The back office start-ups that serve the sharing economy

Ever wanted to rent out your spare room or holiday home on Airbnb or HomeAway, but had neither the time nor a fondness for dealing with guests? Now you could call on start-ups such as Guesty, Urban Bellhop or Huitly, who will handle the messy business of welcoming visitors and cleaning up after them on behalf of busy hosts.

Or maybe Uber drivers are not sure how to track expenses or get a nicer car to improve their ratings. Those services can now be outsourced to companies such as Zen99, Breeze or Intuit.

The idea of the so-called sharing economy is only a few years old, but a host of even newer start-ups and consultants are popping up in Silicon Valley that aim to make it just that much easier for people to make spare cash by sharing their apartments, cars and odd-job skills. Call them the sharing economy’s back office.

Part of the allure of these start-ups is that the companies they support are so new that they themselves are still working out the kinks in their models, whether it is how to track expenses or how to co-ordinate with guests in another timezone.

Derek Davis, a Los Angeles-based accountant, was in a ride-sharing car when he got the idea for his new start-up, Tabby. His driver did not realise that the company he worked for was not handling his taxes for him as a traditional US employer would. Because Uber, Lyft and other sharing-economy companies such as handyman platform TaskRabbit or courier service Postmates treat workers as contractors not employees, those workers need to track their business expenses themselves and file quarterly taxes.

So he launched Tabby to help with the ad­ministrative burdens. It links with work­ers’ credit and debit cards to pull in automatically a list of their purchases, and allow them to categorise expenses as work or personal by swiping left or right, much like the dating app Tinder. “This is insane. It’s 2015, and we’re still keeping paper receipts,” says Mr Davis.

Likewise, Zen99 helps workers to estimate taxes and find insurance plans. It recently graduated from Y Combinator, the prestigious Silicon Valley accelerator that launched Airbnb, among others.

Then, for when Uber and Lyft drivers are involved in an accident, there is Breeze. The start-up has partnered with Peers, an advocacy group for the sharing economy, to offer a $19.99 a month programme called Keep Driving. It will lend a new car to drivers who are involved in an accident but want to keep working. Breeze also lends out cars to would-be drivers without wheels. For $195 a week and a $250 upfront fee, drivers in San Francisco, Los Angeles or Seattle can use a 2015 Toyota Prius.

Other companies help sharing-­economy workers focus more on the niceties of customer service. Most not­able are those that work on short-term rentals and holiday listings, such as Airbnb or the publicly listed vacation home rental service HomeAway.

“To be a good owner you need to be a good hotelier, and some are good at that and some aren’t,” says Brian Sharples, HomeAway’s chief executive.

Guesty charges Airbnb hosts a fee of 3 per cent on each reservation to screen potential guests, schedule cleaning, co-ordinate key exchanges and manage the apartment’s profile on the site. One option it does not offer is an in-person concierge service. For that, there are companies such as Airenvy or Urban Bellhop.

“It is a funny thing,” says Alex Chriss, a vice-president at Intuit, who worked on the development of its software for the self-employed.

“This on-demand idea has made it so easy for the consumer to push a button and get a ride or delivery — and on the other side it’s so messy.”

Source: www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/2a6735cc-b044-11e4-92b6-00144feab7de.html

Crowdfunding: Many scrappy returns

ON NOVEMBER 3rd, surprisingly, a bill was passed by the House of Representatives with strong bipartisan support. The Entrepreneur Access to Capital Act aims to make it easier for small businesses to raise money through “crowdfunding”. For the first time ordinary investors would be allowed to put up to $10,000 in small businesses that are not registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission, enabling Joe Schmo to win big if the company becomes the next Google.

Some non-profits and small businesses already raise money through crowdfunding. Websites allow entrepreneurs to post information about their business plan and to offer perks, such as T-shirts, in return for “donations”; but current securities laws allow only “accredited investors”, rich folk supposedly aware of risks of the venture, to buy a financial stake in the business. In spite of this crowdfunding has thrived. Slava Rubin of IndieGoGo, one of the first crowdfunding websites to launch, three years ago, reckons around 250 competitors have sprung up.

Brian Lamb of Satarii, which sells a device that helps people film themselves with their iPods, raised around $25,000 through IndieGoGo. Their successful online campaign helped attract a further $650,000 from sophisticated “angel” investors. But Mr Lamb thinks they would have been able to raise even more if average investors had been allowed a stake in the firm.

Start-ups are especially needy now, since many banks are loth to lend even to well-established companies. Optimists, including the White House, which supports the bill, say that if small businesses get better access to funding they can help create jobs. Start-ups in America already add around 3m jobs a year, according to the Kauffman Foundation, a think-tank.

But making it easier for start-ups to tap ordinary folk for money online could encourage fraudsters, too. “I am terrified,” says Heath Abshure, the Arkansas securities commissioner, who warns about “the wild, wild West”. Jack Herstein, president of the North American Securities Administrators Association, says the only jobs created will be “more jobs for securities investigators”. The current bill does not require start-ups to give detailed information about their business plan, and since stakes in businesses are illiquid, investors will not be able easily to get their cash back.

But conventional investing is not exactly safe either. It is quite legal, as one crowd-funding supporter says, “to go to Vegas and lose all your money”. Perhaps this isn’t the best mantra, however, for those who want to ease America’s securities laws.

Source: http://www.economist.com/node/21538770?fsrc=rss%7Cust