Giggs helps gig workers and employers connect
Launched earlier this year, it was founded by a former gig worker who experienced what she describes as "gigxiety."
Nikki Sanz knows a thing or two about the life of a gig worker. After all, she’s lived it since before Sanz’s graduated from Elon University in 2018.
Although she told us she majored in sports management in college, Sanz worked a Dolly Parton concert, and that was the deciding factor. “I said, ‘I’ve got to get to Nashville,’ and that’s what she did one day after graduating. Her goal: working on the road in the touring industry.
Within six months, she had secured diverse gigs with Live Nation, the Ryman Auditorium, CMA Fest, and landed her first tour with Eric Church. Sanz says the experience resulted in what she characterizes constant “gigxiety” – the perpetual need to find the next gig to further her career and make ends meet.
As a result of her work staffing tours and events, Sanz saw how difficult it was for employers to find the right talent due to a reliance on inefficient word-of-mouth methods like calling, texting, and posting in Facebook groups. So, she created Giggs to centralize the gigging landscape, allowing professionals to showcase their experience, post jobs securely, and connect more efficiently.
“We want to be the hub for everyone,” whether it is events needing workers or those seeking gigs, she explains. Giggs describes its mission as creating an elite community of vetted professionals, transforming how those in the community connect, find jobs, and succeed in the industry.
Along the way to officially launching Giggs earlier this year, Sanz laughs as she says that “no one asked for that many mentoring sessions,” a testament to the gig work that she was so passionate about. It was also the insights of a young entrepreneur who readily admitted in those days that “I don’t know what I’m not doing.”
While the idea for Giggs was first conceived in July 2022, it wasn’t until November 2023 that she launched a Beta version of the platform. Six months later, Sanz went live with the full-blown version.
Today, she has 16,000 gig workers and 700 businesses registered.
She describes Giggs as a marketplace, connecting those who are seeking gigs and those who need gig workers.
“Professionals apply to be a Giggs member, and we screen them” before they are listed on the platform, Sanz explained. That process typically takes less than 48 hours if the gig worker’s profile is complete. There is no cost to the individual to be listed on the platform, although a Pro version that will launch in 2025 gains an individual access to unlimited premium job listings and application features.
Employers can either pay monthly or annually for unlimited job postings and unlimited access to search the full Giggs database. This allows them to search by job title, location, and years of experience, and contact any professional on the platform. Additionally, employers can manage, organize, and filter their own private roster of professionals, making it an all-in-one customer relationship management, job-posting, and database-search platform for a monthly subscription of $200/month or $2000/year.
“We also offer an ‘On-Demand’ option, where employers can post a job for $90 per listing to get applicants and hire through that method,” Sanz says.
We asked her the biggest challenges she faced in getting Giggs off the ground.
“The greatest challenge is changing the word of mouth culture of the gig industry,” she says. That was followed closely by growing the marketplace and raising capital.
Sanz went the route of working with angels, raising $600,000 along with $200,000 that she personally invested.
While she expects to be at a breakeven point by the end of 2024, she is seeking investors to match a second investment from the Launch Tennessee-managed “InvestTN” fund of $75,000.
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