HelpAroundTown.com
When full time jobs aren’t available, how can we enable people to earn money, build their professional reputation and get work experience that will help them get into better and better jobs or build their own business?
HelpAroundTown is a personalized, localized, reputation-based community marketplace for help. We connect neighbors and monetize To Do lists into a source of flexible work, income and experience.
Our solution is designed to elevate those who can't afford access to traditional marketing: home-based businesses, students, retirees. We give them visibility while protecting their privacy. We give them job leads without taking a cut. We give them reputation-building opportunities.
HelpAroundTown has already impacted over 15,000 lives. We've facilitated 9,000 jobs between neighbors and have enabled 2,000 students 14-25 to get work. Moms have returned to work full time. Dads have launched thriving businesses. We leverage the power of community, so people can help each other.
How do you make a living when full time jobs are not available?
As a mom, I could not suddenly create thousands of full time jobs - but I knew how to build a marketplace that would make people employable, enable them to supplement their incomes, and launch small businesses.
I founded HelpAroundTown in 2010 when youth unemployment reached 25%. We monetize neighbors' To Do lists to create jobs.
Today, global unemployment is surging, with at least 35M Americans 21% of the US working population and --- of the global population un- or underemployed.
(NYT, 6/11/20 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/0...) and (Forbes 6/8/20 https://www.forbes.com/sites/j...
The future's worse: "A recent analysis from the Becker Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago estimated that 42% of people furloughed will never get their old jobs back and only 30% of those laid off will land new jobs later this year. "(NYT, 6/11/10)
Most jobs in the gig economy disenfranchise workers. HelpAroundTown empowers: workers keep all the money they earn, control what jobs they do and build their reputation to get better jobs or launch their own business.
Small businesses struggling to get heard find an easy, affordable way to get the word out.
HelpAroundTown is a community marketplace for help. Technically, it’s a peer-to-peer hyperlocal on-demand gig economy platform built on RoR. If you ask our users, it’s where they find help or find work when they need an extra set of hands for their home, family, business, or organization.
Our founding goal was to create jobs, income, and launch careers while protecting people’s privacy and strengthening community ties. For that, we built a comforting website, where older people feel safe posting jobs, teenagers are safe taking jobs, parents are involved, and people have built businesses that have been their livelihood for years.
During the Great Recession, employers weren't hiring. I created HelpAroundTown then to enable people to save money, gain work experience, and build their professional reputation so they would be employable when full-time jobs became available again.
To become employable, you need to reduce hiring risk. We provide the tools to prove your character. By proving that you're hard working, punctual, reliable and have good judgment, you become employable.
Home-based micro-entrepreneurs cannot afford classical marketing & advertising. Our community marketplace's DIY listings and ads provide affordable, easy, flexible, targeted, local promotion opportunities for entrepreneurs, micro-businesses and SMBs.
HelpAroundTown was initially designed to find entry-level jobs for students. When the Great Recession brought youth unemployment to 25%, we helped thousands of students find jobs and save for college.
Then, as unemployment reached record lows, we discovered moms, dads, empty-nesters, and retirees ardently seek flexible jobs to supplement their incomes. Today, our helpers range from 14 to 70+.
We have evolved our site offerings in response to our users' feedback through email, phone, and social media; observed behavior, analytics and user surveys.
To further support small businesses, we recently launched thematic pages combining jobs, listings and ads in our highest used categories: Care, Home, Yard, Education, Seniors, Kids, Pets, Food, Wellbeing, Tech, Business and Community.
Students: find work, launch their careers.
Seniors: find help, can afford to stay in their homes longer, supplement their incomes, stay engaged.
Unemployed and underemployed people generate income while looking for full time work.
Others supplement their income on nights and week-ends, whether saving for a child’s college, a medical bill or fixing a roof.
Those launching a home-based business find an easy affordable way of getting local visibility and building their reputation.
SMBs promote their offerings locally, affordably and flexibly.
- Enable small and new businesses, especially in untapped communities, to prosper and create good jobs through access to capital, networks, and technology
During the Great Recession, employers weren't hiring. I created HelpAroundTown then to enable people to save money, gain work experience, and build their professional reputation so they would be employable when full-time jobs became available again.
To become employable, you need to reduce hiring risk. By proving your character, by proving that you're hard working, punctual, reliable and have good judgment, you become employable.
You do that by earning good ratings and recommendations on jobs you take on HelpAroundTown.
Further, our community marketplace's DIY listings and ads provide affordable, easy, flexible, targeted, local promotion opportunities for entrepreneurs, micro-businesses and SMBs.
- Growth: An organization with an established product, service, or business model rolled out in one or, ideally, several communities, which is poised for further growth
- A new business model or process
No competitor lets workers keep as much of their money, gives them as much visibility into jobs and choice of which jobs to take, with no pressure or penalty for not taking jobs, while offering a personalized, reputation-building, hyperlocal platform, as HelpAroundTown.
Our most director competitor, TaskRabbit takes 25% of workers' pay. If a worker doesn't take a job TaskRabbit suggests, they get penalized and are sent fewer jobs. This forces workers to stay on the treadmill, reducing the flexibility gigs are meant to provide.
On JoinPapa, the platform keeps >= 50% of students' pay, while charging Seniors $30/month to choose their helper. Our helpers keep 100% and buyers choose who they work with. HelpAroundTown jobs pay $15-$20/hr+, JoinPapa pays $11/hour.
Small businesses find it technically very hard to advertise on Google or Facebook. They hate Yelp's hard-charging threatening sales force. HelpAroundTown is simple.
Contractors have told us they used to like Angies' List, but now that it belongs to HomeAdvisor, it's become expensive and useless to them.
Nobody else has created a community marketplace for help. There are verticals like Rover (dog care) and bulletin boards like Craigslist. Apps connect neighbors to sell/give. We uniquely bring together different generations, those who need help, those who need work, town government, non-profits, home-based businesses and SMBs. It's incredibly hard to create a marketplace that attracts all these players. Bringing them together, in a platform designed to elevate and empower, uniquely enables one party's need to become another's opportunity. We empower.
HelpAroundTown.com is built in Ruby on Rails. This was a big technical decision at founding. I consulted many pro developers before going with this option. It would have been cheaper to use out-of-the-box platforms, but we would have lost in robustness, scalability, speed and flexibility.
Our developer is in NY/MA. We tried offshoring and found a local full stack developer who understands the target market was worth the expense.
We're getting a customized analytics platform developed by an analytics startup that is launching and using HelpAroundTown as its test customer.
Our code is stored at GitHub and hosted on AWS. We use Google Analytics, G-Suite, Google Maps, and SEO.
Stripe processes our payments and users' financial data.
We use AHA to track web development & strategy goals, ConstantContact for marketing emails and Hubspot for CRM.
We capitalize on social networks, hosting our own pages and groups and posting to the many others we belong to.
Please check HelpAroundTown.com/map to see our live map with 7,700 users & current jobs. We launched in Lexington, MA and have grown organically since then, to registered users in half MA cities and towns.
Other users have signed up in all 50 states, Spain, and the UK, but we don't have a critical mass there yet.
Our customer acquisition cost is zero. All these users have come by word of mouth, referrals and Google searches. The entire amount we have raised in 10 years of operation is $110,000. Over 9,000 jobs have been posted.
Most recently, HelpAroundTown won a global competition: The Optimal Aging Challenge for its ability to reduce loneliness and isolation among Seniors. The Challenge was sponsored by MIT Age Lab, GE Healthcare and the Massachusetts Governor’s Council for Aging in MA
This is the award video:
This is a simple demo video
Our home page has other testimonials, please scroll down: HelpAroundTown.com
HelpAroundTown was selected as a partner of the City of Somerville, MA for a Federal Reserve Bank of Boston-funded Working Cities project on youth employment. See the National Civic League article by Amanda Maher on the Pocket Change program, pp.7-8 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/ncr.21262
Ms. Yared has been interviewed on national radio about HelpAroundTown (Sirius XM Wharton Business Radio) and in articles in US News & World Report, the Boston Globe, Boston Herald, Boston Business Journal, and many local publications. HelpAroundTown.com/press
HelpAroundTown earned a Chamber of Commerce award for “this novel way of connecting community”.
- Big Data
- Crowdsourced Service / Social Networks
- GIS and Geospatial Technology
- Software and Mobile Applications
When founding HelpAroundTown, the need we were solving was creating entry-level jobs for the 25% of youth left unemployed by the Great Recession. Our theory of change was that while employers weren’t hiring for full-time work, a community marketplace for help (our input) could help the unemployed by creating flexible local jobs (outputs). These jobs would give the unemployed:
- An opportunity to earn money
- An opportunity to build their professional reputation
- Assumption: By establishing their character, by showing that someone is punctual, reliable, hard-working and has good judgment, we reduce the risk to the employer
The long term outcome is that we would make people more employable, so that when the economy picks up again an employer will have reduced risk in hiring them and more willingness to train them.
Meanwhile, they will have developed skills (caregiving, yardwork, technical support, pet care, …), they will have earned money to pursue their education, and they will have shown entrepreneurial drive.
Monetizing neighbors’ To Do lists into jobs has been an enormous success.
With 9,000 jobs posted, we’ve enabled over 2,000 students to find work, earn money, build their reputation, continue their studies and land good full time jobs after that. We've also enabled adults to survive a layoff or being underemployed. We measure jobs posted and applicants per job. We know from user feedback and messages the impact we have made on their life.
Financial data is from user interviews.
- Students making $3,000 a summer through one job
- Entrepreneurs earning $7,000-$10,000 a summer on the platform
- A dad earning $90,000 a year
Another root problem we were solving is that small home-based businesses don’t have marketing channels available to get the word out. This was based on experience. The community marketplace for help (the input) could provide the affordable, local, flexible marketing tools these SMBs need (the output) to successfully grow their business (outcome).
Indeed, many profitable businesses have been built off the job leads and exposure on our platform. With our low price point and simplicity of posting, we generate qualified leads, in the target geography, from ready buyers.
- Women & Girls
- Children & Adolescents
- Elderly
- Peri-Urban
- Urban
- Low-Income
- Middle-Income
- Minorities & Previously Excluded Populations
- 1. No Poverty
- 3. Good Health and Well-Being
- 8. Decent Work and Economic Growth
- 11. Sustainable Cities and Communities
- United States
- Switzerland
- United Kingdom
Given two people per household, we have directly affected at least 15,000 people who found help or found work or have grown their business on our site.
7,700 people have registered on HelpAroundTown since start, posting 9,000 jobs. About 1,000 new people join a year, posting about 1,000 jobs.
Existing users keep posting jobs and applying to jobs, whether they signed up 1 or 7 years ago.
We are developing a licensing model and plan to add viral features that will accelerate our growth.
Our target is to reach 10,000 registered users this year.
Our target for next year is to add to reach 25,000 registered users.
The following year, we plan to reach 150,000 registered users.
In year 3, we will reach 500,000 registered users.
In year 4, we plan to reach 1M users.
In year 5, we will reach 4M users.
Please note that we only count registered users. These are not Facebook likes, they're not someone who dropped an email once and doesn't know what for. To become a registered user, one must have come deliberately to our site, decided it was worth their time to post a job, apply to a job, or post an ad or listing, register, confirm their email, and take action.
In businesses terms, our users are "at the bottom of the acquisition funnel". In a typical user acquisition funnel, 10% reach the final goal of becoming registered.
Our goal is to make HelpAroundTown a global platform for connecting neighbors for jobs.
To reach a global footprint, we are developing a licensing model that can easily be implemented anywhere in the world. We have also identified website features and processes that will support viral growth when implemented.
For the licensing model to be compelling, our platform has to be profitable. The licensee will have a revenue share.
The licensing model transforms what would otherwise be a staggeringly big marketing expense (global reach!) into a variable cost, only incurred as revenue is generated.
We have experimented with licensees who were very committed to HelpAroundTown's role and values. Launching in a new area requires sustained effort. A financial incentive is the best way to ensure sustained long term effort.
The other leg of our expansion is partnerships with local organizations. These local organizations can be the licensees. We are experimenting right now with a licensee that is an Age-friendly Community on Cape Cod and another that is part of the Village Network in MA.
The Village network is a national organization. Our goal is to work with this and other national organizations, seed our presence locally, and then expand to a broader audience when we know we have a working two-sided market already established.
We plan to improve our mobile interface.
We plan to develop a voice driven interface to address the senior market, which as grown significantly for us. Mobile and voice will increase our global reach.
To implement viral growth features, improve social integration, improve our mobile interface, develop new map-based features, develop a voice-driven app, and add new security capabilities, we need to raise $100,000. We have an excellent full stack developer who has been our de facto CTO for the last 4 years. He is ready to realize these changes.
We would like to be able to consult with lawyers on providing benefits for our helpers. In particular, we would like to explore providing dental and medical savings accounts, group policies, life and disability insurance, retirement accounts, and all the benefits full-time employees have.
Since helpers are not employees of HelpAroundTown, they're independent contractors, we are exploring what legal set-ups would be compatible with these goals, from a mutual insurance framework to a cooperative.
Legal advice is expensive, especially since insurance and benefits regulations vary state to state.
Our design needs a significant overhaul.
Our website used to be open to anyone in the world, at launch. People did register in many different countries. Spam has forced us to implement a more stringent address verification process and restrict registration for now to the US & Canada.
To open up the platform to more countries, we need to add local address verification and translation.
Google translates makes things much easier, but is no substitute for a really localized site.
Whether we raise $50,000 or $600,000, we have plans and priorities in place to reach our goals, one step at a time. We know how we would spend every incremental $50,000.
We will first do a crowdfunding campaign with our existing users. This will be a away of introducing them to our new revenue model, enlisting their support, and explaining why we're doing what we're doing and how this will help them.
A crowdfunding campaign has all the communication elements to present our strategic, vision-driven push. We will also tie-in a qualified investor crowdfunding campaign, for our many supporters who would like a way to fund our growth, without overcommitting themselves financially.
Once we have proven our model can scale profitably through licensing, we will revisit whether we need professional investors.
- For-profit, including B-Corp or similar models
The founder is full time
The developer is a contractor
Two community managers are volunteering.
An administrator and user tester is a contractor.
We have had 3 marketing interns over the summers.
Our years in business have given us a credibility one cannot acquire otherwise. No amount of marketing spend will make people post a job on a website when they need help for a vulnerable loved one. Users must trust the solution. A TechCrunch article might generate awareness; a neighbor's recommendation will make you take action.
By bootstrapping the site and focusing on local growth, with media and PR deliberately kept proportionate to our geographic footprint, we have built a stellar reputation. It started with our founder personally inviting people to join, building on her role as an active volunteer on the school steering committee, the public library, the Principal hiring committee, etc. People drawn to the site saw that it worked, hired good helpers, helpers made good money, and the word grew. Parents got their teens to sign up, or posted a job for their aging parents, or found work themselves.
We then worked with school guidance, teen librarians, senior centers, councils on aging, area aging networks to get the word out to their members.
Before founding HelpAroundTown, Reem Yared (Harvard BA, Wharton MBA), worked as an independent internet strategy consultant for fifteen years, developing the internet consumer strategy for a Dow Jones, Inc. financial information services, etc. She helped launch two online marketplaces: for Java expertise and for independent consultants. It's this expertise developing content, technical specs, user features and managing the delicate dynamics of launching a two-sided marketplace that she brings to bear here.
Two-sided marketplaces are delicate.
HelpAroundTown was selected as a partner of the City of Somerville, MA for a Federal Reserve Bank of Boston-funded Working Cities project. Somerville received the $100,000 grant to help long term unemployed youth (18-25) get permanent employment. Amanda Maher, the City of Somerville grant applicant, asked HelpAroundTown to be the connecting platform for jobs. She also invited a Career Place social worker to be the intake interviewer. The City promoted HelpAroundTown to citizens and businesses, who posted jobs on the platform and hired youth for jobs. Opportunity Youth had badges and profiles on our website, promoting their hiring. See the National Civic League article by Amanda Maher on the Pocket Change program, pp.7-8 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/ncr.21262
We have an on-going partnership with the Lexington, MA Senior Center and the Lexington High School Intergenerational Club to connect high school volunteers with Lexington Seniors.
HelpAroundTown received a grant from the Friends of the Lexington Council on Aging to provide phone support to Lexington seniors.
We're exploring a partnership with Age-Friendly Yarmouth and with the Reading Neighbor to Neighbor Network.
Large businesses also look at HelpAroundTown as a benefit for their employees. EMC/Dell invites HelpAroundTown to present at its Employee Benefits Fair twice a year.
We're changing our model from "everyone is welcome" to "you have to earn a HelpAroundTown membership". Earning will be based on good behavior (e.g. referrals & recommendations) and a $35 charge for everyone.
- Helpers find jobs on our site.
We charge them $9.95 to create and display a listing. Listings appear under Find Help and in the appropriate category pages. They protect a Helper's privacy and contact info, but display their skills, qualifications and availability. Users asked for this new feature.
Now, helpers get free profiles, customized job alerts, and job applications.
We will be charging $35/year for helpers. When we do that, we will give them 3 months' free listing, so they can try it out and see that it works.
- Buyers post jobs free and get answers from respondents free. We have not charged them in the past because our goal was to generate jobs. We will charge $35/year membership to validate ID and run background checks.
- Currently, businesses also post jobs free. We will be creating business accounts and charging $25/month for a business to post a job.
- We charge advertisers $35/month or $300 per year. This pricing will increase significantly as we change our pricing to increase with geographic scale and with number of categories displayed.
In all cases, our business model strives to identify the value a party draws from our site and charge so that we build on that value.
- Individual consumers or stakeholders (B2C)
We plan to introduce new charges to our website and increase some existing fees in a way that reflects the increased value we have built.
Our ad pricing will reflect the new category pages we introduced this past year and a new town-based site structure we are planning.
Licensing partnerships will give us a variable cost sales force in towns across the country.
We will run a crowdfunding campaign to introduce our new pricing and explain how it will strengthen our community.
We will solicit qualified investors among our users and friends in a private angel round.
With GM, we’d encourage them to have their entire dealership network post jobs and internships on our site. We’d also work with them to develop a badging process.
insert into solution_answers values (null,- First, determine what skills & character traits they require to make a hire?
- Second, determine how to prove a candidate has acquired these?
- Three, develop badges that canoe acquired by doing specific jobs that demonstrate specific skills on HelpAroundTown. Make sure we have apipline and a process that lead candidates to proving they have earned these badges.
Founder & CEO