My Founding of Taski, at 19, and Its Growth Into a Six-Figure Business
Tags: Startup Lessons, Entrepreneurship, Business, Startup, Tech

The Pitch

Taski, an online hourly shift marketplace for the hospitality industry, allows hourly workers to access flexible shift work through the platform while hospitality managers can access qualified workers on-demand.

Employer Dashboard

Tasker Platform

Traction

We expanded Taski into Calgary, Vancouver, Toronto, and Whistler.

Taski Annual Revenues (2016–2019)

Our customers continue to include the Fairmont, Four Seasons, Marriott, and more hospitality establishments.

Problem/Solution

Hospitality, one of the largest employers of all sectors, has over 60% turnover per year which represents the highest labor turnover of all sectors in North America (Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics).

Hospitality, a $7.2 Trillion per year industry, contributes 9.8% of the global GDP (Source: World Travel And Tourism Council).

The average life span of an hourly employee is 90–180 days resulting in the decline in the quality of service, loss of customers, and loss in sales and revenues due to understaffing.

Internal Hiring — Archaic System:

A hospitality business will incur a monetary loss over 6 month’s wages to replace an hourly worker:

· Administrative Expenses - Exit of an employee and entry of a new hire

· Advertising Expense - Posted on job boards, job fairs, and online advertisements

· Management Time - Loss of time to review applications, interview candidates, and execute reference checks

· Overtime Costs - Over-scheduling current staff to fill vacant positions

(Source: Go2hr BC)

A hotel chain reports that a 10% decrease in annual staff turnover leads to a 1–3% decrease in lost customers translating to a $50-$100MM increase in annual revenues.

(Source: Go2hr BC)

Staffing Agencies–The Bandaid Approach:

Source: Pexels

· Manual Dispatching: Slow and inefficient fulfillment process

· No Transparency: Available staff assigned to shifts to maximize fulfillment

· Lack Of Staff Flexibility: Assigned staff to shifts resulting in no shows and low quality of service

· Inconsistent Service: Absence of an accountability system

Taski–The Innovative Approach:

Milestones

Jul. 2015 (Vision/Idea)

My freshman year at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver inspired my epiphany which led to the founding of Taski, an app to provide the ability to access on-demand work opportunities through a technology platform. 2015 marked the date of this event, long before gig-economy platforms such as Door Dash, UBER, and Instacart were available in the Vancouver market.

At that point in time, one sought short term shift work opportunities through Craigslist, personal connections, and Facebook groups.

Sept. 2015 (Started The Next Big Thing Fellowship)

Teaming with my childhood friend, Kirill from Calgary, we were accepted as 1 of 20 Fellows for The Next Big Thing Foundation, a fellowship and startup accelerator founded by successful Canadian entrepreneurs. The fellowship community provided us the needed resources, guidance, and mentorship in the form of weekly fire-side chats with successful CEOs and entrepreneurs of technology companies.

right: Travis Kalanick Founder of UBER, middle: Kirill, left: me

The Next Big Thing Fellowship provided us the platform to launch our company, as we knew that Taski represented the ideal industry for the hospitality and events vertical. Once the Fellowship ended, my co-founder, Kirill, returned to his studies, but I chose to defer from university to build Taski as a solo founder.

Apr. 2016 (Launch Taski)

I cold emailed the owners of catering companies in Vancouver resulting in a meeting with the owner of Savoury Chef, one of the top catering companies in Vancouver. After our meeting, he allowed me to “shadow” his operations.

I worked every position from server, to venue preparation, to scheduling staff under the tutelage of the operations manager. Valuing the vision for Taski, the owner of Savoury Chef agreed to become a pilot customer.

As a team of one, I used Zapier as the tool to connect Typeform, a Google Doc’s spreadsheet, and Twilio, which served as our version one of Taski’s platform.

The process began when the event manager created a request on Typeform which then sent out an SMS blast via Twilio with the contact database of Taskers.

I initially onboarded our pilot Taskers by pitching the “platform” to servers at restaurants. I was eventually banned from the Denny’s on Broadway Street for poaching their servers. Eventually, a number of their servers left Denny’s to use Taski as a tool to supplement their income.

Savoury Chef “posted” shifts through Taski on a daily basis. When we were unable to fill a shift, I would grab my black shirt, tie, and pants to serve at events myself. This allowed me to embed myself within the platform.

I learned that most people worked these events as a side hustle while juggling multiple on-call jobs with various catering companies and hotels in the city. Constantly challenged with scheduling conflicts, they still had the ability to earn income to pay their expenses while pursuing their ultimate goals.

Taski evolved as the answer to their challenge.

The successful pilot run with Savoury Chef allowed us to continue to onboard new accounts weekly, and we generated over $5,000 in monthly revenues with a minimum viable product.This proved our business model; however, it was not scalable at that point in time because Taski was just a team of one.

Jun. 2016 (Met Tom)

I met Tom Williams, an Angel investor from San Francisco in June 2016, a month into our launch. The day before, I pitched at Open Angel, and the word was out about a 19-year old founder building a marketplace. Tom heard about me through the organizer of Open Angel

At the age of 14, Tom convinced John Sculley, the CEO of Apple, to hire him as a product manager and became one of the youngest employees at Apple Computers. At 19, he managed Larry Ellison’s $500MM venture fund, and now as a founder, he has successfully exited from his companies.

He now works as a full-time Angel investor and has backed over 40 companies, including being one of the first in a unicorn startup.

After receiving an email from Tom for a meeting, I accepted his invitation to meet in Stanley Park in Vancouver. Without my computer or a pitch deck, I was not expecting this meeting to focus on fundraising. At the end of our walk in the park, he committed to leading our seed round and bringing along more investors to close our fundraising.

During this time, I met Naomi and Alex who came on as our founding team members.

Jan. 2017 (Scaling Company)

With funding secured, we built our team to scale up our platform and operations. In Jan. 2017, we secured our first hotel property, The Westin, in Vancouver. By the end of 2017, every major hotel property in Vancouver was using Taski. We scaled up to $100k in monthly revenues.

Monthly revenues in the first 18 months of operations

Active hotel locations in Vancouver in Nov 2017

Jan. 2018 (Expansion)

With early traction in the Vancouver market, we now chose to focus solely in the hotel industry as it provided an opportunity for “land and expand,” and Taski’s model proved to achieve signs of product-market fit.

We managed to intrigue interest for our next funding round, and we were offered a favorable term sheet for an expansion round.

An expansion playbook now became the next stepping stone. Although we continued to run lean with our first round of funding, our team felt confident that without another round of funding, what we built in Vancouver could be replicated in other cities to evolve into a venture scale business model.

We expanded into hotel properties in Calgary, Whistler, and Toronto.

Although we primarily operated in Canada, our objective was to prove that we had the ability to penetrate the American market which represents a 10x market size in terms of hotel locations.

Once we successfully operated and repeated our accomplishments in our Canadian cities, we would then raise a growth round to expand into the multiple U.S. cities to ultimately raise a Series A round of funding.

Walk with Tom Williams, Taski’s first investor

We realized many of these markets were union regulated, and outside staffing violates the union contracts placed between the labor unions and hotel properties.

To combat the union issue, we expanded our exploration of secondary markets focusing on the southern region of Lousiana, Texas, and Florida because they lacked union regulations.

One of our Canadian properties provided us an entrance into the Texas market. The manager of the major Houston hotel chose to pilot Taski and become our first U.S customer.

We now faced a challenge because these properties were managed by a hotel management company and lacked the autonomy of our Canadian properties.

As a result, the hotel managers needed approval from its parent company to utilize a new vendor because of a staffing agency long term contract that contained exclusivity clauses negating the use of other vendors.

Although the hotel managers saw the benefits of using Taski, it was not enough to motivate the corporate decision-makers to move away from the known staffing agencies to a unique technology platform like Taski.

We spent almost a year in business development focusing on our first market in the U.S because our sales strategy we built for the Canadian markets did not effectively apply to our U.S expansion.

Far from the product-market fit, we now explored options to pivot verticals that could enable further growth; however, we soon learned these verticals were not a fit.

Jan. 2019 (Future Endeavours)

Although Taski continues to operate in the Canadian markets, my ambition was to grow Taski into a venture scale business.

Realizing the need for personal growth, I made the decision to resume my undergraduate studies. I am thankful for Tom Williams, always a supporter, friend, and investor, for believing in me as a founder. I am fortunate to have teamed with Alex and Naomi at Taski.

I will apply my knowledge and experiences gained from Taski into the next business venture.

Lessons Learned

Source: Pexels Keegan Houser

My three years of building Taski has taught me to expand my perspectives, and I have formed five key focal points.

1.Learn to sell

Sales represents the number one most important skill in both business and life. Whether raising capital, acquiring customers, or attracting talent, one must need to know the art of sales.

As the founder, owning the sales process becomes crucial. My mistake at the beginning of the process occurred when I attempted to search for a “sales” person to acquire customers.

Perceiving myself as an introverted engineering student, cold emailing and calling customers proved a daunting task, but I soon saw sales as a repeatable system and learned to manipulate that system to fit fluid situations.

A variety of sales resources exist such as Hubspot’s blogs and Steli Efti’s Close.io Sales Blog.

2. Pursue your north star

With limited resources and capital, product focus is critical because distractions consistently occur that do not positively impact customer experience.

At Taski, the ease of staffing and finding shift work by using a few clicks defined our north star. Every product and the operational decision had to align with our north star, so we worked diligently to prioritize.

In every product meeting, we analyzed the product flow to streamline the process and eliminate user barriers by removing as many buttons and pages as possible.

For example, in our Tasker (worker) onboarding process, we were required by the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) to collect tax information through a TD-1 form:

Taskers completed TD-1 form

Our support team actively worked with Taskers by helping them to properly fill out the complex TD-1 form.

Typeform provided us the ability to condense and streamline this process by allowing us to feed that data into our tax API, resulting in the auto-filled TD-1 form and the Tasker’s tax rate, now taking less than a minute to complete.

We streamlined the employer side of the marketplace, by reconstructing our booking process from multiple inputs to a few clicks. In the beginning, we mainly worked with mom-pop type catering companies that held events in various venues, and each event was unique and requiring extra details. Our initial booking process dictated multiple inputs.

As we scaled and on-boarded accounts such as the Marriott, we started receiving hundreds of shifts per location each week. As a result, we converted our bookings process to “One-Click Booking”:

One-Click Booking

As we built Taski, we continued to pursue our north star .

3. Take actions that don’t scale

Even before we had a fully completed product, we had already secured customers and began generating revenue. A spreadsheet, landing page, and me running around recruiting Taskers in person represented our first product.

DoorDash (Palo Alto Delivery) was launched with the founders taking orders via phone call before actually building a technology platform.

The founder of Zappos fulfilled shoe orders by purchasing shoes from a store and delivering it to the customer before even building inventory.

Apporva Mehta delivered groceries himself before launching Instacart as a technology platform.

Away Luggage launched as a coffee table book before shipping their product.

Founders must immediately engage customers from day 1, applying to both consumer and B2B startups.

As customer knowledge grows, a founder can then tailor their products.

4. Walk in your customer's shoes

Because I lacked experience in hospitality and business prior to the founding of the company, I chose to embed myself into the Taski platform by picking up at least one shift every weekend.

This process afforded me the ability to test the shift booking process and build relationships with both Taskers and event managers by encountering the challenges and frustrations faced by both Taskers and event managers.

As a result, this shortened our feedback loop, as we could now implement immediate changes.

The ability to see the emotions and view how a user utilizes the product personalizes their experiences. Interacting with users directly is different than analyzing A/B tests and user data on Mixpanel.

5. Find your tribe

Startups are a hard and lonely journey, especially as a solo founder. Press releases merely serve as a highlight reel. Startups are a roller coaster.

The Next Big Thing Fellowship allowed me to surround myself with other founders traveling the same path.

Join an accelerator or startup fellowship.

Closing Remarks

Building a startup was the best decision I made and produced the most rewarding outcomes. Using my gained knowledge, I plan on starting another company.