Craig Follett, founder of the Toronto startup
uniiverse, which launched publicly last week, describes his company as catering to the "sharing economy."
"It's a person-to-person marketplace for services and activities," he says. "It allows anyone to monetize their time, resources, skills or their possessions." He says, for example, that people can offering cooking classes, rent out their power tools or organize car sharing. "One cool thing we have in Toronto is lunch sharing. If you get, say, five people who all work at BCE Place who are sick of food courts, they can join together and everyone in the group takes turns bringing in lunch for all five people." That's just one example, he says, of how the site encourages in-person interaction as much as commerce.
Though it launched globally, the platform sorts users by location, offering hyper-local functionality. "For instance, it will take your location as The Junction, and show you first offers based closest to The Junction."
The idea for the company occurred to Follett and his co-founder Ben Raffi about a year ago while he was working for a management consulting firm in Toronto. They found a CTO, and began working on it full-time in June, 2011, with the founders putting up their own savings as seed money. They attracted $750,000 in angel investment, and have now grown their team to nine staff working out of a Jarvis Street office in the St. Lawrence Market neighbourhood.
Follett says that in the first 24 hours after the site launched on Feb. 7, the number of listings grew by 200 per cent. "In the wake of the economic crisis, and a number of economic, social and cultural trends," he says, including decreased attachment to ownership and an increase in freelance work, "this allows people to be a bit more resourceful."
Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Craig Follett, Founder, uniiverse