Small Business Labs

The Rise of the Solopreneur Travel Agent

Fora is a new platform that provides full and part-time independent travel agents with the tools needed to run their travel business.  They recently raised $5  million in seed funding. 

Fora joins a growing list of vertical market platforms providing solopreneurs with infrastructure tools for operating their own business.  

The VC firm leading Fora's round, Forerunner Ventures, refers to independent workers as "the entrepreneur next door".  Key quote from their article on why they invested in Fora:

At Forerunner, we’re passionate about the empowerment economy, especially opportunities that help marginalized demographics enter the workforce. We love businesses that leverage a technology backbone to streamline previously manual processes, and we’re focused on a future post-COVID world, where people are once again able to explore and travel.  

Fora's interesting because it's linked to a mix of growing and powerful trends.

The first is the growth of self-employment and independent work.  Fora's travel advisors are independent workers who access Fora's marketing and operation tools to help them run their travel business.  

More specifically, Fora is tapping into the creator economy, a fast-growing subset of independent work.  Content creators who focus on travel are a large creator economy segment.  Adding travel services is logical monetization path for this group.

And, of course, there's a lot of pent-up consumer travel demand due to COVID.  

Fora is also tapping in to the long-term growth in personal services companies.  These are niche businesses that provide life support services to increasingly harried, time-constrained consumers. 

Examples include personal trainers, wealth managers, dog walkers, mow and blow services, sports, music and education coaches for kids, and many others.  

We started covering the personal services trend in 2008, and it's been one of the fastest-growing small business and independent worker segments since then.  

Expect to see more vertical market platforms that enable independent workers and small businesses to provide personal services.

Bank of America's 14 Moonshot Technologies

Somehow we missed Bank of America's report To the Moon (shots)! - Future Tech Primer report, which they released in September.

But we ran across it recently, and it covers 14 technologies that could "transform our lives" by 2030. Because of this, BofA also thinks these technologies are good investment areas.

Key quote from the report:

"Moonshots are radical technologies that could change our lives and accelerate the impact of global megatrends," Israel's team said. "They are not as far into the future as you might think ... Failure to identify future tech today could mean missing out on the next big revolution." 

The report chart below (click to enlarge) lists the 14 moonshots.  

None are surprising, and we've covered all of them in one way or another over the past few years.

But two did jump out, mainly because it's hard to agree with BofA that these technologies will change our lives by 2030. These are emotional A.I. and immortality, which BofA describes as:

Emotional Artificial Intelligence: Emotional AI (EAI), also known as “Affective Computing” and “Cognitive Computing,” is designed to capture, analyze and respond to human emotions and simulate human thoughts. EAI can potentially collect, analyze and respond to completely new varieties of data and situations and predict or simulate human thought, leading people to take action.

Immortality: Breakthroughs in healthtech, biotech and anti-aging drugs could result in radical life extension that ‘disrupts death’. Traditionally, aging has not been viewed as a disease that can be treated but this is changing. Actors in this space are increasingly looking to tackle the hallmark of aging via pathways such as ‘genomic instability, telomere attrition, mitochondrial dysfunction, and cellular senescence’ among others.

Hey, we'd like to see immortality breakthroughs by 2030, but that seems highly unlikely given our current state of understanding about aging and what could potentially be done to greatly expand human life spans.  But we'd be glad to be wrong about this.

The same holds for creating AIs that truly can think and respond like a human.  Not even the most optimistic AI researchers we've talked to are suggesting anything close to this is possible over the next 9 years.

We like following tech investment research because investors don't just talk about tech breakthroughs - they place serious bets on them.  

See the report for more details.  

The Explosion in Seed Round Funding

Crunchbase's How Seed Funding Has Exploded In The Past 10 Years reports that:

Fewer than 3,200 companies received seed funding in the period between 2006 and 2010. A decade later, that had ballooned to more than 23,000 startups.

Crunchbase data also shows that the average seed investment has grown from $1.7 million in 2011 to $4.6 million in 2020.

The article points to the launch of Amazon Web Services in the mid-2000s, which made it cheaper and easier to start a software company, as a driver.  

That's certainly true.  But many factors contributed, not the least of which is the broad adoption of technology across industry and society during this period.  This opened up a wide variety of new market opportunities for tech startups. 

Also contributing is the massive increase in public and private valuations for tech firms.  This is attracting more capital to seed rounds, which leads to more seed stage firms raising money.

Pitchbook's Seed market braces for an onslaught by top VC firms covers the influx of large VC to seed investing.  Key quote:

Earlier this year, Sequoia and Index Ventures each unveiled seed funds of roughly $200 million. Then, Andreessen Horowitz and Greylock Partners announced seed-focused pools of capital with $400 million and $500 million, respectively.

In the past, the large A-list VC firms did few if any seed rounds.  But getting in early means the opportunity for greater returns. It also greatly increases the VC's the ability to put more money into successful firms in later, highly competitive rounds.  

We expect seed funding to continue to grow, which is good news for entrepreneurs.

The Global Survey on Platform Based Freelancers

The recently released Global Survey on Freelancing covers data gleaned from over 1900 freelancers from across the globe. 

To gather this data, the survey team - a collaboration between the Agile Talent Collaborative And the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto - worked with 75 freelance platforms, agencies and communities from various countries who helped them collect the data.

This study breaks new ground because it's the first global study we're aware of that focuses on freelancers who provide services to businesses via online platforms.  

The study includes an 8 factor freelance satisfaction index (click on the study chart below to enlarge).  

Key report quote on the satisfaction index data:

Most freelancers understand and accept the trade-off they make by trading traditional professional employment for a solopreneurial life and career. The data line up with earlier results; Freelancers value the flexibility and independence that freelancing provides, enjoy the quality of life it offers, and appreciate the chance to build satisfying client relationships. And, they accept the occasional volatility of opportunity, and the challenge of a frequently changing workplace and colleagues.

As noted in the quote above, this data is consistent with other studies (including ours).  But almost all the other studies (including ours) are limited to one or just a few countries.  This study shows that globally freelancers share many views on independent work.

The report covers a lot of ground - way too much to cover here.  It's well worth reading for anyone interested in freelancing.  

Click here to download the report.

The Return of the End of Men Trend

There's been a flurry of recent articles on the declining share of men enrolled in colleges and universities.

The Wall Street Journal's A Generation of American Men Give Up on College: ‘I Just Feel Lost’ seems to have started the flurry.  Key quote:

At the close of the 2020-21 academic year, women made up 59.5% of college students, an all-time high, and men 40.5%, according to enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit research group. U.S. colleges and universities had 1.5 million fewer students compared with five years ago, and men accounted for 71% of the decline.

Quickly following were stories from The Atlantic, New York Times, USA Today and others on the same topic.

As the Bloomberg chart below shows, the college gender gap has been in place for several decades.

The gap also widened in 2020, with the pandemic-induced decline in college enrollments hitting men a bit harder than women.

So men struggling academically relative to women is not a new trend.  And it generated a lot of attention a decade ago.

The 2010 Atlantic article The End of Men, released as a book in 2012, focused on the academic underperformance of men relative to women.  

This article and book also covered other issues faced by men and boys.

These include higher rates of incarceration, addiction, suicide and mental illness than are experienced by women.   

We covered these and other issues men face in our 2010 article on the end of men.

This sudden media interest in this topic illustrates an interesting aspect of trends - they can lie low or disappear for years and then suddenly reappear.

In this case, the renewed interest is certainly justified. The problems men and boys face have, if anything, increased over the past decade. 

Moment House and the Blending of Social Media and Digital Entertainment Experiences

Moment House is a live streaming, interactive social media platform for digital entertainment.

Newly launched in 2020, Moment House has produced over 700 concerts, called “moments,” selling one million tickets through its platform. Each unique digital experience can generate tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue for creators who can reach audience members from all over the world.

The moments have featured big-name artists such as Justin Bieber, Halsey, Kygo, and Tame Impala, but the creator economy platform also provides opportunities for emerging creators with small audiences to monetize their fans.

Moment House recently closed a $12 million investment round led by Forerunner Ventures.  They plan to use this money to expand their platform to all kinds of events, including comedy, speeches, business events, and interactive podcasts through the use of live audio rooms.

Moment House held a Louis the Child concert on August 29th, which was a recorded experience of the live performance at Colorado’s Red Rocks Amphitheatre on August 27th.

The show was interactive, with a live chatroom for users to talk, and the sound quality was quite impressive. 

Their platform also allowed audience members to use breakout chatrooms during the show, allowing audience members with similar interests to connect and interact in smaller groups.

The camera panned to all different angles of the unique concert venue: up close on stage, to bird’s-eye views of the dancing audience. For a price tag of only $12, this was an attractive deal to fans who were not located in Colorado or could not pay the $60 cost of a normal ticket.

The CEO of Moment House, Arjun Mehta, emphasizes the importance for modern creators to provide more online interactive entertainment for fans, which is achievable through Moment House’s engaging platform.

In the competitive creator economy, the digital experiences of Moment House provide more meaningful memories, ultimately building stronger fan bases for creators with both large and small audiences, compared to pre-recorded and asynchronous events on a typical streaming site.

Moment House nicely illustrates the trend towards online entertainment experiences, the use of social media to better engage audiences, and the growing array of services helping creators large and small reach and monetize their audiences. 

The Independent Worker Surge

After falling by 7% in 2020 due to the pandemic, the number of independent workers (freelancers, independent contractors, gig workers, etc.) rose to 51.1 million in 2021, an unprecedented 34% increase.

This is the key finding from MBO Partners 2021 State of Independence research study. This is the 11th year this study has been conducted.

As the study chart below shows (click to enlarge), the number of full-time independent workers increased by 25%. By labor market standards, this is a huge increase.

But there was even a bigger surge in those working as independents part-time, but occasionally (regularly, but without set hours per week) as independents. Their ranks grew from 15.8 million in 2020 to 23.9 million in 2021, a 51% increase.

Most occasional independents work this way to supplement their income or pursue a passion or a hobby.  

For example, many rideshare and delivery drivers are occasionals. They fit in their driving work hours when they can, usually around other obligations (caregiving, school, a traditional job, etc.).  

Another example is a craftsperson who sells their work on Etsy as a side gig. When their schedule permits or demand for their product is high, they may work 10 or 20 hours, or even more in a single week. But other weeks, they may not work at all or spend very little time on their side gig.  

There is a mix of reasons for the surge in independent workers:

1. The pandemic has many people rethinking what work means to them and reevaluating how they want to live and the type of work they want to do. This has more people turning to independent work for the autonomy, control, and flexibility it provides.  
2. Many lost their jobs or had their work hours cut due to the pandemic. This accelerated the existing trend towards people needing to take on 2nd and even 3rd jobs to supplement their income.
3. Online platforms, marketplaces, and social media have made it cheaper and easier to become an independent worker.  The burgeoning creator economy is an example.
4. The pandemic has reinforced a growing view that traditional jobs are riskier and less secure than they once were. This makes going independent more attractive.

See MBO Partners' research brief for more details.

Emergent Research worked with MBO Partners on this study.

The Metaverse is Coming

The metaverse has been getting a lot of media attention recently, mainly because Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook plans to shift from being a social media company to a metaverse company.

So what is the metaverse?

There is no standard, widely accepted definition. The Wall Street Journal, in its article Facebook, Roblox See the 'Metaverse' as Key to the Internet's Next Phase, describes it as:

"The metaverse concept, rooted in science-fiction novels such as "Snow Crash" and "Ready Player One," encompasses an extensive online world transcending individual tech platforms, where people exist in immersive, shared virtual spaces. Through avatars, people would be able to try on items available in stores or attend concerts with friends, just as they would offline."

Facebook's first metaverse effort is a virtual conference room service called Horizon Workrooms. The application allows users to meet in virtual reality conference rooms and collaborate on shared whiteboards or documents while still sitting at their own physical desks.

Facebook's video below provides more details on the virtual conference room.

 

The online game industry is also promoting the metaverse.

TechCrunch's article Fortnite's Ariana Grande concert offers a taste of music in the metaverse describes the integration of the metaverse and popular music artists.

Fortnite (an online gaming company) also held a virtual concert featuring rappers Travis Scott and Marshmello. Over 12 million people watched it live, and the concert video (below) has been viewed over 60 million times.

 

While most of the current metaverse hype is around its use by consumers, there's also a growing array of industrial applications.  Wunderman Thompson's Building the Metaverse describes a joint effort by virtual reality chip producer Nvidia and BMW to build a "digital twin" of the car company's factory in Regensburg, Germany.

This will allow BMW to virtually to test changes in the plant's configuration and workflows digitally before implementing them in their physical factory - saving BMW time and money.

In many ways, and despite our title, the metaverse is already here.  But its use and applications - both consumer and industrial - will become much more common over the next few years.  

LA's Creator Townhouse Community

The Hollywood Reporter's New Studio City Townhouses Draw Digital Creators Thanks to Hybrid Zoning covers a new townhouse community designed for artists and creative professionals.  

Quite unusual in LA, the townhouses have live/work zoning approval.  Key quote from the article on the units:

"Located at the edge of Studio City, across from Universal Studios, Thirty Four Fifty West has hybrid zoning that permits people to have a full professional office or creative studio with industrial grade electrical and the like in spaces where they can also live in luxury."

The townhouses are 3 stories (plus a loft above the 2nd story), and according to the article, most buyers use the first and second stories as creative office areas, reserving the third floor as their residence.

The prices start at just over $1 million, so starving artists and creators need not apply.  But by LA standards, that's pretty reasonable.

It will be interesting to see if more communities are built to support the work/life needs of independent workers and creative professionals.

How the Pandemic Changed the Way Americans Spent Their Time

The New York Times article More phone calls, less shopping: how the pandemic changed American lives, down to the minute examines data from the American Time Use survey to show the changes in how Americans spent their time last year.  

The article charts below (click to enlarge) shows the biggest winners and losers, timewise. 

The key change from 2019 is that during the second half of 2020, Americans spent ten waking hours a day at home. This is up from 8 hours in 2019.

We spent about a third of that time on leisure activities, with the rest spread out across a variety of endeavors - including getting a bit more sleep.

According to the data, we spent less time on grooming, but only 5 minutes less per day.  This is likely an example of people not telling the truth on surveys. 

Based on our personal experience and anecdotal observations of others, grooming time fell by much more than that.