Fredrik Thomassen as a consultant used to have the resources to offload the boring tasks of the project – like making PowerPoint presentations – but now that he's gone, he and his team wanted to make this available to everyone.
Now the startup, called Konsus, wants to reverse the situation even more quickly. Konsus is a design market where companies can quickly view the design projects they need for various parts of their work, such as presentations, and designers can take back this work and submit their work – a time-consuming task useless. an employee who could be better employed in other duties. Konsus said that he was compressing even further now to provide a 12-hour turnaround for these companies. The company was launched on Y Combinator in 2016.
"[Employees] wants to be helpful and spend time on essential tasks," said Thomassen. "The average knowledge worker, depending on various specifics, spends about 40% of that time on non-core tasks that need to be outsourced – that's the 40% we're looking for, and people understand it very well. Some companies have in-house design agencies and so on, and they are 3 or 4 times more expensive than us, and they typically want to work on these larger or larger projects and do not want to work on small projects that vary from 10 am to 3 pm Most of the projects we are doing are those small nominal projects that people would have had to do themselves. "
Konsus hires account managers and project managers who manage customer relationships to make sure they get the quality they need when they post projects like presentations PowerPoint on the site. But Thomassen also said that there are many examples of these companies that find designers and contractors that they have decided to bring full-time, and he agrees with the Start-up is seen as a stepping stone for entrepreneurs who want to hone their skills to work with Western clients – and even end up with a full-time job afterwards. Many designers come from Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia and other parts of the world that are not necessarily on the radar of these western companies.
Like many other modern services and markets, Konsus hopes to enter the bottom of a business and progress. A person or team from a large company will discover it, start using it and possibly start up could follow this business and start talking to a custom team and dedicated emails. Subcontractors working for this company then go through a background check, sign confidentiality agreements and take training on the company's branded material. Konsus' revenues come in part from subscriptions and prepayments for obtaining a team, and the other half from a pay-as-you-go model where companies get a rate and Konsus takes a commission.
"If you look at [big consulting firms] they have a solution similar to the one we have, and you can get support for all kinds of services – data entry, PowerPoint, various graphic design tasks – that make life a lot. easier. "Thomassen said. "You come home from work and you get it back in the morning, that's part of your workflow, that's what we wanted to build for everyone." Freelancers come to us from all over the world, they're applying on our website, and we have our own job as a recruiter with them, we get about 5,000 to 10,000 people applying, and we accept 10 to 20 depending on the number of people we need.The bar is extremely high. "
Of course, given that these are the tasks that companies could outsource without such a platform, Konsus needs to potentially deal with larger consulting companies like Accenture, and there are many startups that are looking to create a business market. work online. do not target the design at the moment. But as these platforms begin to gather a lot of potential customers, they will probably start asking for tools like Konsus – which means the company will have to find ways to stand out quickly.
The company raised $ 1.7 million from Sam Altman, the Slack Fund, Acequia Capital, Paul Buchheit, Geoff Ralston, John Collison and Liquid2 Ventures.