Airtasker co-founder Tim Fung, on how he turned working for free in his early career, into an invaluable lesson that helped when launching digital marketplace Airtasker, now one of Australia’s favourite e-commerce sites with 950,000 customers

After a stint working in finance at Macquarie Bank, and then working pro bono at one of Sydney’s biggest modelling agencies, young Tim Fung got noticed by one of the agency’s owners, who gave Tim opportunities to help a small team start up a sim-only mobile virtual phone network operator, which turned into Australia’s 4th-largest mobile service provider Amaysim. Living through that successful start-up helped give Tim Fung the confidence needed when he and a friend came upon their simple idea, whilst moving house, to try and match those many people with skills and talents to those customers who needed jobs done—anything from gardening and fixing leaks to drafting up contracts and assembling IKEA furniture —and to do that via a digital marketplace, where customer and “tasker” decide on the price. While Airtasker was born less than a decade ago, it still took a number of years of struggle to get traction in the marketplace, and demonstrate credibility in order to win the trust of end users, who after all had to feel confident about letting strangers into their homes to perform the tasks. But 9 years on, Tim has built an e-commerce platform in Airtasker that boasts 950,000 paying customers, and hundreds of thousands of genuine and rave reviews from customers. Last week, when Tim Fung IPO’d Airtasker, publicly listing it on the ASX, the share price skyrocketed in its first trading days, buoyed according to The Australian Financial Review by Millennial traders giving Airtasker a definite thumbs up. How exactly did Tim Fung turn his humble idea into the Airtasker phenomenon? In Part 1 of our chat, we’ll find out how and where it all began.

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