WorkMonk: Harnessing the Power of 1500+ Freelancers and Vendors
Are you idling away your time? If you have a lot of free time on hand and if after each deep breath all you do is get multiple naps or get on to do household chores, WorkMonk guys have something to keep you awake and busy!WorkMonk is a Platform which connects freelancers/SMBs from India to businesses all over the world. It is also involved with Project Management and Quality Control through the online platform. With this hybrid model, WorkMonk is looking forward to leverage technology to organize the fragmented Indian service providers.
WorkMonk is the brainchild of Pushkar Gaikwad, who has an interesting story pertaining to the genesis of his entrepreneurial journey: “I have been working as a freelancer for 8+ years and had started freelancing from 2nd year of my college. It was fun and got me hooked. If you take out few weeks, I have never done any job in my whole life. I was technically strong, so started doing some development work in college and then started working with freelancers all over the world. I have spent some time in all the major cities of India while staying in hotels, liked Bangalore so moved here in 2010. Interestingly, I did stayed in a hotel in Bangalore for 1.5 years doing my work where I started the company too, I only moved out because the bank refused to open company account on hotel address.” Adarsh S B is his only companion on board added to the 1500+ registered skill-force working as freelancers.
Pushkar knew some of the Morpheus Gang company founders since 2010. The WorkMonk idea conceptualized in April 2011 and it was then that he thought of scaling it by building a platform. He contacted Sameer Guglani, Founder, Morpheus Gang,and got into the Batch 6. The experience was really good and he got to learn a lot from the portfolio companies along with the knowledge shared by Sameer & Nandini.
The WorkMonk platform is targeting skilled individuals and people who can bring in something substantial on the table. Currently, they track all the work by splitting big projects into multiple parts and assigning them to others. There is virtual hierarchy, so a DWF (Distributed Work Force) manager can further split the assigned task to others, thus enabling communication, reporting and payment through the platform. “We are still adding lot of features to make it more robust and smooth as far as control flow and processes are concerned and do want to integrate 3rd party softwares to our platform in the coming months,” says Pushkar indicating future plans. There is a desktop based time tracker too which can be used to track timed work. On the financial front, WorkMonk makes monthly payment on 1-3rd of every next month by direct Bank Transfer to the freelancers’ accounts. On the income front, Workmonk takes certain variable commission on the work cost. They have even observed a good traction with a good number of monthly paying customers.We asked Pushkar about cases of people violating the contract codes and this is what he replied, “People are legally bound under WorkMonk ToS when they register. We do offer contract under special cases too, so far we never had any violation of ToS, most likely because we are only working with Indian vendors and freelancers and do have their phone numbers and bank details. If you check the major freelancing sites, you would observe that a US based site can’t control someone who is in Eastern Europe or Asia pacific.”
Overall, WorkMonk has managed to get 180+ registered Clients, 1500+ freelancers and vendors registered without any marketing. Getting featured on YourStory is the first step that the WorkMonk team has taken for its marketing endeavors.
Got time on hand? Freelance here.