Jobble Is Connecting Faces to Brands and People to Jobs

Photo via Jobble

Offline word of mouth marketing is reported to drive at least five times more sales than a paid advertising impression. Boston startup Jobble wants to help brands capitalize on that trend by offering the ability to easily and conveniently market to customers face to face.

Jobble spun out of a need cofounders Zack Smith and Corey Bober discovered after launching student employment agency Collegiate Contact. The two were students at Northeastern University, but already working with big-name brands like JetBlue to help the company form a street team for the Boston Marathon.

“It opened up our mindset to this space of businesses really needing the opportunity to hire quickly and scale up and down as quickly as possible,” Smith says. “We took the concept we learned in school and put some technology behind it.”

Jobble surfaced in August 2014 to allow businesses to do just that. Companies can post the details of the kind of help they need and amount they’re willing to pay, and “Jobblers” receive a push notification alerting them of a new opportunity. If interested, they apply by answering, “Why am I a good fit?” and hiring managers can sift through their ratings and review their past work and recommendations.

For Jobblers, the onboarding process takes roughly seven minutes. Interested freelancers can select the part-time jobs they’re interested in, such as brand ambassador, promotional model, catering staff, or street teamer, and upload a W-9. Within 24 hours, they’ll be notified if they’ve been verified and can start applying for “business gigs” at the hourly rate they feel comfortable with.

Once the job has been completed, businesses can rate the Jobblers they hired, verify the hours they worked, and then complete the payment process within the app. Jobble receives 20 percent of each transaction, and the Jobblers hired see the money in their bank account in roughly two days.

More than 40 paying customers are currently working with Jobble, according to Smith, who says the startup is preparing to expand to New York City—and an additional 15 cities, such as Atlanta, San Francisco, and Chicago, by the end of 2016.

“There are already 23 cities on our map,” Smith explains. “We plan to be very, very aggressive out the gate.”

Jobble has grown to six employees since September and the start of this month marked the first time they were all in their WeWork space working full-time together. To further grow the business, the team is in the middle of raising a $1 million round—with $750,000 committed to date by a group of angel investors. Among Jobble’s list of advisors is Kyle York, chief strategy officer of cloud-based Internet performance company Dyn, and Ryan Burke, vice president of sales at InvisionApp, a prototyping, collaboration, and workflow tool.

As Jobble continues to expand to other cities, the startup will also be working on expanding its product offerings to make it easier for businesses to engage with customers face to face.

“The reason there’s been an increase on the digital marketing side is because it’s pretty easy to throw that together—you can make that happen sitting behind your laptop,” Smith says.

But Jobble’s goal is to help businesses create more effective, in-person marketing campaigns from behind their laptop as well.