This Outsourcing Company Generated $1B Last Year

Read time: 3 minutes

GM! It's Thursday, May 18th - Today we're covering a services business that absolutely prints money, generating $956M last year....let's unpack TaskUs.

FEATURE

This Outsourcing Company Generated $1B Last Year

Strapped with just a few grand, Bryce Maddock opened the first TaskUs office on the floor of a Filipino elementary school.

From those humble beginnings in 2009, Maddock has grown TaskUs to a $1.27B valuation.

So, What’s the Business?

TaskUs provides digital services for some of the most notable Silicon Valley companies like Tinder, Whisper, Uber, and many more. These companies partner with TaskUs to outsource entire operation sectors, such as customer service, content moderation, and even product engineering.

The Revenue

After some initial growing pains, the company quickly became profitable and generated $15.7M revenue in 2014. TaskUs’s growth hasn’t slowed down either, seeing how the company, on average, has continually experienced double digit year-over-year growth, and last year they generated $956M revenue.

How Are They Different?

• Don't Be The Cheapest: The traditional outsourcing marketplace is a race to the bottom where companies try to beat one another by reducing costs. TaskUs takes a somewhat different approach. While they do provide reasonably priced services, they focus on providing high quality work that preserves their client’s culture and brand.

• TaskUs has 23,000 employees, primarily based in the Philippines, that make between $15 an hour for call center reps and $76 an hour for software engineers.

• In the Philippines, the average hourly wage is $5.73, making TaskUs positions highly sought after throughout the country.

How Do They Win?

1) Follow The Demand: TaskUs owes its name to its original business model in which clients submitted a task and TaskUs would send it to a person whose skills were best suited to complete the job.

This idea looked great on paper, but businesses were unfamiliar with the concept, and it failed to generate revenue and form a client base.

So, Maddock bit the bullet and transitioned his unique business model into a traditional outsourcing company.

2) Get In early: After transitioning business models, TaskUs solicited Silicon Valley startups who were eager to cut down costs. This was an ideal consumer base to target as these tech startups were fantastic at product design but struggled to operate customer service and content moderation teams.

By handling the tedious day-to-day operations of these startups, TaskUs allowed them to put all their focus into building the best product.

By targeting companies in their infancy, it provided TaskUs an opportunity to grow alongside them. As companies like Tinder and Uber expanded, so did their reliance on TaskUs.

So What?

Writer and Nobel prize Laureate William Faulkner famously said, “In writing, you must kill your darlings”, meaning that it’s crucial to abandon ideas that simply aren’t working.

TaskUs’s darling was its task request platform, and it wouldn’t have succeeded today if it didn’t kill the idea and take up a traditional outsourcing business model. A good entrepreneur is willing to pivot and find the demand.

TOGETHER WITH VENHUB

How One Founder Is Revolutionizing Retail

Shahan Ohanessian is pioneering the fully-autonomous retail store – and he’s just the CEO to do it.

After scaling his last tech business to $200M and working with Uber, UPS, and other big brands, he’s teaming up with leaders from all ends of the delivery and fulfillment industry – including Amazon and GrubHub – to automate the $654B convenience store market.

Why VenHub is the future of retail

VenHub's vision is to offer a 24/7 operation through automated systems and touchless transactions, smaller store sizes, and a flexible and customizable store design.

Their robotic retail model aims to provide a seamless and frictionless shopping experience for customers, while making store owners’ lives easier in the process:

• 5X higher margins

• 98% faster to build

• A more sustainable operation

This revolutionary tech could stretch even further to stores of all kinds, and you can be a part of that by becoming a Venhub investor.

Please support our sponsors