An overview of our platform

The problem your project solves

Problem: Huge unemployment numbers, lack of job creation and jobs, psychological impact of job searching.

195 million jobs across the world are expected to be lost due to the economic crisis brought on by Covid-19. This also has a devastating impact on job creation, the impact of which will continue as recessions happen across the EU and the world.

Solution: Our solution is simple, to enable people to move from searching for jobs to creating jobs by starting businesses through collaborations.

We know how dispiriting, demoralising and draining applying for jobs can be. The process of searching and applying for jobs not only saps people of confidence, but can impact mental health, relationships and families. We know that when people start their own businesses and collaborations there will be a mindset shift, so instead of searching for opportunities, they will be creating their own opportunities. We believe that people have great business ideas. However, at the moment we haven’t identified a platform that caters for individuals who are not part of an already established entrepreneurial or academic network. These individuals are not currently catered for in the start-up community, accelerator programs or incubators and are not in the target market for platforms and companies suchas Antler, The Hub, Strategyzer and many others. Indeed, many of these people may not even be on LinkedIn. There is huge interest for people to start their own business. In Sweden 1 in 3* people dreams of starting their own business and 47%** of people would consider starting their own business. We also know by looking at companies such as Co-Match that our business model works, we plan on moving down the value chain to more people. In the EU 99 out of every 100 businesses are SMEs and they employ 2 out of every 3 employees.***

Our team met on the first day of Sweden's HacktheCrisis and that was our first-ever hackathon. So we had done a limited amount of work on a short timescale for the project before. Our pitch and website are called CollabMaker as we realised ConnectedFutures.com was already taken.

Sifo/Visma – 2018 *Tillväxtverket - Entreprenörskapsbarometern 2016 ** European SMEs according to the Annual Report on European SMEs 2018/ 2019.

The Solution we bring to the table

Our solution is a matching engine which matches idea makers and collaborators based on skills, passions, experience and what each of the two types of users might want to work with (complementary skills, experiences and passions). We consider this the basic scoring engine that doesn’t involve strict queries that excludes rather than includes. This way everyone gets a rating on how they rank on all collaborations. However, we won’t present unnecessary matches to overwhelm the idea makers or collaborators with too many matches and clutter the front end. There’s two other hard parts that we will do after the hackathon with matching and that is:

Matching between languages. Having this would enable minorities matching through skills translated to their language and international collaborations. This would be an immense task but luckily we have found ESCO which has translated skills and more in all EU languages. We have also found research that suggests immigrants are more likely to start businesses.
Matching between words with similar meaning but different wording. We have again to thank ESCO for providing a structure in place to be able to match Python as both Python2, Python3 and potentially as programming. To do all this we have a Python backend which talks to the webserver using django. We have our database in postgresql with postgis to enable to match based on location. We think that this can bring immense value as we then can also enable people to match locally based on distance. We have put a lot of thought in how we will scale so we are using docker to ensure scaling broadly with several webservers as demand increases.

What you have done over the weekend

Our project has accelerated at a lightning pace over the course of the weekend.

• We have designed and conducted a validation survey that has given very useful initial insights to validate our offering. Despite only having 28 responses, the survey has shown:

More than 75% of people had a positive reaction towards using a website to find likeminded people who could help them start a business
Over 85% of people said they would use a website to join others who are starting up a business and are in need of their skills
96% of people would use a website for information or support about starting a business.
95% of people were comfortable using online services. • We’ve analysed and developed our service offering and brand in more detail to ensure that our MVP is an inspiring platform that wraps our users in a warm blanket and gives them the support, inspiration and confidence to start creating their own business and collaboration - this is extremely important to us. We want our users to feel as inspired as we have after all our mentorship conversations over the course of the weekend. So we have spent time analysing how we can do this, and are mapping this into our first Minimum Viable Product (and future iterations too). • We have also built the first draft of our frontend, so we can now work on getting some initial UX feedback from users and developing our user flows based around our service design that has been developed over the course of the weekend. This is very much a first iteration and will be amended before we go live, especially with UX and front-end development support. • We have completed our backend proof of concept, which is a huge step forward. The technical details of which can be found above and we can send details of our GitHub if requested (we have included our URL for the entry) • We have also started to develop our brand – in terms of a logo and look and feel. We have also used our time to get great insight and extend our network with mentors, a process we have found invaluable.

I have included our business case below.

Business Case Value Proposition We will provide a structure, process and guidance to enable people to successfully start business collaborations with others. We will assist people so it is: • Easier and more accessible to make the active decision to join/help start a new business rather than just browse job ads • A natural thought process and easy to find likeminded people with suitable ideas, complementary skills and experiences. • We will help the newly formed team to formalize their cooperation and help empower them through a network of expert mentors.

Customer Segments • User A. Recently unemployed people (due to Covid-19) who have always dreamed of starting their own business or would consider starting their own business (in Sweden 1 in 3 people dreams of starting their own business and 47% would consider starting their own business). Our users are not the traditional entrepreneurs that are already catered for by Antler, the Hub and several other platforms. That’s not to say that those people cannot use our platform. • B. Person / small business with an idea or Business Proposal looking for support, skills, experiences or resources • C. Mentors • D. Investors (in version 2.0 or 3.0)

Customer Relationships – • User A,& B: o Supportive, assisting and empowering relationship • User C: o In it to contribute to society. Share learnings and learn from others. • User D o In it to contribute to society and make a ROI.

Revenue Streams

Marketing – We believe that there is a premium marketing opportunity for advertisers wanting to reach people when they are making a positive and conscious decision to start a business, these range from account software, to freelance graphic design to legal advice and much more.

Subscription model – we believe there is an added value subscription service we can offer to provide even more support people to people when they are starting their business and collaboration, for example, access to even more articles and resources in the Resource Hub, expert guides and recommended freelances and software to use.

Investment platform – In version 2.0 or 3.0 we are going to establish a social investment platform where people can invest in loans or crowdfunding for projects based on locality, climate change, sustainability, gender equality etc.

CSR/ Philanthropy – We believe a successful job creation platform that enables people to create business collaborations and creates jobs around the EU and world could also be supported by companies or individuals from a CSR or philanthropic perspective.

Channels • We will reach our users by collaborating with unions, unemployment agencies, through press and PR, social media and Inbound Marketing etc. • Once a user has joined our service, communication will be through the platform or our social media channels.

• Key Partners Unions, unemployment agencies, etc.,

Provide support to their members and users
Helps us with reaching users
Collaborations in order to help the building of companies (connections, legal issues, etc.) • Mentors • Contributions to support the newly formed teams • Investors • Collaborations to invest in the newly formed teams who need it • Other Partners • Providers of services, tools, etc

We are currently adding finances to our business case and will be finalising those next week. We have done an initial cost basis, but need to add costs and potential revenue based on scalability options.

At the moment we believe we would need a total of 5.5 staff and have operational costs (including salaries) of €325,000 in the first year. We would be very happy to provide a more detailed breakdown of costs and anticipated revenue next week.

Example User Case Stories Dwane and Lisa matched on CollabMaker, both had left university in 2020 and were finding that it was even a struggle to get unpaid internships due to the huge competition. Dwane was a graduate developer and Lisa was a marketing graduate. They decided to set up a collaboration together building and marketing apps for micro businesses. They helped develop an app for Louise, Ida, Ben, Warren and Kyle – who also met on CollabMaker and wanted to set up a local co-operative of cycle couriers – initially delivering orders from shops, and then branching out to offer a local alternative for food delivery services, not only from restaurants, but from local food produces and shops. Jake, Hoda, Deepa and Lars met on CollabMaker. Jake used to work for one of the biggest economic unions for flats in Sweden. Hoda was a consultant in the car industry. Deepa has lots of sales and marketing experience and Lars is a Full-Stack developer. Jake noticed that 70% of the cars in the flats he visited were not in use 95% of the time, yet there were always waiting lists of a few years for spaces. So Jake had an idea to set up a B2B company selling and leasing electric cars to economic unions and carparks, initially in the Nordics and then globally. Individuals would have access to a new electric car, for a lower fee than a normal car would cost them, and everyone in the economic union would have access to a car when they needed one. Through the software, individuals could work out the environmental impact of using a shared electric car, and the cost saving compared to owning their own car.

The solution’s impact to the crisis

195m jobs are expected to be lost due to the crisis. If CollabMaker can inspire and empower 1% of those to set up collaborations, 2 million people will be creating jobs for themselves and potentially for others too. Every one of these people will have a family and are part of a community, so the impact could easily be on the lives of more than 10 million people. This is using a conservative estimate. Sadly, because so many people across the EU and the world are going to be losing jobs and there is going to be a prolonged period with far less job opportunities, we think we will have to inspire far more, and we would love to help enable and inspire far more collaborations to be formed.

The cumulative effect of our platform is potentially huge. We don’t just see our impact being in job creation though, we also see a big community impact and huge personal growth of people.

The necessities in order to continue the project and next steps

• Develop our business strategy. • Put together potential income figures on different scenarios and calculate a break-even figure. We believe this needs to be considered properly and with the right amount of time, in order to give most accurate figures. • Apply for and receive funding and/ or investment. • Scope and map out our MVP, then plan out the time line of the next month to make it happen. Also map out our potential future iterations too. • Finalise the backend. • Develop frontend. • Conduct User testing. • Set up Google Tag Manager and Analytics. • Develop content marketing and inbound marketing strategy – to build the resource hub.

The value of your solution(s) after the crisis

Our platform has been specially built for today’s economic reality, despite this we firmly believe the need for such a platform will be on-going in the future. Indeed we intend on developing a social crowdfunding investment platform in the future so people can support SME’s that are tacking some of the major challenges facing the world today, for example, climate change, sustainability, gender quality and inequality amongst others. This way, we can really help make an even bigger positive impact on the world. We also think collaborations will be increasing important in a world of robotization.

To sum up, we think there will always be a need to enable anyone who has a great business idea to make their idea a reality.