The Gig Economy — Everything is a Remix

The Gig Economy — Everything is a Remix

We are seeing massive disruption in virtually every services-related sector by a highly mobile, efficient gig workforce. The gig economy is now composed of 60 million workers, and by 2027 the majority of workers in the United States will be contract workers. As evidenced by the recent Uber and Fiverr IPOs, the valuations and growth potential for the best and brightest of these companies are stratospheric in scale.

My team has invited Shmuel Fishman an entrepreneur to share some powerful insights and advice for business owners on how to take advantage of these changes to transform their own business.

How is the gig economy reshaping business?

“We’re all consumers of demand sources. Anybody you know use Uber? I call Uber a demand source. It has a service that’s a demand-based service, more customers of it. The drivers on Uber, I call them agents. I can remap this over and over and over again to smaller platforms.

If you want food from Whole Foods, there’s a company called Deliv that will bring it to you. Your customer, Deliv is the demand source, Whole Foods is the supplier, and the person that’s delivering the food is the agent. You can keep doing this over and over and over again. We’re all vendors, insurance carriers, brokers, and we have this huge opportunity to provide services to demand sources, which is what we’ve been doing.

The way this works is it’s about building this triangle over and over again. There’s always these two connections to be had in this new economy. The first one is what we all know. It’s about providing services to these large companies, what I call demand source. The second one that’s becoming way more important for me is providing services to these agents at scale.

Let me tell you why this works. This is not like you need to call up a hundred thousand people every day. The reason why this works is because all of these agents have phones, and these phones are always connected to a central nervous system. It allows you to understand exactly where these people are, surface information to them exactly when you need it to be, and you really understand what’s going on in their day. I would challenge all of us to think how we can use data in these phones that are out on the field to all of our betterment.

How did I spot this or how is it that we’re able to talk about this? There’s a really good documentary on the internet by a guy named Kirby. He says that everything is a remix, that everything that we think is new and is innovative is actually just a remix of something that already exists. Let me give you an example to help frame it.

Who’s seen a James Bond movie? Yeah, so that’s a remix. The reason why that’s a remix is because it’s the same film every single year. Every year, it’s the same exact film. They just changed who plays the villain. Sometimes they change who plays James Bond. But it the same thing over and over again. But it’s interesting each time. They’re remixing something. We’ll try another one.

Who uses Amazon? Yeah, that’s a remix. The reason why that’s a remix is because you have an online website that acts exactly like a catalog. Remember those catalogs where you would get it in the mail and you would pick the things that you wanted and you would call them up? That’s what Amazon does. They just digitized that.

We can do this again for Uber. Uber is a remix. There’s always been taxi cab companies. There’s always been a way to call a taxi cab and get them to come to your front door wherever you are. They’re just adding in technology to it.

I have a remix, too. I didn’t invent this. All we’re doing is taking a professional service organization that’s been around for a very long time, grouping them into pools of workers and giving them all technology so they can get work in volume.

There’s a little bit of a math formula to this, or a science formula to this. It’s called copy, transform, and combine. I want to ask all of you to think about this in your businesses.

What you do is you take two ideas. We can take the Amazon one again, right? Catalog plus distribution system. You take these two things, you copy them, or Steve Jobs would say we would steal them. But we’ll use copy because it’s friendlier. You copy them. You transform them in some way. You make them a little bit different than they were before. Then you combine them. You offer a new service to the public.

I think that the most innovative things that we can think of in our culture today are using this formula. It’s something that we do every day and it’s something I everyone should do for their own businesses.”

Big shout out of thanks to Shmulik Fishman for sharing his thoughts and perspective and giving business owners, a LOT of new ideas to think about as we all search for new ways to help our businesses grow faster and more efficiently. If you have any questions, feel free to drop them in comment section.

The Gig Economy — Everything is a Remix was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.