Earlier this summer, a friend of mine based in Boston called asking for a favor. Her son had fallen in love with a picture of a pooch -- of a rare breed, apparently -- and he wanted his mom to buy said pooch who just so happened to be chilling with his litter mates in Saratoga, California ... the town next door to me. The favor: would I take a look at the critter and write back with comments before she made the trip to California? Though I’m not at all an expert on dogs, I gladly accepted the mission. I had a feeling that it was another kind of expertise she was looking for, and I had it in good supply.
The incident reminded me of a startup that I recently got wind of -- through the Latino startup grapevine -- that has an app for sourcing experts to verify the salient qualities of high-ticket items before you purchase them. Let’s say you want to buy a fancy car, but the car is in LA and you live in Miami. With the app, called Veryfier -- today in beta, on iOS -- you can find an LA car expert to look under the hood, kick the tires, and, perhaps, take the car for a spin on your behalf.
The broken link
As I said, I had heard about Veryfier through my Latino network. Why: One of the company’s first investors is Ozzie Areu, a Cuban-American business executive who worked his way up the Tyler Perry organization from the mailroom to president of the media powerhouse. When he met with Veryfier founder Laurent Piani, he instantly saw the opportunity to help lots of experts -- in different fields -- to make money. As a Latino who had to employ a lot of heart and hustle to get ahead, he was empathetic with the hordes of people -- including TV and film logistics personnel who are constantly between jobs -- who could use extra cash by participating in the gig economy.
But Ozzie and Laurent also saw the opportunity to fix a broken link in e-commerce: the touchpoint between the discovery of a high-end used product and the actual sale. The touchpoint here, of course, is the verification and validation of a product before the relationship between buyer and seller proceeds any further (as in jumping on a plane to California). It’s a big challenge, and Veryfier aims to provide the solution.
A platform play
Big challenges often make for smart investment choices, provided you have the right team. The thinking goes, “the bigger the headache, the bigger the pill.” But Ozzie was intrigued by another angle on the investment: the opportunity to partner with large platforms like eBay and craigslist -- two of the world’s largest purveyors of used products -- for whom the verification link was also broken. When I spoke with Laurent a few weeks ago, we paused to reflect on Veryfier's partner opportunities. “Veryfier is ending a major issue for the big platforms,” he said. “For a company like craigslist, it could enable them to take over the whole market for used products online.”
The long tail of expertise
I agree that it's a big opportunity for big platforms, and Veryfier could be the big beneficiary. But for me, there was something more compelling about the Veryfier story: the idea that the gig economy might be expanding to include the long tail of expertise. If successful, Veryfier could be the harbinger of a new kind of gig economy, one where doing what you know and what you love has greater value. Instead of driving your car for Uber, or doing light chores for people via companies like TaskRabbit, you might find ways of making money by lending a larger range of professional insights. In the end, what we are talking about here is not just the long tail of expertise that companies like Veryfier are attempting to create but the long tail of trust that’s required to make e-commerce for big-ticket items come alive. With expertise -- whatever it happens to be -- comes trust: trust that you know and love what you do to actually care about the customer of the product.
When my Boston friend asked me to check out the dog several miles from my house, she knew she needed the expertise of someone with good judgment about temperament. I’m a pretty good judge of pets and people, and I’m proud of it. And I’m not alone in my pride for my own special expertise. With Veryfier, many more people might find the opportunity to work on small gigs doing what they know, and what they love.
