Peopleperhour : Strengthening the Freelancers Community in the UK Since 2007
With the emergence of companies like Fiverr, Freelancer.com, Superside and definitely PeoplePerHour, the table has seemed to turn for the freelancer community around the globe. Previously, the majority of the working class didn’t support the idea of freelancing because there wasn’t any job security, no fixed earning and definitely not a long-term job assurance. But, with an increasing number of start-ups and SMEs, the demand for freelancers is escalating very fast. Clients prefer hiring freelancers over hiring an entire agency because the workflow is better, assured delivery of work within time and other factors combined it is pretty amazing for both the clients and the freelancers.
Xenios Thrasyvoulou and Simos Kitiris founded PeoplePerHour in 2007 as an online marketplace for the freelances. The company can hire the talents for a minimum of an hour which stretches up as per the need. PeoplePerHour has really increased employment among the students and senior citizens as well.
Xenios Thrasyvoulou
Xenios graduated from the University of Cambridge in 2002 with a degree in engineering, following the conventional way of pursuing business studies at Harvard Business School. Right after he graduated from Harvard, it was the time when dot com boom was becoming history and businesses again started rising. The era of the internet already hit the UK, and Xenios realized that most of the people tend to do their jobs sitting at home and not preferring the daily 9to5. The offline scheduled job was somewhere starting to lose its value. It hit him hard that why not create an entire marketplace for these people. This was like the ultimate turning point in Xenios’s life, and in 2007, he co-founded PeoplePerHour along with Simos Kitiris.
Xenios has also founded another start-up called TalentDesk.io in January 2017.
Simos Kitiris
Simos also completed his engineering from the University of Cambridge in the same year as Xenios. He joined Amadeus as a Software Engineer, immediately after graduating, followed by working for Accenture as an IT Consultant. He left Accenture in 2006 and started working with Xenios on the PeoplePerHour project. He is the CTO of PeoplePerHour, and apart from that, he worked as an Advisor for SIP-The Tech Investment Club, Hellas Direct and BetaAngels Management LLC. In October 2013, Simos Kitiris founded another UK based start-up, Yumbles.
Founding PeoplePerHour
Dealing with the crisis of freelancers, Xenios realized that there is a huge gap between the service providers, and the clients, which led him to co-found PeoplePerHour with Simos. Founding the company in 2007, it has its office in Athens, with its headquarters based in London, UK. The most unique feature of PeoplePerHour is job or project allotted to the freelancers is hour wise. Unlike other freelancer company, when the project is uploaded along with the deadline, in PeoplePerHour the working hours might extend as long as it needs to complete the work, and the freelancers are paid accordingly.
The Success
The launch of PeoplePerHour turned out to be a great success as the employment of senior citizens in the UK increased by a great number. After retirement, many people still have the zeal to work but maybe not a 9to5. PeoplePerHour worked wonder for them, and according to the report from the UK Office for National Statistics, 358,000 people aged above 65 started working after the launch of this online platform. The mostly the retirees showed a keen interest, and by 2012, the percentage of senior citizens searching for a job increased by 137%. In this journey of 12 years almost, PeoplePerHour has served more than 1million clients and paid over £100 million to its freelancers.
Investors and Fundraising
After the opening of the beta version in 2007, the company kept expanding, and within a year, PeoplePerHour announced that their freelance community comprises of 40,000 freelancers. One of the biggest investors of PeoplePerHour is Index Ventures, and the amount of fundraising in the interim funding round was undisclosed. In 2010, the company raised funding of £425,000 from its founders and Michael van Swaaij. The company secured a fund of £2million from Index Ventures, and along with that, also launched its new iPhone app in October 2012. In the same year, PeoplePerHour was featured in the magazine, Wired UK as one of Europe’s 100 Hottest Startups of 2012.
The company today comprises of around 100 employees, with Xenios as the CEO and Simos as CTO. Even though Simos has recently opened his own start-up, he still keeps serving the community of PeoplePerHour.
Annasha Dey is an NIT student, who apart from studying engineering is also a content writer. She has a great interest in photography, writing, reading novels, and travelling as well. She is a foodie who loves socializing and hanging out with her friends. She is also a trained Kathak dancer and a big fashion enthusiast. Dey also loves watching TV series, which includes F.R.I.E.N.D.S. and Big Bang Theory. To be a better writer she prefers to read more