The Fastwork Freelancing Platform and Its Challenges During Two Years in Indonesia

Fastwork is one of the platforms that is committed to making it easier for freelancers (freelancers). Fastwork was founded in 2015 in Thailand and entered Indonesia in mid-2018. The main reason is clearly to seize the Indonesian market, which is the largest in Southeast Asia. Data from the Central Statistics Agency (BPS) in 2018 stated that 56,8% of the people worked in the informal sector, including freelancer.

The trend of increasing the number of freelancers is predicted to continue. This is in accordance with research conducted by Sribu last year which stated that freelance workers in Indonesia at that time up 16% from the previous year.

Fastwork Co-Founder & CEO Jerd Phichitkul told the story, when they entered Indonesia marketplace is on the rise, the emergence of many SMEs, and awareness of freelance work is increasing. "We officially launched Fastwork Technologies Indonesia in August 2018 and in October 2018 we announced that we received series A funding," Phichitkul said in a written statement.

Fastwork Challenges in Indonesia

Since operating here, Fastwork has gained 100 thousand registered users, 10 thousand freelancer professional, with 10 completed transactions every month. There are more than 60 categories of freelance work on Fastwork. Graphic design, writing & translation, photography & videography, web programming and consulting services are the most popular categories on Fastwork.

Phichitkul asserted, one of their advantages lies in the work system that allows freelancer and service users can work together more effectively such as exchanging files, managing orders, and processing payments.

In terms of service payments, Fastwork uses a money back guarantee if the work is not completed. New wages will be sent when the work is completely finished. "We also have a gradual payment feature, where service users will pay for the work in several stages. This will make it easier because the work can be started first without having to pay in full in advance," added Phichitkul.

This vertical is not new anywhere. There are quite a number of Fastwork competitors. Some of them are Sribu, Workholic, Freelancer Indonesia, Upwork, to Crowdsource, to Fiverr. Realizing this, Phichitkul has ambitions to make a number of adaptations for the Indonesian market.

One of them is to make sure user experience application mobile devices they are well received by their users. This is none other than 70% freelancer access Fastwork via app mobile devices. Whereas in Thailand access to their platform is still dominated from the desktop.

"It is a challenge for us to continue to ensure that our applications have user experience good ones, can be as complete and comprehensive as the desktop version," he said.

The pandemic does not dampen the target

The pandemic certainly has an impact on the Fastwork business. However, Phichitkul claims, they are slowly starting to rise because many businesses have switched to operating online. Both the number of freelancer registrations and the number of daily users are claimed to have increased 50% higher before the Covid-19 outbreak hit. Fastwork mentions jobs related to online commerce as constant growing every month.

These factors seem to have made Phichitkul and his team remain confident in meeting their business targets. For this year, Fastwork has set a target for the number of new users and transactions to increase by 50% compared to the previous year. This optimism can also be seen from the funding aspect where there are plans to roll out funding. Fastwork's funding status is still series A, which they managed to collect in 2018 with investors such as Gobi Agung Fund and Indogen Capital.

"We are planning our future funding to expand our team in Indonesia and will release information in a timely manner," concluded Phichitkul.