The “disruptors” of the blue collar jobs, iFixng.com, which is an online platform for hiring handymen and artisans, by connecting you with the best handymen in town, has raised $50,000 seed funding from Yomi Martins, a non-institutional private investor. This is great because we believe that they would be able to serve the market better.
Okonkwo Gerald, who doubles as a founder and CEO, made known that the deal completed last month, specifically on the 21st of March 2018. But the company chose to announce it now for reasons best known to them.
The funds raised by the company would, according to the founder, serve three major purposes; One is to grow the number of handymen and artisans currently signed up on the platform. The second is to grow customer and user base, and the third is to expand services beyond Lagos to Abuja. We believe these are realistic goals that can be well achieved with their newest funding.
According to Gerald, “This is a step in the right direction. We believe it’s time to increase our customer and artisan base to enable us extend our services to individuals across boards who find it extremely difficult to find these handymen for repairs or installations in Lagos and other cities subsequently,”
Partnership has been made with banks to bank unbanked artisans that registers on its platform. “We’ve successfully partnered with Heritage Bank to bank all unbanked artisans during our process of on-boarding,” This is great, as it isn’t hidden knowledge that they would be killing two birds with a stone.
In a bid to further increase the number of handymen on its platform, a number standing at 313, iFixng are planning to partner with recharge card vendors. This, in their opinion, would drive more registration. They would partner with other channels too, to reduce the response rate from 4 hours to below 2 hours.
The platform which was launched in 2016,and had passed through Beta testing have processed up to 200 jobs since it was made public. They have also garnered over 500 signed up users and think it’s the right time to grow the company.
