Exclusive Interview with Devaansh Bahl, Co-Founder and CEO of Unigigs

Networking generates huge value for an online community. It creates a space for people to meet like-minded peers and share knowledge. UniGigs is a professional networking community that helps people connect, hire and engage with the brightest of freelancers and skilled professionals across the globe. Analytics Insight has engaged in an exclusive interview with Devaansh Bahl, Co-Founder, and CEO of Unigigs.

Kindly brief us about UniGigs, its area of specialization, and the services that UniGigs offer? 

UniGigs is a professional networking community that helps people connect, hire and engage with the brightest of freelancers and skilled professionals across the globe. We do so by allowing businesses and startups to post jobs, projects, and explore services and by providing tools for freelancers to create and monetize their portfolio-based professional identity. The best part is that UniGigs is a zero percent commission freelancing platform.

With what mission and objectives, UniGigs was set up? Tell us about your journey since the inception of the company.

Our vision is to enable Gen-Z and millennials for the future of work driven by a "skill-based" gig economy. With the mission to create the largest online professional networking community for freelancers and to provide everyone with an opportunity to monetize their skills.

Both Harsh (Co-founder & CTO, UniGigs) and I used to undertake group tuitions and workshops for our classmates as freelance tutors. During graduation we realized the amount of potential freelancing could have in the future, especially seeing the number of side hustles our classmates would take in two different parts of the world, me in the UK and Harsh at IIT Delhi, it was then that we got together and thought of creating a platform our friends could use. Our third co-founder Dharmendra has the experience of pivoting his entire venture around one similar and popular freelancing platform in the US. We studied the market intensively and concluded that it would be a good idea to launch a freelancing platform in India. We started conceptualizing the idea of UniGigs and building a prototype at the beginning of the year 2021, and we were ready with our MVP in July 2021. We gathered a lot of public feedback and improved upon our platform and we launched our first stable version in November 2021. Since then, we have gained thousands of users and thousands of gigs listed on our platform and we look forward to keeping growing.

Please brief us about the services UniGigs provide to Its customers and how do they get value out of it? 

UniGigs provide professional one-to-one and one-to-many engaging opportunities to freelancers and service seekers. Our customers (freelancers) can enhance their visibility and create their photo/video-based portfolios on our platform. Our core value lies in the ability of both the freelancers and the seekers to network with each other and the ability of the freelancers to land projects and jobs by building these connections as opposed to just listing their services. We help freelancers improve visibility with an AI-based targeted engine

How do you plan to revolutionize the Indian Freelancing market and what are your plans to tap the market?

With a large working population and an overall workforce that grows by over four million every year, the advent of the gig economy in the country has had a major impact on the country's labour market. There has been a significant rise in both the number of gig workers across the country, as well as growing numbers on the hiring side. According to one study over 70 percent of respondents from the hiring side has used gig workers at least once or twice for solving organizational issues in the last year. Further, the report said, nearly 45 percent of the human resource (HR) heads surveyed wanted to hire a gig worker so that they can supplement the skills of the existing workforce, 39 percent would do this to reduce the cost, and 10 percent for filling temporary vacancies in their teams. India, due to its sheer number of working population, many of whom are beginning to get digitally connected, has found a growing acceptance of gig work. It currently values the global freelancer market at $2-3 billion which is growing at an annual rate of 14 percent. India currently accounts for $1 billion in the global market. While the US leads the race with 53 million independent workers, India has 15 million freelancers with its gig economy workers increasingly gaining independent contracts in industries like IT and programming, finance, HR, and design, among others.

We as an organization strongly believe that changing the future of work will be driven by Freelancing, the gig economy, and remote working. Which will help drive the future of the economy in India by giving small-town people an opportunity to showcase their skills. With Covid acting as a catalyst for the concept of remote working and freelancing was very rare for the Indian working class now the employers believe the new way of working will continue for a long time and has in a way shifted the way employers are now looking at getting talent. This is helping them in getting better salaries and opportunities.

What are the key trends driving the growth of the Gig Economy in India? 

Amidst the pandemic began a new modern era due to the demolition of the global workforce, all left to do was rethink our working structure and switch to the new, remote working conditions, which are here to stay for the years to come. The need and demand for freelancers have only seen a rising trend in the past few years, not only because it has advantages of being secure, and independent but also fruitful among others. Businesses look at freelancers as the workforce of the future because of countless reasons and strongly believe that they're an integral part of the work ecosystem.

Apart from being cost-effective, highly skilled, professional, and providing quality work, freelancers are known to be extremely productive too. Research reveals that the average regular employee is only productive for two hours and 53 minutes in an eight-hour day," according to a recent Inc article. That's right—only three hours of productive work per day for an hour and a half of pay. Employees (and freelancers) who work from home have been regularly found to be more productive, owing to fewer interruptions, remote work arrangements that save significant commute time (and money), and the benefit of flexible hours

How do you see the company and the industry in the future ahead?

From an organization standpoint, our core focus will always be to execute and from an industry standpoint we believe, the digitization of the workplace will play a major part in increasing interest in self-employment and work that is more flexible. The ongoing job scenario is more inclined towards freelancers or gigsters and the Pandemic is making it a more suitable option. The covid-19 Pandemic has made us realize that working from anywhere, anytime, and for anyone is possible. India's gig sector is likely to grow to US$455 billion at a CAGR of 17 percent by 2024. It has the potential to grow at least 2 times the pre-pandemic estimates, according to the ASSOCHAM report. Independent workers and traditional job holders alike will have to become more proactive about managing their careers as digital technologies continue to reshape the world of work. Understanding the freelance economy and getting on board with the gig business revolution is a great alternative to ensure your goals of sustained growth, greater output, and increased revenue for your business are achieved. As India moves towards its stated goal of becoming a $5 trillion economy by 2025, the gig economy will be a major building block in inclusively achieving the above goalpost, bridging the income and unemployment gap.

What are your growth plans for the next 12 months?

Our growth plan for the next 12 months is to build a strong tech, business, and product team focused on establishing a strong product-market fit, user revenue, user growth, and user retention. In addition to this, we are planning to roll out a mobile app for our users along with some future enhancements and functionalities in the product. Also, we believe with the cost-affordability that the Indian talent is extremely lucrative for organizations from all around the world, which is why geo-expansion, as well as marketing the product at a bigger scale, will be a critical factor for us.

Kindly brief us about your role at UniGigs and your journey in this highly promising sector.

As the CEO of UniGigs at the pre-launch stage, I was focused on activities like Market and competition research, Product conceptualization and functionality, Product development, and assembling a strong team of other co-founders, design, and technical resources to help drive product, technology, and development.

However, my focus has changed since our MVP launch. At this stage of the venture, I am more focused on establishing a product-market fit specifically for the following 3 things:

1. Defining and implementing go-to-market strategy and running marketing campaigns

2. Increasing Website traffic and finding the first set of paying/ transaction users

3. Generating User Feedback and looping it back to the product development and tech team

Our platform is actively used by the freelance community offering their services in the areas of content writing, graphic design, multimedia, coding and programming, web development, social media marketing, voice-over artists, and more. We're growing 30% month on month and are now an organization focused on growth and user engagement. On the demand side, the buyers typically small businesses and startups looking to outsource their non-core activities can use our platform to find the right talent.