PHL Inno's weekly "Startup Spotlight" feature highlights founders and new businesses cropping up in the region.
The startup: Backyard Gig is a two-sided service marketplace that lets households and small businesses in a college town outsource everyday tasks to local college students.
Founded: 2020
Home base: Newark, Delaware
Founders: Shaun Gupta and Shahroze Ali, two juniors at the University of Delaware and natives of New Castle County.
In an entrepreneurship class, Gupta was tasked with carrying around a notebook and writing down any problems he saw in his community. What he found was that his fellow students were in constant need of money, but that they couldn’t commit to getting a part-time job on top of their class schedules.
Always looking for creative ways to make cash, Gupta and Ali built Backyard Gig.
“With the rising costs of tuition and overall rising cost of living, it's tough for people to maintain themselves and afford themselves, especially in college,” Gupta said. “So I thought if there's a platform that allows people to make some extra money here and there, while also being flexible with their schedule, it could be a solution that can help a lot of college students out.”
The product: Backyard Gig’s website lets local residents and businesses post tasks to be completed at a discount by college students in their area.
For example, if a household was looking to move and needed some help hauling furniture or boxes but didn’t have the funds to pay a professional moving company $150 per hour, they can post their task on Backyard Gig offering to pay a fraction of the price.
“That allows the household to not only get more affordable work, but it allows local college students the ability to make some extra money without having to get a part-time job,” Gupta said.
Backyard Gig differs from other long-standing platforms like Craigslist, or hire-for-cheap platforms like Fiverr, because its users are local college students that are required to follow their university’s code of student conduct.
Funding: Backyard Gig has raised about $20,000 including cash prizes from the Horn Entrepreneurship program at the University of Delaware. It was a finalist in the Hen Hatch program in 2020.
The startup is testing the market in Newark to see how students and households use the site before it begins raising money and scaling to other areas like Philadelphia, State College and New York, Gupta said.
Backyard Gig is currently pre-revenue, but it plans to take a transaction fee for every gig on the site in the future, he said. The startup has its minimum viable product available now, and is in the process of building a fully functional site with a transaction processor built in.
The goal: The startup wants to boost the number of tasks posted and completed on its site.
Backyard Gig has 150 students and 175 households signed up so far, Gupta said. That number grows every day as students continue to familiarize themselves with the Newark community and as vaccination rates increase, he said.
“Overall, we've just seen major growth in those numbers, especially since this is the first normal semester,” Gupta said. “Those numbers were primarily under Covid environment.”
