Over the past few months there's been almost a stampede of gig economy companies talking about the corporate market and/or announcing new services, products or initiatives aimed at serving large corporations.
Examples include (but aren't limited to):
- IT talent marketplace Gigster announced g a new funding round that is fueling a "pivot to the enterprise".
- Talent marketplace Upwork announced a new division - called Talent Services - targeted at corporate users of online talent.
- Creative talent marketplace Fiverr announced Fiverr Pro, which targets enterprises.
- Crowd talent provider Gigwalk announced a partnership with Deloitte to jointly target enterprises.
- Coworking giant WeWork revealed that large enterprises are fueling their growth.
- Airbnb expects their corporate business to quadruple in 2017.
- Uber and Lyft have been gaining share in the corporate market.
This is quite a shift for the gig economy.
Most of these firms - and most other gig economy firms - have focused on consumers or small businesses.
Upwork, for example, pointed out in one of their studies last year that over 80% of their revenue came from small businesses. WeWork's customers were almost exclusively freelancers and startups as recently as 2 years ago. And Airbnb only had 250 business customers in total in 2015.
All these firms now get a sizable share of their business from larger corporations and are looking to this sector for additional growth.
So what's going on?
Three things. First, big companies are starting to embrace the gig economy.
As the Fortune Article The Gig Economy Isn’t Just For Startups Anymore points out:
Increasingly Fortune 500 companies and global giants like Samsung are turning to online freelancing platforms like Upwork and PeoplePerHour to find designers, marketing staff, IT specialists and other knowledge workers.
Driving this shift is corporations are looking for faster ways to hire and utilized specialized talent. And they're finding online talent marketplaces provide these benefits.
Second, the gig economy has matured and most corporate employees have used gig economy services as consumers. Because of this, they are expecting to use them on the job and companies are responding by changing their attitudes and policies on the gig economy.
And third, gig economy companies are recognizing that the enterprise market offers a lot of opportunity and they are creating new programs, services and even specialized business units to go after this market.
We expect that gig economy use by large corporations will continue to accelerate and be a key driver of the next round of gig economy growth.
Comments