SquadRun gets mobile ‘players’ to do crowdsourced jobs, bags funding from founders of Zomato, Slideshare

College kids, housewives, retired people, and others with ‘down time’ are the players on SquadRun. It’s a mobile app that sets simple tasks for users to perform and earn points. The earned points can pay for phone credit top-ups or purchases on ecommerce sites.

The tasks could be easy ones like a doing a comparison of products or removing duplicates, they could be a bit more demanding, such as writing product descriptions or generating images according to given guidelines. All these tasks are gamified to make them seem more like fun and less like drudgery. The players typically do them in their ‘down time’ while waiting for somebody or commuting or just doing nothing.

This can be very useful to a variety of businesses with simple, repetitive operational tasks they can crowdsource. Apurv Agrawal, founder and CEO of SquadRun, gives an example:

An ecommerce marketplace uses SquadRun’s army for curation of content uploaded by sellers, moderation of user-generated product reviews, audit of their customer support conversations, UX testing of their product features, and tagging products to improve search relevance.”

The SquadRun team

A statement from the company says it has brought over 7,000 players on board after starting up in July last year, and more than 35 businesses have posted various jobs for this mobile squad to pick up. Crowdsourcing gets these tasks done at a small fraction of what it would cost businesses to hire teams for them. However, it raises the question of whether people are getting paid a fair price for the jobs they’re doing.

“We mainly compete with in-house teams and BPOs [outsourcing companies], but our high quality distributed workforce, strong algorithms and workflows enable us to be much cheaper, faster, better and more flexible,” says Kanika Jain, co-founder of SquadRun, which was incubated at 91springboard.

It’s a business model that seems well-suited for a large, increasingly mobile population in India. Companies like Freecharge, which rewards users for using the platform to top-up their phones, have shown there are many takers for apps that give small incentives for engagement.

Investors certainly seem to think so. Freecharge has quickly become one of the most well-funded startups in India. And now, SquadRun has just raised an undisclosed amount in seed funding from Amit Ranjan of Slideshare, Deepinder Goyal, founder of Zomato, Zishaan Hayath, founder of Toppr, Girish Khera, co-founder at Scientific Animations, and other angel investors. The backing of such a diverse set of successful entrepreneurs is the best endorsement SquadRun could get at this early stage.

See: With $33M funding, Sequoia-backed FreeCharge pivots to targeted advertising