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Clevergig, WeAreBrain’s skyrocketing co-venture, is here to stay
In the words of clevergig’s CEO and co-founder Michel Pilet, “2019 was the year in which clevergig became a serious company”. To be clear, WeAreBrain’s co-venture did not become a serious company in the sense that it suddenly swapped out strict processes for having fun! On the contrary, they cemented their purpose. By finding their space in the market through solving a real problem for many businesses, they could officially outgrow the startup phase and take the business to the next level.
Exciting results
The core clevergig team has doubled to 7 permanent members which is supplemented by 5 freelancers who are on hand to regularly assist. clevergig’s income grew by 350% and the business now serves more than 80 agencies which place 7,000 flex workers every day for more than 30,000 services per month. Customers are also giving clevergig a convincing NPS score of +33. The business is now break-even and cash flow positive. In other words: clevergig is here to stay!
A few important choices
As entrepreneurs, the clevergig founders are forced to make choices every day. They like to make them quickly, but each remains well thought out. Their compass? The3 core values that clevergig was founded upon: simplicity, freedom and customer obsession. With these values in mind, what are the most important choices the business has made in the past year?
A new North Star
How do you measure the success of a company? Until recently, clevergig did that in the form of Monthly Recurring Revenues (MRR), or the income generated through monthly subscriptions. As long as the MRR increases, the company will grow. But does this really put the customer first or keep clevergig’s customers busy? Frankly not. Therefore the business adjusted their most important measure — known as the North Star Metric — to something that better ensures the long-term success of business.
clevergig thus opted for the number of filled services. When customers enter more services through clevergig, their turnover grows, which in turn means they continue to make more use of clevergig’s product. This helps the team in product development to remove barriers, and make starting and growing with clevergig even easier.
What value does clevergig add?
When clevergig first started out, the objective was to save time for customers (quickly filling a service via clevergig’s app with push notifications). Saving time means saving money but of course, clevergig costs money — so how big is the saving? The results were surprising: the more customers started using the product, the more often a certain pattern emerged. The agencies and companies grew in the first year by 200–300%. This means clevergig’s software has a flywheel effect.
A product that is never finished
clevergig’s product team is an essential link in the entire company as it builds a stable and safe product every day. This includes the development of useful new applications. The team regularly insists that ‘the product is never finished’ and so they are constantly improving and developing for the benefit of the customer. In the future, the team looks forward to incorporating new technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning and speech recognition.
Throughout development, the team relies heavily on feedback from customers. They launched more than 20 major releases in 2019 and handled 290 technical tasks. That is a release almost every 2–3 weeks!
Growth to be proud of
Although growth in the fourth quarter went a little slower than the previous quarter, 2019 is a year the founders and team can be extremely proud of. The business gained over 50 new customers, and the monthly income grew by a factor of 3.5. A milestone achievement.
What will 2020 bring?
clevergig’s founders and core team will continue to find new ways to grow the business and provide their customers with a truly beneficial product. Using the positive momentum gained in 2019, clevergig will aim to further develop their product and service offering in new and exciting ways. Although the company has evolved quickly from a humble startup to a fully-fledged business, clevergig’s CEO and co-founder Michel Pilet says it best: “We hope not to become too serious and business-like, because not being that way has helped us achieve all we have in such a short time. As long as we look to our core values for guidance, we will be great”.
Elvire Jaspers
Working Machines
An executive’s guide to AI and Intelligent Automation. Working Machines takes a look at how the renewed vigour for the development of Artificial Intelligence and Intelligent Automation technology has begun to change how businesses operate.
