At 18-years-old, Stacey Ferreira cofounded her first company, MySocialCloud.com, with her brother, Scott. The internet security company raised a $1 million round from Richard Branson, early Flipboard investor Jerry Murdock, and Photobucket founder Alex Welch. At age 20, Ferreira sold MySocialCloud.com to Reputation.com, where she then began working as a Product Marketing Manager.
By the time she was 22, Ferreira published 2 Billion Under 20: How Millennials Are Breaking Down Age Barriers and Changing the World, which examines 75 stories from ambitious millennials around the world. While writing her book, Ferreira noticed a trend among young people: they want flexibility from work. This realization led Ferreira to her most recent venture—
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Forrge, which was recently named one of our top 50 startups to watch, provides on-demand staffing for the services and distribution industries.
“I realized that everyone wants flexibility and in retail and quick service restaurants, which is where a lot of millennials work, there’s not a lot of flexibility because managers are setting the hours that people have to work,” said Ferreira. “So I realized there was an opportunity there to provide people with a platform where managers can list the hours available to work, and anyone can sign up, go through an approval process, get trained to work at retailers or quick service restaurants and then they can pick the hours they want to work, go work, and get paid for the hours they worked.”
Forrge allows retail and restaurant workers to fill out a common application (similar to the college application process) with information about your job history in order to apply to companies you’re interested in working at. If you’re selected to interview at a company, you then go through basic training via video tutorials and get pre-approved to work multiple jobs at multiple companies based on your skill set.
Each day, you’ll be able to browse job openings, hours and hourly salary, and then choose the job and hours you want to work that day. The company will also implement an Uber-like rating system, which will let employers verify an employee’s work conduct as well as allow workers to rate store managers and locations. Forrge will take a percentage of every hour worked.
Currently, Forrge is partnering with brands such as Dunkin Donuts, Little Caesars and Red Robin and plans to announce more retail partnerships throughout this year.
The company recently announced the close of a $1.5 million seed round. Forrge intends on using the financing to launch its new app and beta test with several national and international QSR concepts in the second quarter of this year.
Forrge plans on becoming a viable option for young people who want to pursue entrepreneurial projects, as Ferreira did, while affording people the option to work flexible schedules in order to pay the bills.
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