Interview with John Thomas Connor

co-founder of HelpWith.co

HelpWith is an online marketplace that allows users to garner new knowledge and Helpers (gig workers) to capitalize on their skills.

HelpWith caters to users looking to acquire a new skill, rather than simply paying someone to complete a task. For gig workers, this can offer a satisfying new work experience as a teacher and coach instead of a simple job-based order-taker.

Last Wednesday, we interviewed co-founder & head of product, John Thomas Connor, to find out about their unique freelancer marketplace.

John, who has a teaching background, has worked on many community education projects. Through his work he noticed that his students “lacked a technological backbone, essentially something like a platform that would make it normal to have these types of transactions, to learn skills and talents from people around them”.

He thought there should be a technological solution, and soon after built a marketplace, with Nick Bucheleres and Thomas Jung to connect people wanting to pay for skills with those willing and able to teach.

John describes HelpWith as “an online marketplace for learning new skills and monetizing your knowledge”. The platform is ideal for those who are looking to learn a skill and for those who want to capitalize on the skills they have. John emphasizes the human-to-human connection his marketplace offers, “whether it’s marketing, photoshop or guitar, you can make a trade, meet up in a coffee shop or you can pay someone an hourly rate and have them be professionally motivated to help you achieve your goals in pretty much any skilled category that the people around you have knowledge of”.

HelpWith is a community that encourages users to tap into the knowledge and expertise of those around them in a vetted, peer-reviewed approach.

“There are two primary things that attract people to our platform. On one side is simply commerce. It’s an open marketplace and you set your own rate and people are able to book sessions with you, review you, message you. It enhances your discoverability,” says John.

“On the other hand, it’s the sense of community you get just being able to see that someone down the street from me can help me learn how to change a bike tire. Or could help me learn how to make a logo for my small business and maybe I could trade him something that I know how to do like setting up a website or exchange a yoga session for someone helping me with a karate lesson”.

According to John, HelpWith’s users seem especially eager to learn skills in and around tech.

“You would think you could look up anything about WordPress, JavaScript or CSS or fixing your website online. But it turns out that a lot of people have trouble with that”, says John. “If you’re a designer, let’s say, you don’t want to have to walk through having to learn, you know, the basics of jQuery just to make a slider work properly on your portfolio page”.

He believes it’s much easier for some to meet up with someone, learn the required skills and then have the know-how to perform the needed skill themselves. John himself has had the most sessions in teaching people how to navigate WordPress.

He expresses that “ people are willing to pay $30, $50, $80 dollars an hour depending on the demographic and depending on how difficult the task is, for you to sit down in your spare time and show them how to do these things… and once they (clients) learn how to do it…They’re empowered to take control of their brand or their learning process or their ability to learn songs on guitar”.

HelpWith is planted in localization and encourages face to face connections within local freelancer communities. Their marketplace spans dozens of major cities across the US, with the most active networks in Portland, Seattle and Chicago.

Next week we’ll follow up with Part 2 of our interview with John on his thoughts about the future of on-demand work how to succeed in the gig economy.