SquadRun leverages power of mobile crowd to deliver small tasks for startups and individuals
SquadRun is a crowdsourcing platform that connects business to a smartphone enabled workforce. It’s an exciting new app that allows anybody with a smartphone to make money on a per task basis. For instance, if you need something simple done either online or at a physical location, and as long as it's something almost anyone (with a decent IQ) can do, you can put up a task on SquadRun for its ‘player’ community to pick up.
Brainchild of Apurv Agrawal, Kanika Jain and Vikas Gulati, Squadrun is solving massive business problems efficiently by breaking them into several smaller parts and leveraging crowdsourcing, mobile technology and gamification.
One of Apurv’s most successful ventures while in college was ngoFuel.org, a crowdsourcing platform to connect skilled volunteers (mostly students) with non-profits that needed basic tech help (websites, social media, etc). Even though service based, crowdsourcing made it a highly scalable model. He was exploring a startup along the themes -- crowdsourcing, monetizing excess capacity of time, and amazingly growing smartphone penetration in India, etc. And SquadRun was born.
“I was working with Apurv at 91springboard at the time and found the concept very intriguing, and wanted to come on board as an angel investor. However, as I started getting more and more involved I joined the team full time to lead ops and marketing. We needed someone to lead engineering efforts, that’s when Vikas, Apurv’s batchmate from VIT jumped in,” says Kanika.
The company is currently working with several businesses -- biggest e-commerce players, directory services, real estate portals and consumer apps among others. So far, the startup has about 4K plus active community of players who execute close to 600 missions on a daily basis.
A few use cases that SquadRun's mobile army is being used for include content moderation, data tagging, categorization, crowdsourced content, user experience testing, surveys, and sentiment analysis, etc.
Keep experimenting to evolve
“We are big fans of ‘lean’ and ran a whole bunch of experiments in the beginning to understand the market and figure out the right use cases. Based on these experiments, we came out with a beta app which we launched in the first week July this year. The product has been evolving since then and we are constantly experimenting with different customers and use cases to optimize and refine the product,” says Apurv.
How SquadRun works for players?
Players sign up for SquadRun and make a profile. They then pick up missions according to their preferences, and complete it based on specified rules. Once the missions have been successfully completed, the players earn squadcoins which can be redeemed for mobile recharges or online shopping vouchers. “We are soon coming out with a feature which lets you redeem direct cash,” adds Apurv.
Plans for scaling up and USPs
Being a marketplace, there always has to be a balance between supply (players performing tasks) and demand (business requesting tasks). “The supply has been fairly easy to crack and we have built strong channels to constantly increase the supply as required. On the demand side, we are reaching out to various companies both in India and the US and have been getting extremely positive feedback,” reveals Apurv.
SquadRun is a powerful tool for both sides. For businesses, it provides them access to a cost effective flexible workforce that can deliver quality results in a short span of time. For the players, it's an easy way to make extra money on the side.
