{"id":8852,"date":"2021-11-09T15:41:45","date_gmt":"2021-11-09T15:41:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/TheNextWeb=1372666"},"modified":"2021-11-09T15:41:45","modified_gmt":"2021-11-09T15:41:45","slug":"gig-startups-want-you-to-believe-they-can-replace-your-job-dont-fall-for-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/?p=8852","title":{"rendered":"Gig startups want you to believe they can replace your job \u2014 don\u2019t fall for it"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
<\/div>\n

This article<\/a> was originally published by Built In<\/a>.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

Don\u2019t quit your day job just yet.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the message that should be implied \u2014 if not explicitly stated \u2014 to every applicant of every gig and creator marketplace during the vetting process.<\/p>\n

With the poorly named Great Resignation in full swing, talent is leaving the nest (prison?) of gainful full-time employment at record levels and sometimes seemingly on a whim. As a result, talent marketplace startups are popping up to backfill that labor with the promise of a full-time salary on a work-for-yourself basis.<\/p>\n

As a 20-year entrepreneur who has dabbled in the service-for-hire world \u2013 and as a techie who grew up with the opportunity of gun-for-hire contract employment \u2014 I can tell you that a lot of those marketplace salary promises not only go unfulfilled, but they usually come crashing down on the marketplace startup like a strong breeze through a house of cards.<\/p>\n

If you lean into the gig or creator economies too hard, you\u2019re going to get burned. It\u2019s just a matter of when and how much income is at stake.<\/p>\n

The great resignation is not pandemic-related<\/h2>\n

There\u2019s a misconception going around that huge armies of employees are quitting their jobs after experiencing some kind of awakening during the pandemic lockdowns. From my perspective, the lockdowns didn\u2019t cause the resignation movement; they just sure as hell accelerated it.<\/p>\n

You could make the case that the Great Resignation is actually the natural outgrowth of the gig economy movement crashing head-on into the creator economy movement. That collision brought about a shift in opportunities for gig work and an expansion from \u201canybody-can-do-it\u201d tasks like ride-sharing, food delivery, and dog-walking into areas that require more of a creative and experiential arsenal to get the \u201cgig.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thus \u2014 from accounting to digital asset creation and even medical and legal industry roles \u2014 if you\u2019ve got skill, you can get paid to wield that skill on your own time, in your own home and for only the customers and the jobs you want.<\/p>\n

The promise goes even deeper than that. Marketplace startups are springing up to match companies to work for other companies, resulting in a new type of startup: the loosely defined gig-worker collective.<\/p>\n

The end result is not too different from the original inspiration for the creation of the marketplace itself. Everyone gets a cut of a continually shrinking pie of revenue.<\/p>\n

So again, as someone who was gigging before gigging was cool, I feel like I need to offer this warning: If you\u2019re a marketplace startup, or a vendor in a marketplace startup, or a vendor\u2019s vendor, or a vendor\u2019s employee \u2014 if you lean too hard into the gig or creator economies as your primary source of income \u2014 you\u2019re going to share in a continually shrinking pool of revenue.<\/p>\n

Digital marketplaces are great. It\u2019s the implied promises that don\u2019t add up.<\/h2>\n

I\u2019m actually a huge fan of digital marketplaces for second- and third-party products, services, expertise and even derivatives of those offerings. If anything, one of the great outcomes of the digital age is the democratization of the transaction. I don\u2019t need a storefront, a cash register or even a bank account to produce and sell whatever it is I\u2019m good at making.<\/p>\n

But the more derivative those derivatives become, the more gaming of the system goes on to maximize those various middleman cuts in the transaction chain. That system eventually becomes an exercise in arbitrage for everyone involved \u2014 with everyone trying to replicate their fraction of the transaction into the equivalent of a full time salary.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve seen this before. It\u2019s dropshipping on Facebook; it\u2019s MLM and referral recruiting. Hell, it\u2019s even Uber and Lyft and the promise of being your own boss, working your own hours and taking only the jobs you want, from the customers you want, when you want them.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t get me wrong. As a part-time gig, if you don\u2019t care about the money, and you\u2019re willing to play whatever incentive game the marketplace is experimenting with, you\u2019re good. But when you get sucked into the possibility of building your business on the back of someone else\u2019s business, you\u2019re just helping them maximize their cut. And they know this.<\/p>\n

Full-time jobs are more than just a full-time salary<\/h2>\n

That\u2019s the primary lesson I learned when I built my service-for-hire startup some 15 years ago. I couldn\u2019t survive just by matching my salary; I also had to pay for my benefits, my health care, my time off \u2014 and that was just the beginning.<\/p>\n

The real killer is I had to pay for sustainability in my business. That\u2019s the feast-and-famine nature of \u2018gig work.\u2019 And if I wanted to not have to work 80 hours a week, I had to pay for growth, the luxury of bringing on more resources (and their salaries, benefits and time off) to counter the inevitable shifts and changes in my customers\u2019 needs and budgets.<\/p>\n

Does Uber or Lyft tell you this when you sign up to be your own boss? No. And that\u2019s the primary reason why there is so much action against the contract versus full-time nature of ride sharing in several states. They did it to themselves. They took a part-time marketplace proposition and implied the promise of a full time job, even \u2018your own business,\u2019 and they arguably glossed over a lot of the economic math I just did.<\/p>\n

The full-time math isn\u2019t hard, but it\u2019s daunting<\/h2>\n

At Spiffy, where we do mobile, on-demand vehicle care and maintenance, every single technician we hire is a full-time, benefitted, time-off-available employee \u2014 not a contractor, not a part-timer, not a gig worker.<\/p>\n

The margins required to be able to do this are not the kind of \u2018everyone can take a cut\u2019 margins that normally lure folks into starting or joining a digital marketplace. But I watch the 1099 model fail time after time \u2014 not just in our sector, but in almost every sector.<\/p>\n

Why the gig economy doesn\u2019t work for most people<\/h2>\n