Postmates. Postmates. Last December, Postmates launched with the plan to offer up a courier delivery service for local businesses throughout San Francisco.
But then the team had a brilliant idea: What if it gave its couriers pre-paid debit cards, which would let them purchase goods for customers and then deliver them anywhere in the city? That idea evolved into the Get It Now app, which Postmates launched in private beta in mid-April. Since then, the app has attracted more than 1,000 users in just four weeks. Not surprisingly, many of those users come from tech startups themselves, with employees of Twitter, TaskRabbit, Square, Cherry, and Yelp all signed up to use the service. More than just acquiring beta users, however, the app has been making money. Coworking paris. Conwomation collaborative. The Rise Of The Micro-Entrepreneurship Economy. Years ago, Russell Howze was working as a creative at an advertising agency in Atlanta when he got laid off due to budget cuts.
He then spent years piecing together work through various corporate jobs, until he decided to follow his heart. He founded a nonprofit organization for artists, and now supplements his income running street art tours through Vayable, the company I founded, in his extra time. The first part of this story is one that has come to define the reality of so many in the wake of the recession. But the second part--where the discontented worker leaves behind the “security” of a corporate job in favor of his or her passions--is a new and growing behavior in post-industrial countries, particularly in the United States, Europe, and Australia. The media has named the growing trend toward micro-entrepreneurship “the Rise of the Creative Class," “the Gig Life," or "the freelance economy.”