Ned Dwyer first met Leni Mayo, a founding investor at 99designs and co-founder of Learnable, while studying a Bachelor of Entrepreneurship at Melbourne’s RMIT, where Mayo does the occasional guest lecture.
The pair crossed paths again at Melbourne’s 2011 Startup Weekend. In the meantime, Dwyer had grown digital agency, Native Digital, into a product development agency with five staff, working for companies like Paydirt, Travelcandy and Business Spectator. But, Dwyer had been looking for a startup idea he could sink his teeth into. When Tweaky.com (formerly Theme Pivot), took out first prize at the two-day ‘hackathon’, Dwyer and his now co-founder Pete Murray, knew they were onto something. Mayo agreed. He told the pair to keep working on the idea. He thought they were onto something. They kept in touch for a few months, and when it came time to raise money, they reached back out to Mayo.
The idea has now attracted the confidence, and money of the successful entrepreneur and angel investor, as well Mark Harbottle, co-founder of 99designs, the world’s best-known design marketplace. Tweaky raised $450,000 from the pair, and Harbottle’s company, the SitePoint Group, in July this year.
“It’s going to be really helpful having them onboard,” says Dwyer. “They’ve built a really successful marketplace with 99designs.”
Tweaky is a marketplace for website customisation. It allows people to outsource changes to their website. A simple request might be the addition of a Facebook or Twitter button on your homepage, or a change to the CSS. A customer would post a project to Tweaky, where a Tweaky project manager would break the project down into small chunks (or ‘tweaks’) to be outsourced to a team of hand-picked developers.
“With the existing marketplaces, you might get hundreds of replies. But in reality what we’ve found is that it’s hard to determine quality.”
The site is growing steadily, and Dwyer hopes it will reach break-even point in January or February next year. There are 250 live jobs currently on the platform. Dwyer tells FLT Tweaky is now 163 days old. He also says he loves numbers. We’re not sure whether that’s true, or he’s just hanging out for a drink — like Brand Honee founder Laurence Wolf, he made a pact with co-founder Pete Murray, not to drink again until the site was profitable.
The majority of projects are from the U.S. Dwyer guesses the size of the market has something to do with it. He says WordPress websites currently accounts for 60-80% of the requests on the site. Other than that, most people people are asking for tweaks on their Shopify, Tumblr, and Drupal sites.
Tweaky co-founder Ned Dwyer (Image: supplied)
Tweaky has recruited four full-time project managers from its database of web developers. The benefit for both developers and customers is that there’s a go-to person for each project. Developers know the projects are all scoped, with details like logins and website information provided before the project starts. Customers know they’ll deal with someone who can cater to their understanding (or lack thereof) of technical information. Many customers wouldn’t know how to find their FTP, or their hosting details, so having someone to step them through is important.
Dwyer was interviewed on Jason Calacanis’ web series, This Week in Startups, last week and received some positive feedback: “Something Jason said was it’s the kind of place you’d send your mum to. You don’t need to analyse the developers, because we do it for you.”
Tweaky has just launched a campaign to help five businesses get off the ground, for less than $500. Dwyer has recruited people with ideas including flat pack standup furniture, a review site for hospitals and pharmacies, a platform to rollover superannuation, a life-casting and goal setting platform, and a subscription coffee business. It’s been getting some good press, thanks to the help of an Australian PR agency (which also manages PR for 99designs).
“We will turn that into content for the blog, but our focus is on taking the idea and opening it to more people so they can learn to build a business too.”
The company currently takes a 50% commission on all projects. It’s a substantial figure, but Dwyer says it helps Tweaky ensure the jobs that come through are all screened. Development work is broken down into individual tweaks, which cost $39 each. You can find a list of current projects on the website. It shows that installation of a Twitter button on your homepage would cost $39, whereas changing the font and layout would cost $78. The more complex the work, the more tweaks required.
Like any marketplace, Tweaky needed to create demand on one side to fuel the other. With customers onboard, the developers have arrived in droves. There are currently 700 applications from developers wanting to be registered on the platform. There are three main groups: the ‘location-irrelevant’ travellers looking for some money, university students, and full-time employees with some spare time. Each developer is hand-picked, based on their previous work.
It helped having the digital agency to begin with. Dwyer utilised the skills of one of his WordPress designers to cope with initial customers. As demand grew, he was able to recruit other developers: “Because I’d worked in an agency, I was able to cannibalise the model to some extent.”
Strangely, the tech press has helped generate demand. Not because Tweaky’s customers read sites like Hacker News or ZDNet, but because technical people — web developers, designers —are often the first port of call for friends and family needing help with a website. Dwyer says they are now the ones driving people to the site through word of mouth.
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