Yesterday we saw the funding announcement of HandyBook, and it appears this whole area of booking labour fast is really starting to take off. PeoplePerHour, a sort of ‘European E-Lance’ emerged in 2008, scored a seed round then secured VC round from Index ventures. Now it’s announcing a further £2M ($3.2M) investment from Index, and boosting its management team with new appointments including CFO David Engel, former financial Director at Skype and Yahoo Europe.
In addition it’s launched it own iPhone app has gone through some significant changes, launching a new website in August with a new UI and a new product called ‘Hourlies’ which allows anyone to buy and sell pre-packaged services at a fixed price in bundles, starting from one hour. It’s a different take on the old RFP model and allows anyone to sell any kind of hour. We’l let your imagination run with that thought. That means it it’s the only such e-lance type site with a an RFP and supply driven model.
Hourlies launched in August and popular categories include design, writing and digital but also someone making you a custom made dog coat in three hours for £25, or someone to write your CV from scratch in one hour for £10, says the company.
Founder and CEO Xenios Thrasyvoulou says they want to “make buying and selling of services as easy and widespread as buying on Amazon or eBay”.
David Engel, formerly the FD of Skype and Yahoo! Europe has now joined as CFO and Katie Kitiri, formerly the Head of Customer Service, Trust & Safety at Gumtree, joined as Director of Operations.
Peopleperhour.com is an online marketplace matching freelance or self-employed professionals with project work, usually in small or medium-sized businesses (SME’s).
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