Introduction 

Tim Fung, Founder &CEO of Airtasker Limited caught up with Giri Tenneti, ASX to talk about the founding of Airtasker and their journey to become an ASX-listed company. 

Tim Fung, Welcome to On The Board, and thanks for joining us today.

Airtasker successfully listed on ASX in March 2021 with an issue price of 65 cents, giving it a capitalisation at the time of around $255 million. The markets responded very well to your company, with the stock trading well above issue price, and with the current market capitalization of over $400 million. So congratulations and thanks for coming and talking to us today.

First, what I'd love is if you could give us an overview of how you founded the business and what it looks like today.

Well, thanks for having me. So how did we found Airtasker?

Back in 2011, I was actually moving apartments and I asked a friend of mine to come and help me move because he's got a truck that he uses to do deliveries for his small business. So we packed all the stuff in the back of his Chicken nuggets truck, and we moved to my new apartment. And this just got us thinking, why do we ask friends and family to help with all these kinds of jobs when there's so many people out there who are looking for work?

So that was the genesis of the idea. It's been almost 10 years since the time that I moved apartments. And so Airtasker has evolved through a number of stages throughout that journey. Where we are today is around 150 employees across Sydney, Manila, and the United States. I'm really pleased to say that we've just closed over $153 million of GMB, which is the size of our marketplace for FY21. So it's certainly been a long journey and it's been a journey full of ups and downs. And we've come a long way since where we started, which was from a Chicken Nuggets truck.

Excellent. Can you tell us a little bit about the considerations going into your choice to list and to list at this time, and what were the key elements out of those?

Well, it's very interesting. In 2019, as an organization, we made the call to be able to build a sustainable business. So that was the story of 2019, which turned out to be a very good move ahead of COVID and the impact of COVID, which was that at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, Airtasker saw a drop in marketplace growth. But then immediately following that, we sort of bounced back and actually an acceleration point to point in 2020.

So at the back end of 2020, we started looking in and realizing that our company, was really adaptable to the changing situations and was actually going to accelerate overall as a result of the COVID pandemic. So looking at the international opportunity, we thought, how are we going to be able to access agile capital to be able to grow internationally? And at the same time, how can we give our employees and our taskers the opportunity to own part of Airtasker?

And when we thought about weighing those two things up, listing on the ASX seemed like the right solution for us to be able to access that agile capital, give our employees and taskers an opportunity to buy a part of Airtasker, and really to accelerate our overall international growth ambitions.

Fantastic. And listing isn't the only way to access capital, obviously.

So can you tell us a little bit about why you chose listing compared to say staying private and getting further capital in that environment?

One of the key considerations of becoming a public company is that you actually have to front load a bunch of work. So you have to do a lot of work to be able to become ASX compliant. And for us as a company, we really looked at this as an opportunity to grow up as an organization. So that work that was done upfront really now allows us to be able to move much faster on raising capital or accessing capital moving forward.

So for example, we raised around $20 million to fund international expansion. We were able to do that in the space of about one week, of which one day was road showing. Comparing that to what the private venture capital market looks like, is that you don't have to do all of that work upfront, obviously, but each time that you're raising capital, it usually, and I think most founders will probably resonate with this, it can take anywhere from a month to three months, sometimes even longer than that, are pretty much been dedicated to raising money. And at the end of that period, there can be quite a small number of people that you can actually raise. So it can be quite a binary outcome.

So being a publicly listed company allows us to be more agile, allowed us to do that work up front, but now allows us to be much more agile with raising capital to fund international growth.

Awesome. I love the use of the term growing up and I can really see that's a great analogy to pursue. And also, as you mentioned, right from the start, agile capital, and really you've demonstrated that just with your comments, then just the speed of being able to raise that money. So thanks for that. That's really insightful.

What advice would you give to founders and CEOs looking forward to a listing and thinking about when and how to progress?

Well, I think it's one of those things that in the spirit of being an agile startup and responding to customers and the needs of your users, you want to stay very agile. And one thing about being a public company, or choosing to go public, is that once you make that decision, it is a one-way door, you're going in one direction and you need to be comfortable with that. On the other hand, I do think that a lot of the stories, a lot of the myths out there about being a public company are actually not very well understood by a lot of startup founders. One reason for that is that I think startup founders are very much focused generally on users, on customer problems and tasker problems in our case, and so don't think about and understand all of what's involved in being a public company.

But I think also there's a lot of myths out there that have been developed. And I suspect a lot of them are developed by some of the investors in the private market, because they obviously want to be able to show their why private markets are very attractive, as much the ASX and public market investors are trying to tell you why it's a great idea to be a public company. I must admit that I didn't know much about what was involved in becoming a public company. For example, I was under the impression that we had to do quarterly forecasts and I found out that that's just not something that actually is a requirement, at least not at the stage of company that where we're at now. And so what I realized is, I just didn't understand much about it. And so I think it's worthwhile for founders and CEOs considering a listing to really try and bust the myths and get to the bottom of what would really be involved for you in your specific circumstance.

Great advice. So Airtasker today, you've recently acquired a US business to turbocharge your US expansion. As you mentioned earlier on, you're doing very well in your prospectus forecasts for gross marketplace value.

So tell us a little bit about the long-term strategy and your vision for the business going forward.

Moving forward in terms of our growth strategy, we've got three key areas which we're focused on. One of those is growth marketing. So actually for a number of years, we haven't invested much into paid marketing at all. In fact, our run rate in marketing was something like $20,000 per month, which is less than 1% of our revenues. So we're really coming into a stage where we feel like investing into paid marketing is very exciting and I'm pleased to say that we've just brought on board a new CMO, Noelle Kim, who was the previous Head of Marketing Asia-Pacific for Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp. So really leveling up our level of C-level expertise in marketing there.

The second pillar of growth for us is what we call our Superstore initiative. So this is all about building out new marketplace models and new user experiences for our customers and our taskers. So for example, listings is a product that we've created, which enables our taskers to be able to prepackage up services and list them on the shelves of the Airtasker app. And we're working on a number of other of these experiences to really be able to empower our taskers to be able to create more working opportunities.

The third area of growth for us is international expansion. And, as mentioned, Airtasker has been growing in the UK, we have a multi-million dollar marketplace in London, which is really starting to find it strides now. And in the US market, we recently acquired Zaarly to jumpstart that. I'm really looking forward in FY22 to really be able to double down and leverage that acquisition to be able to drive growth into the US and compress up that time that it took to break the chicken and egg problem, which is very famous in marketplaces. And compress what took many years to do in Australia, what we're hoping to do in one or two years in the US.

Fantastic. Tim it's fantastic to see your company doing so well on market and here at ASX we really want to support you in realizing your ambitions as a listed company. And thank you for sharing your journey and your thoughts for the benefit of those who come behind you. Take care.

Thanks so much for having me.

Where to now? 

For more information contact ASX Listings Business Development