If you’ve been following HourlyNerdsince their launch out of Harvard Business School in 2013—which was aided by an early investment from Mark Cuban—then you might know a bit about their freelance consulting gig marketplace. What might be new to you, however, is the way that HourlyNerd is using software to do something the consulting world has never seen before: Provide a pleasant buying experience.
“Relative to what we do, I’d argue that it’s almost as easy as Uber,” said co-CEO Rob Biederman.
That’s new to the business consulting industry, which traditionally has relied on “a lot of word of mouth and hearsay about who’s good, and very little tracking,” he said.
The emphasis on software has ramped up over the past 12 months, during which time HourlyNerd has grown to serve 10 percent of the Fortune 1000 companies, while its own staff has expanded from 18 in mid-2014 to 53 now. In late September HourlyNerd moved from the Leather District to a larger new office in Fort Point, where they hosted Mayor Marty Walsh for an event on Monday evening.
For Boston, success stories in the on-demand economy—the “Uber economy,” perhaps—have been relatively rare; Drizly is one name to know right now, while Handy and RelayRides both started here but left. HourlyNerd, though, appears to have a huge amount of momentum and is staying put in Boston—the backyard of Bain & Company, one of the giants of the consulting industry.
Interestingly, Biederman and co-CEO Patrick Petitti believe their model isn’t actually impacting the likes of Bain and McKinsey & Company, since their service involves taking on smaller projects from those that the big firms specialize in. The co-CEOs say that, in some cases, other consulting firms have actually referred projects to HourlyNerd.
“There’s plenty of room for HourlyNerd to build a $1 billion company and have Bain and McKinsey not affected in the least,” Biederman said. Customers to date have included GE, Microsoft and American Apparel.
"There’s plenty of room for HourlyNerd to build a $1 billion company and have Bain and McKinsey not affected in the least."[/pullquote]
HourlyNerd’s online marketplace now includes 17,500 freelance consultants (known as “nerds”) along with a few hundred boutique consulting firms. “We want to be the place you go when you need to solve a business problem, whether that’s something you’ll need boutique consulting for, or a single person, or a team,” Petitti said. “And we want you to be able to make a data-driven decision.”
That’s where HourlyNerd’s software comes in. The idea is this: when a client is looking for a consultant, the HourlyNerd software provides details on past projects that look like the one you’re trying to staff and what consultants or firms have done well on those projects. “We can effectively Kayak your professional services purchases, and let you comparison shop for the consultant that’s likely to deliver great results,” Biederman said. “Our software sweeps up a lot of the friction in launching a project.”
Ultimately, the HourlyNerd co-CEOs believe they reached a tipping point in their business this past summer. Part of that was the software, they said, and part was just that more companies are waking up to the fact that they don’t need expensive consulting firms for many of their projects. “It seems like the world has really begun to catch onto that, and we’re well positioned to catch the fallout,” Biederman said.
HourlyNerd
Founded: 2013
Employees: 53
Funding: More than $10 million
Investors: Highland Capital Partners, GE Ventures, Greylock Partners, Mark Cuban, Intuit founder Scott Cook, the Kraft Group, angel investor Semil Shah, former Etsy CEO Maria Thomas, Rent the Runway Founder/CEO Jennifer Hyman, Suffolk Equity Partners
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