Success is snowballing for an Auckland odd jobs marketplace app created by a man who delivered the NZ Herald to homes for months while bootstrapping his software startup, Ezy Peazy.
In 2019, New Windsor man Sumit Sharma began noticing inefficiencies in digital marketplaces which were trying to help Kiwis find a local handyman for odd jobs.
Sharma had been made redundant from two jobs in the Auckland IT sector and by December 2019 began getting up for a 4am start delivering papers each morning then putting in long hours taking care of his daughter, aged 15 months at the time.
Sharma initially bootstrapped the business with income from those early morning NZ Herald deliveries.
Having previously worked in computing and cybersecurity, Sharma recruited a team to set up EzyPeazy.co.nz which matches people who post tasks which need completed (‘Posters’) with handymen and women to take care of the task (‘Taskers’) - all completed through an app which facilitates payment and resolves disputes.
Sharma discovered a co-founder, UI designer and "right hand man" in Amandeep Singh, who lives in Mt Roskill and has also worked as a Herald delivery person to support the startup.
From Day One, the founders had a policy of being unafraid to step in and do jobs back when the app didn’t have enough tradies to guarantee that each posted job would find a matching Tasker.
"If a job comes up and it’s not being filled, we should fill in the gap, that became our ethos," Sharma says.
"We are not afraid of doing any of the jobs listed on Ezy Peazy ourselves, so long as they don’t require professional certification and licensing. We have done a lot of landscaping jobs, weeding, digging gardens the whole day till our muscles and bones hurt for three days afterwards. We’ve taken care of plenty of moving jobs too. We even moved a whole three-bedroom flat all the way down to Hamilton."
One of the most memorable jobs an Ezy Peazy tasker helped with cost many times more to drive to than it did to service, but gave the team a great customer success story and helped build Ezy Peazy’s kaupapa of fulfilling promises to customers.
"An old lady needed a three-seater couch at her house to be lifted and straightened. It was only a one minute job!" Sharma laughs, "But she had no assistance from neighbours or whÄnau, so we were happy to get that done for her."
An interesting niche industry which came up on the Ezy Peazy.co.nz platform was trampoline assembly, which pays well and is so obscure that it is in high demand.
In fact, on Christmas Eve 2021, Sharma found himself hurriedly zipping around Auckland to assemble a total of three tramps, which each took over 90 minutes to assemble.
"We have become specialist pros at trampoline assembly and we can do it without looking at the manual now!" Sharma says.
Building trampolines, hanging drapes, installing a lock, moving house, trimming hedges and tiling a splashback are typical jobs listed on Ezy Peazy on any given day. Rather than taking business away from professionals in the phone book, Ezy Peazy is intended to fill in gaps and provide more work for professionals who may have experienced a downturn during Covid.
The next step for Ezy Peazy may be expanding into the construction industry later in 2022.
"We have a plan to facilitate more services from taskers - soon, every kind of job should be on Ezy Peazy."
After proving itself in Auckland, Sharma expects Ezy Peazy to be available in other major centres.
Sharma also has a profit-sharing plan underway, as revenue begins to flow more strongly.
"10% of all profits have been going to the development team so far, and for the last quarter 10% of profit has been going to Taskers as bonuses. We also have a plan for 10% of profit to go to charity and if you’d like to become our charitable partner, please contact us from www.EzyPeazy.co.nz."
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