Wrap up 2021 report — Journey of MyGigster
2021 has been an amazing year beyond the challenges of COVID, restriction, travel ban and lockdowns. We managed to build a fantastic team and company — MyGigsters.
Our vision is to become the largest, safest and most financially secure gig workers community in the world.
MyGigsters is building a global financial services platform specifically designed to meet the needs of a gig worker, supported by the community and backed by the gig service companies.
Early 2021, MyGigsters was just a name (no community, no product, not a bigger team, no revenue, no users, no investors)
We were very fortunate to be highly supported by the gigsters community, mentors, broader startup ecosystem, regulators, accelerators and gig service companies.
Summary
🤩 Community — Gained over 1000+ members | 5 Community events
🎙 Podcast — 22 episodes published | 900+ Downloads
📱 Product — 700+ active users | Version 1.0 to 2.7 released
🤝 People — Team grew from 2 to 10
💲 Funding — Raised $500K funding + $150K Grant
Journey in more detail
Jan
I decided to start with the MyGigsters community on Facebook. This community invited all rideshare and delivery gig workers in Australia.
We also started interviewing gig workers and understanding their problems in more detail.
Feb
Registered MyGigster business and made it an official entity.
We learned that gig drivers preferred audio content and started the MyGigsters podcast channel — an exclusive pod for rideshare and delivery gig workers.
March
As part of Civic labs, we received our pre-seed funding of $35K from Launch Vic. This enabled us to proceed into building mygigsters community confidently.
Our interviews/customer discovery continued at this point; we managed to complete over 200+ interviews and connect with over 10,000 gig workers across Australia.
We prepared a solution design and landing page to attract early access users with insights from the interviews. We built five versions of the landing page on understanding what message and content lead to higher conversion.
Apr
Thanks to the community and my marketing team, we attracted over 120 sign-ups interested in being part of our closed-group alpha release in less than four weeks.
I grabbed the opportunity to connect with my early sign-ups individually to build relationships and understand their needs.
I took it one level up, and I ended playing badminton with a couple of my users every week.
With our target of 100 alpha users achieved, the tech team was ready to build our alpha version of the application with one feature.
May
In less than three weeks, our alpha version of the application was ready and available on iOS and Android devices. This version was released to the 100 early access users, and we continued to build to the MVP along with them.
Parallelly, the community was consulted and engaged in our product-development planning. The community played a crucial role in providing feedback, testing, and actively contributing to making the features value-driven.
Our work with WorkSafe Victoria was recognised, and MyGigsters received a grant of $150K for developing the application and helping gig workers become smarter and safer.
June — July
With the development of MVP kickstarted, we had lots of tech action. The team was expanded to include
- Exec Admin and Operations
- Designer and Animator
- Content Author
- Digital Marketing Head
- Product Growth
- Social media specialist (Interns x 2)
- Data analysts (Interns x 2)
- ICT Business analyst (Interns x 2)
August
17th August, at our community event, we launched our first version of MVP to everyone in our community. Within the next 48 hours, we have over 100 users who downloaded the application.
We received terrific feedback and ❤️ from the community
September
Started our pre-seed fundraising round. We actively connected with the industry, regulators, gig services platforms and subject matter experts.
We also graduated GIANTS program organised by Blackbird. This program helped us connect with numerous mentors, investors, and startup coaches, which significantly helped us shape our journey.
Our tech sprints were re-designed to release product updates and bug fixes every fortnight.
Another milestone for this month — we earned our first revenue of $3K in affiliate revenue. At this point, on average, 65 new users joined our application every week.
Oct
We grew 350% in less than 60 days.
We added more features such as Auto-bank sync, auto-tagging of business income and expenses, on-demand tax reports and alerts and advanced insights.
We secured $300K funding from a Global Venture Capital (name to be disclosed soon). This VC led our pre-seed round and offered us their best coaches, mentors to proceed.
Nov
More Features | More Users | More support from the community
Dec
If you have read this far, you know we had an action-packed, blessed and unforgettable year. Beyond the world of uncertainties, remote work and COVID, my team pulled it through to make MyGigsters a passion-driven startup.
To close wrap up the year, MyGigsters got selected to be part of the next cohort at Startmate (Summer 22)
Closing notes
We thank the huge support from our mentors, accelerator programs, state regulators, gig service companies, community, team members and other startup founders.
🤩 2022 — Another exciting year awaits
We are excited and eager to unpack 2022. MyGigsters has some outlandish ideas and ambitious goals to achieve. I shortly share our plan for 2022 and Q1 OKR.
