How on-demand service apps are giving blue-collar workers a new lease on life

What defines success for startups? What is that one thing that, when achieved, will unequivocally be the moment when founders can say that they have made it? Perhaps it’s raising an astronomical amount of funding. Others would venture: breaking the ceiling on a certain level of traction reached, perhaps in terms of month-on-month growth in revenue, users, or pageviews.

Here is my humble opinion: startup success is defined by the number of lives it has impacted with its service. And on-demand service apps like GrabTaxi, Kaodim, and The Lorry are leading the pack in this respect.

From the get-go, these startups serve a segment of society that traditionally has had to slog hard to make ends meet. Blue-collar workers – taxi drivers, plumbers, electricians, and so on – tend to lack a voice in society and struggle to connect with customers. There’s an over-supply of workers, and traditional advertising channels don’t work for such kinds of services. As a result, competition to secure business is cutthroat.

It is an industry that is ripe for change.

On-demand service apps fill in the gap by bestowing upon both consumer and vendor alike the power of knowledge. Take GrabTaxi for example. On one hand, consumers are able to find out how many cabs are in their vicinity via the taxi hailing app, and immediately secure one. With this information made known to would-be riders, taxi drivers now have access to a constant stream of business – there’s more than enough demand to go around.

Changing lives, literally

Consumers might perceive this as simple convenience, but on the flipside, these apps can and do dramatically improve the livelihood of vendors. Jorn Ng, owner of Reliance Cleaning Services, is a great example of this. For the past six months, he struggled to bring in business through distributing flyers and pamphlets.

“No matter how much the clients I did bring in raved about their results, it wasn’t enough to help my practice grow,” he says. Working with Malaysian service marketplace Kaodim, though, helped him to achieve a 70 percent growth in business within two months.

To many, these spurts of growth almost literally brings food – and dad – to the table. Ben, a GrabTaxi driver and father of three children, was recently featured in a lengthy Facebook post in which he shared about how his life had been changed by the app.

“Eight years ago, when I started driving, I was worried about my family’s livelihood. I have three children. I wasn’t sure. I wanted to be a limo driver but that would take me out of state. And I wanted to be with my children,” he said in the post.

When he started using GrabTaxi, all those worries melted away. Since then, his revenue has increased threefold, and he is able to “go home, cook, and then go back out with confidence that he’ll be able to give a ride to someone from his neighborhood.”