This Startup is Creating a Global Army of Mobile Workers

Imagine having an unlimited army available on-demand, ready to perform small tasks and execute campaigns! That’s exactly what SquadRun is creating.

Running a business is no joke. It’s a well known fact that brands have loads of tasks to be done and sometimes a sudden addition to the list of tasks makes it difficult for the team to accomplish. Thus it often happens that brands either end up outsourcing that particular work or hire a new employee that gets that work done. Finding a right person to outsource at the right price and even getting a new employee has its own challenges.

Apurv Agrawal also faced similar situations while working for his startup NGOfuel, a platform connecting Non-Profit organizations to student volunteers, which propelled him to start SquadRun along with Kanika Jain and Vikas Gulati.

Squadrun is a platform which helps people earn some extra cash and allows businesses and brands to outsource work effectively. It’s a mobile marketplace that enables businesses to access a smartphone enabled, intelligent workforce – players for executing small tasks called missions.

Lets understand how it works

Imagine an online community that gets 10,000+ images every day needs to moderate, categorize and tag every image. They can integrate with SquadRun by creating small tasks and set a small reward, that users will receive, for completing the task.

The interested players for a particular task pick up and complete missions according to instructions provided. Multiple players can perform each task to achieve the required confidence. The output of the mission can be viewed real time on the dashboard of the clients or exported via APIs. Once the mission is completed, the player gets his reward.

From the perspective of brands, SquadRun strives to solve massive business problems efficiently by breaking them into several smaller parts and leveraging crowdsourcing, mobile technology and gamification. It gives them access to intelligent and cost-effective workforce that is reliable and does their work with great speed.

The tasks are of two types – On-site tasks, where the users need to go to a particular location and complete the tasks and Remote tasks – where the users can complete the tasks from wherever they are.

A few use cases that SquadRun’s mobile army is being used for already is for content moderation, user experience testing, crowdsourced content for brand engagement, on-ground data gathering, focus groups, outreach, surveys, sentiment analysis, etc.

SquadRun is currently active all over India for tasks that can be carried out remotely. On-site tasks such as mystery shopping, retail execution are currently available only in Delhi NCR, however, these will be expanding to all the major metros in a couple of months.

From the perspective of players, as they are called on SquadRun, it’s quite a cool, simple and fun way to earn some extra cash on the side. Ideally a perfect match for college kids, who’ve already gotten free mobile recharges by completing just a few missions on the platform.

Revenue Model

It charges a transaction fee from its clients. For example – a brand outsources its work and fixes INR 10 price per task and sets 10 tasks. SquadRun would create a platform and flash the tasks on their app. Once the tasks get completed, SquadRun would charge a small percentage of the reward amount as their transaction fee.

It currently has over 1600 active players/users with nearly 200 missions getting completed on it every day. It is now targeting to achieve 1000 missions every day in the next 4 weeks.

The biggest challenge that the team faces is to maintain a balance in the marketplace; i.e. to strike a balance between the players and the brands. For example, if the app invites 1000 players but there are no tasks to be given to them, then the entire purpose of the app goes for a toss. Similarly, brands enquire about the number of players before giving out tasks. “Both the sides are dependent on each other, if one of them is not stable, the platform becomes useless for the other side” says Apurv. This is a classic two-sided marketplace.

Internationally San Francisco based startup Taskrabbit and Thumbtack works on a similar model. But in context of India there are no direct competitors for SquadRun and thus there’s a huge market for this startup to tap into.

The app is currently available on Android and is expected to launch on other platforms soon.