Exclusive Interview with Prashant Janadri, Co-Founder, Taskmo

In today's world, customers demand a consistent fulfillment experience across multiple sales channels—whether an online store or marketplaces. They want a fast fulfillment option on every platform they shop. With this, eCommerce sellers are constantly challenged to meet this growing expectation of a unified experience. Taskmo is a "tech-driven on-demand task fulfillment platform" that helps large businesses, corporations, personal brands, and even start-ups by employing gig workers to perform tasks. Analytics Insight has engaged in an exclusive interview with Prashant Janadri, Co-Founder, Taskmo

1. Kindly brief us about the company, its specialisation and the tech-based services that your company offers.

Taskmo is a "tech-driven on-demand task fulfilment platform" that helps large businesses, corporations, personal brands, and even start-ups by employing gig workers to perform tasks. Our sole mission is to make jobs accessible to everyone at the global level.

Taskmo is addressing one of the world's largest gig economy markets with a vision of making job accessibility a fundamental right for the Indian workforce. We have successfully completed 1Mn+ tasks with the help of 750K+ gig workers in the year 2021. Our clients range from start-ups to Fortune 500, a few of them are Paytm, Byjus, Swiggy, BigBasket, Tanishq, Cashify, etc. We are headquartered in Bengaluru, Karnataka. Whereas we are present across the length and breadth of the country with offices located in Chennai, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Delhi, Pune, Kolkata, and Ahmedabad.

We are a tech-driven company whose business model, innovation strategies, and growth are technology-centric. We make use of our technology for better customer service to gain a competitive advantage and evolve with the marketplace. With the advancement of AI technology, we give them more mobility, freedom, and creativity to innovate instead of clinging to traditional methods and processes. Also, our updated technology helps us to get the most potential taskers according to the task requirement.

2. With what mission and objectives, the company was set up? In short, tell us about your journey since the inception of the company?

Taskmo, formerly known as FeedMyPockets is the brainchild of Prashant Janadari and Naveen Ramchandra. They initially started off as a platform to engage students based on a simple premise "Earn to Learn" with the sole mission to provide them with temporary jobs with flexible working hours so that they had ample time to balance their education and their temporary job.

Though it started as a simple Facebook campaign, the duo saw over a thousand plus students who started enrolling to perform field-based jobs. At the end of August 2020, many students benefitted from FeedMyPockets.

The rising surge for tasks never took a halt and it was at this moment that our founders realized that it was time to look at the bigger picture. Looking at the phenomenal growth of the gig economy, our founders rebranded ourselves into Taskmo. Since then, Taskmo's growth has been phenomenal. This decision to rebrand ourselves had switched our entire game plan. Even though our sole vision was still to provide jobs to everyone, we swiftly transitioned into the gig economy with a mission to digitize all gig jobs and provide gigs for the next billion internet users.

3. Mention some of the awards, achievements, recognitions and clients' feedback that you feel are notable and valuable for the company.

• We were delighted to be Elevate Finalist at the Karnataka Govt. start-up program.
• We have also been facilitated with KSDC Award for Karnataka Skill Development co. under social impact
• Startup of the year: Deccan Herald in association with Radio Mirchi.
• We are thrilled to announce that we have made it to the list of 10 Best start-ups to work for – Bangalore: Silicon India under Series A start-ups
• Recently, Taskmo's Co-founder Prashant Janadri has facilitated with BusinessWorld 30 under 30 awards.

4. Tell us how Taskmo is utilising AI and IoT effectively on its platform and how it's benefiting your clients?

As a tech strategic organization, our entire technology is backed by AI. AI offers more agility in a business, giving us an upper hand over other companies that fail to innovate. The AI dashboard helps in shortlisting the most perfect gig worker for that particular task based on their skills and work experience.

Talking about IoT, our highly experienced tech support team is working on implementing it in the reference of taskers, so it could help us keep a track of the gig workers, thus giving us the ability to quickly assimilate new tasks.

Because of the latest technology and tech support from Taskmo, our clients can experience transparency in the whole process starting from assigning the task to the task being performed.

5. Kindly mention some of the major challenges the company has faced till now and how technology has been an enabler in solving the issues?

Task based platform is new to both companies and gig workers. Training and screening gig workers was always difficult. However, we brought in AI-driven training modules to shorten the training time. With our AI-supported task curation, we have improved the productivity of gig workers and thereby their earnings too.

6. What is your biggest USP that differentiates the company from competitors?

• Digital training in vernacular languages
• Availability of digital tasks based on interest
• AI driven checking for task completion
• Instant payments

Untill now, Taskmo has released 300+ training videos for the gig workers with 50+ professional trainers, 150+ projects, and 13,500+ watch hours. Our latest tech integration allows businesses to organize and share data across multiple platforms, offering a substantial workforce to fulfil last-minute tasks.

Taskmo offers quick payment methods that rely on financial systems that are accessible throughout the day. With these USPs, Taskmo has successfully executed 1 million+ tasks to date in PAN India, with the quality assurance that stands above the rest. Our taskers are well trained to meet clients' needs and businesses can easily monitor them through our real-time monitoring giving them a bird's eye view of the market.

7. How do you plan to revolutionise the Indian/US market and what are your plans to tap the market?

As per a report by ASSOCHAM, India's gig sector is expected to increase to US$455 billion at a CAGR of 17% by 2024 and has the potential to expand at least 2X, as per the pre-pandemic estimates. Also, India is likely to have 350 million gig jobs by 2025, presenting a huge opportunity for job seekers to capitalize and adapt to the changing work dynamics. Taskmo is India's fastest growing gig marketplace contributing greatly to the gig economy by working with start-ups and fortune 500 listed companies. Taskmo has a unique distribution of tasks which makes us stand out in terms of the service we provide. We have witnessed a growth of 50X in one year with the help of immensely knowledgeable mentors and a talented workforce.

9. What's your growth plans for the next 12 months?

Taskmo is looking to scale INR 100CR ARR (Accounting Rate of Return) business, acquiring 500+ brands & facilitating 1Mn+ gig workers with digital & hyper-local tasks in the next 12 months. We are looking to raise a series-B fund to scale the business to 400% . We also want to expand Taskmo to Tier – 2 & Tier – 3 cities and simultaneously explore business opportunities in the global market. Team expansion is also one of our primaries for the next 12 months.

10. The industry is seeing rising importance with business and technology enablers like virtualization, convergence, and cloud. How do you see these emerging technologies impact your business sector?

Companies are attentive to the changing landscape of their industry and are sure to count on right talent to carry out new business models. Taskmo helps an organization keep up with emerging customer demands and therefore survive in the face of the future. It allows companies to compete better in an economic environment that is constantly changing in response to technological evolutions. With proper management of the digital turnaround, we allow accessing operational and productive advantages.

11. AI is projected to be the next market. How is AI contributing to the making of your products and services on Taskmo?

AI is no longer merely a buzz. It is boosting profitability and transforming businesses across sectors through systems that can learn, adapt and evolve with changing times. As a tech-driven organization, we are working continuously to re-architect ourselves every day with the changing needs of business and technology. At the same time, we advocate our taskers for the responsible use of AI to reduce operational costs and gain more insights from data and other such services.

12. Which industry verticals are you currently focusing on? And what is your go-to market strategy for the same?

Taskmo being sector agnostic offers digital solutions in task completions. We have successfully assisted businesses in various verticals including retail, FMCG, Ed-tech, E-commerce, Fintech, offline stores, and shared marketplaces all over India. Our platform is designed digitally to meet the needs of clients and offer various services as per the market demand. We don't see ourselves as a workforce agency but a strategic organisation that focuses on a shared niche of various verticals spanning multiple industries.

13. What is your Leadership Mantra?

We always believe in the mantra of "Team work makes the dream work". We are a team of people with different abilities, strengths, talents, experience, and skillsets who have come together towards a common goal of digitizing gig jobs for the next half billion internet users.

14. What are the technical skill sets that you specifically look for while hiring employees for Taskmo?

The ultimate goal of our hiring is to hire employees with job knowledge and functional expertise. We look to on board product engineers, data scientists, full-stack developers, development engineers, AI & ML enthusiasts, QA analysts, hybrid & native app builders, and many more.

15. How can businesses efficiently extract value from data, without increasing cost and complexity?

Data, or rather big data, is a revenue generator, market developer, and prime analyzer of consumer behaviour. Taskmo gathers data from more sources, applies insights over more channels, and does all of this continuously while ensuring that the data is clean, privacy is protected, and regulatory responsibilities are met.