house of gigs is the first earnings manager where gig workers can leverage insights to earn more money. The company is backed by leading early-stage venture capital firms, including Broadhaven and AngelPad.
Currently, the app is available to download on iOS or Android:
While working at house of gigs, I was the principal Product Manager and Product Designer. I was the third employee so everything had to be built from the ground: a brand identity, a new website, a design system, social media profiles, the whole iOS and Android mobile app user experience.
I was mainly working with the founders at the beginning, then we hired two awesome developers.
It's important to start by saying that we had around 100'000 users but the retention was pretty low. Most of our users would open the app to find a new gig or a service that could be useful for their daily work and then leave.
We dreamed to be more helpful for the gig workers, we wanted to be there for them, to answer their questions and that's what we did. We engaged with them by phone, by email, by in-app messages. We spent hours trying to better understand their fears, their doubts.
đ¸ Gig workers don't have a steady income, they have multiple spikes of income.
â It takes time to take the most ouf of a new gig, the more you work a gig, the more efficient you become and the more money you make.
đ Not having a financial goal reduce the potential earninigs. Setting a weekly financial goal can drastically increase gig workers earnings.
We decided to focus on
We wanted to launch our product as soon as possible to test it with our target audience. We didn't have much time left before running out of money so we had to deliver the minimum of features while solving the maximum of pain points.
Also, we needed to be careful because we already had many users using our original app (more or less active), and since we were testing a new direction, we had to make sure that our users would understand the changes. So we had to prepare the right communication to inform them about our change: Blog post, email campaign, in app notification.
Our retention was pretty low but we had roughly 300 new users per week without spending any money on ads. Our goal was to improve the retention of new users.
We started by removing every unused feature and we simplified the navigation to make it as simple as possible
We redesigned the onboarding and the account creation carousel but the results weren't good enough. We thought that the users who were downloading the app, were still looking for the marketplace version and not the earnings tracker.
So we decided to completely rewrite the stores description and change the name of the app from house of gigs to house of gigs: A smarter income tracker.
Once the onboarding is finished, the user can navigate between the three main tabs.
Home: to add his daily earnings, the daily goal is computed automatically based on the information provided during the onboarding.
Insights: all the earnings entered by our users were used to provide insights around gigs with the top earnings.
Activity: every push notification was visibile in the Activity tab to have some sort of history of all communication between us and our users.
Because of our constraints, earnings had to be manually entered at first. We tried to make it as simple as possible while collecting the name of the gig, the amount and the time spent in order to provide meaningful insights to our users.
We managed to release our new app focusing on tracking gig workers earnings in a couple of weeks. All the marketing materials we planned (website, blog post, stores description) were also part of this release.
The results were encouraging:
We went from around 12% retention on week 1 to 45%.
On week 4 the retention was up to 25% instead of around 6%.
For the first time in weeks, we started to receive emails and messages on Facebook of users asking for new features or reporting bugs. It was a great achievement đž
The following weeks we continued to work on the app, adding new features (and solving bugs đ) to improve the experience of our users.
If you have any question, feel free to contact me.
