Airtasker is expanding to Austin: What to know about the online community marketplace

Yahoo

20-02-2025

An online community marketplace is expanding to Austin and kicking off a Formula 1 campaign behind the scenes to coincide with the 2025 season, including the Austin Grand Prix.
Australian-based Airtasker connects people with "skilled local helpers." Tim Fung, who founded Airtasker in 2011, described it as a platform where users can request assistance from their community for a task or post a job, allowing anyone in the community to offer their help.
"There's so many jobs that don't fit neatly into categories," Fung told the American-Statesman. "It's a plumber or it's an electrician, or it's a moving company or something like that, but so many jobs are just like, 'I just need some help.' It's not specific."
"By partnering with Sinclair Broadcast Group, Mercurius Media Capital, iHeartMedia, and TelevisaUnivision, Fung raised $21.75 million in media capital in the U.S. He then focused on marketing campaigns and collaborations to boost the website's visibility
Visa Cash App Red Bull F1 racing team approached Fung, an avid F1 fan, about a possible partnership, but he initially declined.
"F1 is all about elite brands, and Airtasker is not about the elite and the luxury and all that," Fung said. "Airtasker's about common people just trying to make an honest living, sharing their skills and making some money. People can make good money on Airtasker, but we're not talking about the billionaires of the world."
Fung attended a race with a friend a few months later and started noticing the hundreds of people behind the scenes of the racing teams: the ones who build the cars, the ones who fine-tune treading on rubber tires, the ones measuring the car lengths with laser pointers and the ones with clipboards managing the operations.
Fung said he wanted to highlight those people, and the partnership with the team will highlight the various people who work behind the drivers and make it so the team is capable or competing and winning.
"We want to celebrate these people, because that is Airtasker, that is people with unique skills doing stuff. ...," Fung said. "The thing that motivates me more than anything is watching people do their thing and doing it the best they can do it. It's so motivating to see people use their skills and give a shit and do it really well."
Given Austin's connection to the F1 Grand Prix in the fall and Airtasker's media partners owning several television stations in the city, Fung said they knew Austin was the next U.S. market to expand into after Los Angeles.
Airtasker currently has 3 million "taskers" who have completed 4.3 million tasks. The website has its own secure payment system, Fung said, and allows users to tailor what kind of people they want for their jobs, from running background checks, requiring distance or approved to work with children.
Fung said the central thing he wants Austinites to know about Airtasker is that it's not like other online marketplaces or trade apps like Uber, Instacart, Craig's List or Facebook Marketplace. He said it's uniquely more community oriented.
"Your food delivery or your rideshare apps, they're trying to standardize labor and make it as cheap as possible. And that isn't really great for workers. Eventually, there's talk about automation and artificial intelligence and getting rid of workers," Fung said. "Airtasker is the opposite of that. The taskers determine how much they want to charge and what work they do. They only pick the jobs they actually want to do."
This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Airtasker launches F1 racing partnership and Austin expansion