, the pressure was on to prove to investors that Jitjatjo could succeed in this slow-moving and distrustful industry. Recognizing the importance of the first transaction in building favourable client relationships and subsequent re-utilization of their platform, the co-founders put in place credit-based incentives to attract clients to its platform. The co-founders also recognized that with Jitjajto being marketed as a way to fill shifts quickly, clients adopting Jitjatjo would likely immediately require talent to fill their shift, the co-founders decided to focus first on building out a competent talent pool before acquiring clients. On top of hiring change agents to grow the business, efforts were also focused on onboarding as many quality talents onto the platform as possible. Hiring practices were focused on improving the efficiency of identifying suitable applicants and filtering out unsuitable ones. Additionally, to further differentiate itself from its competitors, the co-founders also decided to invest in training their talent, maintaining that their platform is only as strong as the talents that deliver on its service.

It was nearing the mid of 2018 when Jitjajto began to run low on capital. In an emergency meeting with the board, the co-founders identified that this was caused by an accumulation of factors covered below.

Incentives offered to acquire new clients have yet to bear fruit. Due to the highly contingent nature of Jitjatjo’s value proposition, clients were not utilizing Jitjatjo’s platform often enough to bring in the necessary revenue to breakeven on their cost of acquisition. Over investing in training courses for talent. With talent under W2 employment, Jitjajto is legally bound to pay its talent to attend their training courses in addition to the cost of hosting the training itself; rather than contributing back to the platform by working gigs sent to them, talent were finding full-time employment with these new skills and exiting the platform. Both measures were evidence of investing too much too quickly into acquiring clients and improving talent without devising means to retain them.

With a lower-than-expected demand from Small-Medium-Business(SMB) clients and a drain of quality supply of talent, the co-founders knew that Jitjajto was in the red. This spurred the adoption of cost-cutting measures and downsizing of full-time staff, shifting the company's focus from growth and expansion to survival. Tim, Ron, and Dom knew that they needed series A funding, and soon.

The co-founders fully believed in Jitjatjo’s primary mission of ‘human betterment’, but learned that they may have dived in head-first, too fast, too soon, over-investing into its supply before it secured sufficient demand. On the talent front, they have devised more stringent hiring processes and cancelled talent training to retain the funds they had left. Instead, they focused on delivering on Jiajatjo’s core promise to flexible work for talent. On the client front, they looked to secure a more consistent client demand by expanding and diversifying their client base by targeting enterprise-level clients such as stadiums, catering companies and large hospitality providers that book in greater frequency and larger volumes.

In addition to the restructuring of business strategy, the opportunity arose when Compass group put up a contract for a white-label mobile app to manage its own staffing needs. Believing in the technology and the team behind its product, the co-founders poured in hours into refining both Jitjatjo’s suite of products and business pitch, bent on securing this contract. Their efforts paid off as they beat out 5 other major competitors to sign a SaaS deal with Compass group, legitimizing Jitjatjo as a player in the new wave of ‘Uber of X’ startups in the hospitality space. Despite a slight extension to their business model, Tim and Ron remained committed to running their platform despite Dom’s belief in Jitjatjo’s potential to exist as a SaaS company, arguing that Jitjajto’s platform supports its SaaS endeavours in being a secondary avenue for shifts to be fulfilled and also the best way to illustrate the value/effectiveness of the product is by using the product itself.

Despite these challenges, Jitjatjo has managed to overcome this rough start and earn the trust of both its customer bases, by investing in key relationships and strategic partnerships with clients while simultaneously delivering on its core promise to talents. Since then, Jitjatjo has experienced success in expanding to three other states on the back of a new influx of series A funding lead once again by Morningside Ventures. Despite these lofty achievements, the co-founders have decided to adopt a more cautious plan for expansion and growth all while never losing sight of how talent were the foundation its company is built on, Jitjatjo remains centred around the core principles of ‘human betterment’. In Q1 of 2019, Jitjatjo has already booked upwards of 5000+ shifts with a fill rate of 86% across three states. To date, Jitjatjo has raised over $15 million in investor funding and $3 million in SaaS deals, and with plans of further regional expansion, the co-founders plan to move towards Series B funding to fuel continued growth.

Lessons from the brink

This harrowing experience taught the co-founders that they had to learn from not only their mistakes in misallocating funding and demand forecasting but also their successes in revenue and business model diversification. After securing a SaaS deal with Compass group, Jitjajto was at a peculiar place in which its business model was a hybrid of a tech-staffing platform, as well as a SaaS distributor, selling and supporting the technology powering its tech-staffing platform to enterprise-level clients. Between the co-founders, Dom(also the head of product) was a great proponent of investing in the technology powering Jitjatjo’s platform, seeing how this option would enable Jitjatjo to take on the SaaS field while leveraging on the unique advantage that comes with running a hybrid SaaS and platform model. Whereas Tim championed doubling down on branding and operations, asserting that after a recent review with each department, they raised that there was not only inadequate support for operational demands(on both sides of the market) but also a dissonance between Jitjajto’s brand values and the values that each team believed in. Ron, as the chairman of the board, was mainly concerned with balancing opposing viewpoints amongst his peers, maintaining investor relationships and discerning the best Jitjatjo moving forward. With ideals clashing against business needs, Jitjatjo’s identity in flux and backdropped by fast dwindling series A funding, the co-founders had to come to a consensus and implement a strategy that positions the company for success in uncharted territory and prove attractive to potential and current investors.

Alt 1: Invest In Technology

Dom felt that the Compass SaaS deal was a hard-earned and deserved victory, but it was also one made out of necessity, a lifeline of much-needed funds. However, as his team was building out a demo for Compass, they saw a growing opportunity to expand into the SaaS staffing solutions market, with securing the Compass deal as an endorsement of the quality of their product offering. Additionally, while developing a new white-label app for Compass group, Dom also led the team on a parallel effort to refine Jitjatjo’s current suite of products. These concurrent projects necessitated a larger development team to meet deadlines promised to Compass‘s upper management. Lastly, even as investing in its technology was a costly endeavour, Dom added that doing so had a spillover effect that benefited operations and SaaS activities and positions the co-founders to grow Jitjajto’s SaaS endeavours. The co-founders agreed that the above factors warranted a close examination of the merits and demerits of resourcing this course of action, depicted in Exhibit 4 of the Appendix.

Automation

Since Jitjajto was born, the matching algorithm that governs its matching of clients to talent has only been improving, reducing the percent of gigs filled by manual matching from 70% in 2017 to less than 5% in 2019. With the co-founders recognizing that automation is the foundation for scalability, they have pushed advancements to automate fulfilment (of gigs), achieving over 90% of gigs being filled by Ma. However, unique cases such as multi-day and large group bookings; alongside service delivery measures such as reminders, push notifications and automated replies for FAQs for talent queries, are still lacking. Hence, such cases are being manually filled by internal change agents. Coming from a product standpoint, Dom felt this is an unnecessary strain on scarce resources, one that backed with sufficient resources and a dedicated team could be easily alleviated. With change agents freed from such menial tasks, they would be able to spend more time engaging with Jitjatjo’s customers and resolving issues that required a human touch, raising overall customer satisfaction and creating a more ‘human’ service.

Predictive capabilities

To Dom, the next natural step for Jitjajto’s product was to leverage the large amounts of data collected from its gig platform to explore MA's predictive capabilities. So far the development of a separate ‘last-minute’ booking algorithm to bolster MA’s main function of fulfilment had shown promising success. Its development entailed plotting parameters/talent characteristics such as, the distance of their homes to the site of work and historical track records that the Community Management(CM) team considers in such a case onto a 3-dimensional graph. Parameters were then weighted and tested, showing promising results of predicting for the top 5 preferred talent to invite to a last-minute gig corroborating with CM’s team's own choices. In part a form of automation, Dom was confident that with the current data on hand, Jitjatjo could develop means to predict ideal talent hires from an applicant pool, determine the necessity of backup assignment to high-risk gigs, and eventually recommend clients the number and skill level of talents they would require to cover their shifts. This would improve talent quality, reduce unnecessary costly backup assignment and improve client talent matching while reducing manual work from change agents to improve the scalability of Jitjatjo’s business model.

Spill over/Speed to market

With Jitjajto’s current trajectory, Dom knew that product improvements would serve to benefit both Jitjatjo’s operations and SaaS efforts, improving its technological advantage(as listed above) over competitors(a major selling point for enterprise-level clients) in terms of running a gig marketplace and also better positioning Jitjatjo to grow its SaaS arm. Additionally, for SaaS clients, shifts unable to be filled internally by their staff would spill over to Jitjatjo’s marketplace, presenting another avenue for generating demand. Furthermore, technological improvements can be easily applied regionally, unhindered by geographical boundaries allowing for a faster go-to-market solution to improve operations across its regional offices. As Dom puts it, Jitjatjo is first a technology firm, not a staffing firm; and to embrace the future of staffing, Jitjatjo has to invest in technologies to position itself as a major player in a shifting gig economy.

Unique market position

Amongst their competitors, large and small, Jitjatjo’s hybrid business model is positioned uniquely as both a SaaS company and host to its own gig marketplace. Both sides of its operations are intrinsically linked and serve to strengthen the other. Working with SaaS clients pushes for product improvements that spill over to Jitjatjo’s gig marketplace, whereas the running of their gig marketplace not only serves as a testament to the quality of their SaaS solution its markets but also allows for statistics and data to be pulled from in-house operations that support the sale of SaaS solutions. This diversification of its revenue streams business endeavours that mutual support each other creates a competitive advantage that few of its competitors have.

Detracting from mission/inertia from operations

Between Tim and Ron, they found themselves agreeing with the validity of Dom’s points, however, Tim felt that operationally Jitjatjo still had to resolve issues such as low client demand, payment/billing issues, brand communications, service standards, and talent vetting practices to name a few. All of which requires an investment from limited resources to improve. He felt bound to address such issues first seeing how Jitjatjo’s original mission was ‘human betterment’. Currently, Jitjatjo’s public image is less than stellar as reflected by its online reputation and in-app feedback from its customers. Hence, choosing to invest in technologies rather than operations would detract from Jitjajto’s founding mission and efforts to do right by its clients and talents.

Commitments

Additionally, Jitjatjo has already been working with various SMBs and enterprise-level clients and the above operational inadequacies had affected the clients’ experience with Jitjatjo, negatively affecting Jitjatjo’s brand reputation in the hospitality space as both a platform operator and indirectly as a SaaS provider. Tim argued that the success of Jitajtjo’s future SaaS arm is inextricably tied to the success of its current DTD operations. Before setting sights on new ventures, Jitjatjo has to meet the expectations of its current and prospective clients, running the platform right and delivering on its core brand promise.

Fraught with Risks

Even as Dom made his case, Ron saw that despite the potential of Jitajtjo’s product, this move would be a risky one, at least relative to the alternative Tim was proposing. In doing so, Jitjajto’s relatively inexperienced product team has to enter a new crowded SaaS staffing solutions market and invest limited funds into designing a SaaS solution for potential clients, while facing the uncertainty of its success and profitability. Additionally, this would require organizational restructuring to support Jitjatjo’s growing SaaS arm and even then, seeing the Compass group was their first SaaS client, the product team may lack the experience and the framework to support the potential multiple SaaS clients effectively. Lastly, entering this space would bring Jitjajto into direct conflict with other companies and the likes of Shiftgig, who has recently pivoted to offer staffing SaaS solutions. Combined these factors convinced Ron and Tim that despite its potential profitability, pivoting to SaaS is a much too risky move.

Alt 2: Invest in operations and branding

Tim believed that Jitjajto was tangibly lacking in an operational capacity, unable to meet the needs required by larger clients; while less tangibly, its old brand was disconnected from its mission of human betterment. With Jitjatjo growing at a rapid clip, he felt the need to stabilize growth by addressing operational concerns. While operational demands have already outstripped its capacities this has lead to Jitjatjo’s platform being destabilized through a lack of proportionate client demand for its growing talent pool and inadequate communications to support both clients and talents. Next, he felt that a rebranding campaign would aid in aligning Jitjatjo’s brand beliefs to the change agents’ own. Fittingly, it's about time Jitjatjo stood for something. As CEO, Tim felt that funding the improvements to Jitjajto’s brand and operations will not only improve Jitjatjo’s chances of securing series B funding to achieve greater levels of stable growth but also give time for Jitjatjo to mature in its SaaS deals with Compass group.

Rebranding and re-alignment of mission and vision to business activities

When Jitjatjo first started, Ron and Tim, decided that Jitjatjo’s value proposition was best delivered in a functional angle; flexible work for hospitality professionals and on-demand staff for hospitality providers. ‘It's about time’. Although this brand has served well since the company’s inception, it is ill-suited for a startup with aspirations to scale regionally as it leaned on a functionalistic rather than idealistic appeal. Unlike their competitors, their decision to employ talent under a W2 scheme evidenced this commitment to human betterment(and foresight for regulatory changes), all that was left was to communicate it. Hence, like many other gig economy companies (Lyft, Uber, Fiverr) and brands that have transcended to sell more than a tangible product (Nike, Apple), Tim saw that Jitjatjo needed to stand for something bigger than themselves, to be more than another gig economy enabler but one that embodies larger ideals, cares about its users, and understands its responsibility in this emerging economy. Of which were best communicated through branding, however, to do so Tim knew that such an overhaul would require changes to Jitjatjo’s logo, design, and communications, aspects of a business Jitjajto as unable to undertake internally. Hence, if they decided to rebrand, they would need aid from an external creative agency, which would require resources that would otherwise be allocated to improving technologies and expanding the product team.

Improve operations and standards of service/support (provided to clients/talent)

Besides the technological demands of growing a single-pull-model job marketplace, not every aspect of delivering Jitjatjo’s brand promise could be fulfilled via technology. From personal experience, Tim understood that attracting and retaining clients required well-resourced sales and Customer Success(CS) teams while vetting and managing talent required a similarly supported CM team. On the client-side, new strategies to discover, track and convert leads at every step of the marketing funnel had to be explored to inform the development of future sales strategies. While on the talent side, the vetting of talent’s skills and suitability for the platform had to be revised with external advisors and to hire the talent with the right skills and attitudes to meet the client’s needs. He stressed that after clients are onboarded, their re-utilization of the app would be built on positive experiences with Jitjatjo’s platform. With the volume of talent/client communications(enquires/disputes) increasing, resources needed to be allocated to adequately field them through hiring new change agents across CM and CS teams. Secondly, each team lacked middle management and as a result is largely disorganized with poor inter-department communications, as such it was difficult to streamline and improve current work processes. Lastly, new tools had to be deployed to not only conduct marketing attribution post-onboarding to better allocate marketing spend and raise lead generation amongst clients, but also to track customer’s use of the app to improve its user-friendliness. Tim believed that such practices if implemented well, would serve to benefit the brand as it grows.

Erodes technological advantage

At this point, Dom interjected that Jitjajto’s success has initially been built on its technological advantage, if resources are allowed away from the product team, technological improvements would have to take a back seat. Eroding Jitjatjo’s technological competitive advantage over the likes of Pared and Wonoloo, who since then have taken steps to greatly improve the technology powering their platforms; furthermore, this course of action would also stun the development of an arguably more profitable, albeit risky SaaS arm of Jitjatjo.

Conclusion: Constantly adapting, constantly evolving

With Jitjatjo’s SaaS arm being based on its proprietary technology, both sides of the company are inextricably linked, one unable to do without the other. Even so, Tim and Dom had come to a compromise on the allocation of funds to two equally compelling and urgent choices. In the face of a rapidly dwindling treasury of funds, the success of Jitjatjo’s hybrid model was contingent on the co-founders agreeing on a course of action that best positions Jitjatjo to thrive in the future of work.