Kulkarni and Narula wanted to build an on-demand service platform where workers could quickly come together to tackle a new project as a team; this is called a scaffolding approach.8 The goal is for each team to have a mixture of newbies and experienced workers. New workers bring new questions and new ways of orienting themselves to a problem, while experienced workers cement their knowledge by passing it down. Each team was overseen by a junior manager, who was available to answer questions. This strategy is the pragmatic way to help a business grow quickly, even if Silicon Valley uses the more vacuous, depopulated language of “scaling up.” Kulkarni and Narula believed that scaffolding their workers as teams could accomplish more than an unsupported, atomized universe of independent workers.9 And, like CloudFactory founder Mark Sears, they believed that workers with support produced better work and were ultimately better off. So, to create LeadGenius’s first worker base in 2010, they started with the most obvious place to find people connected to one another—Narula’s cousins, uncles, and aunts back in Uttam Nagar.
As noted earlier, LeadGenius’s software integrates workers into each step of evaluating prospective sales for the company’s clients. Workers don’t just chase leads; they check one another’s work, they cheer each other on, and existing workers recruit new people to join them. Teams working on specific client campaigns keep tabs on each other’s work and collectively identify when the sales-lead data are too thin to pass along to a client, deciding as a team what to do next.
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By using this scaffolding technique, LeadGenius reinvented a career ladder. Rather than leave people to individually absorb the costs of orienting to new projects or figure out how to move forward “when they got stuck, LeadGenius invested in capturing the value of all the collaboration described in the previous chapter as the kindness of strangers. They made paid tasks out of mentoring others, supporting teams, training new hires, and the hiring process. One of the greatest differences in LeadGenius’s design is that it assumes that people may want or need to move back and forth between contributing as an always-on worker and a regular one, much as Zaffar did when his mother was in an accident and he needed to step away from LeadGenius for more than a month to care for her. It sees workers’ desire to control their time, what they work on, and who they work with as features rather than bugs of on-demand systems.
LeadGenius also assumes that each campaign’s focus, rather than the skills of a specific subset of people, will determine the mix of team members assigned to the job. This design allows them to draw on a worker’s personal interests as much as a worker’s past successes. If, for example, someone is a sports fan, they may become a fantastic worker on a project looking for sales leads related to selling software for tracking fantasy sports leagues. LeadGenius workers can select projects by opting in on campaigns posted to weekly job message boards. And unlike with open-call platforms like Upwork and MTurk, workers are not forced to vie for jobs in ways that might drive down fellow workers’ pay.
LeadGenius was one of the first on-demand businesses to build in-house tools to help workers collaborate. They didn’t assume, like many of their competitors, that workers’ communication was bad for business. Some of this comes from the realities of managing a global workforce operating in 45 different countries: communication is vital when coordinating across time zones. They addressed this, in part, by organizing teams by country, led by junior managers located in that country. Once the junior managers were connected, it was easy to connect workers as well. Open chats among workers create cohesion among team members, which is both a business advantage and an advantage to workers, who can ask peers for assistance if they get stuck on a problem.
“eadGenius relies on its most experienced members to recruit and hire people like them. The company provides software and tools, and in some cases even a tech budget, to equip workers to contribute. “It makes everybody’s lives easier,” says Narula. “And it helps us by increasing the length of time workers stay with us.” For Narula, this is the model design for the future of work and the only sustainable way to use ghost work for more complicated workflows. He believes that learning from how workers organize themselves—how they make decisions, manage their time, and collaborate on projects—strengthens the work delivered.10 “As we provided more and more tools, that self-organization became stronger and stronger and the results got better.”11 While LeadGenius offers a for-profit model that prioritizes workers, a nonprofit approach can afford to elevate workers’ needs even further.
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