These days it’s all about startups, especially after the just-founded Instagram got bought by Facebook for 1 billion dollars…well maybe it ‘s not worth that much, at least not yet, but you will probably hear a lot about Gidsy, a Dutch startup which offers a “marketplace for authentic experiences.”
Gidsy seems to be one of the hottest European startups. It has just won the Dutch Startup Award and has recently landed a 1.2 million dollar investment from a combinatiom of Sunstone Capital, Index Ventures, Werner Vogels (CTO of Amazon) and… Ashton Kutcher, random but true. After all he has also invested in Berlin based Soundcloud.
This new website is what we could call an evolution of the social dimension of regular social networks but with Gidsy the social part gets real. Here people can book and offer many kinds of activities.
If you have some special skills that you know people might be interested in you can create an event, offer a service by providing descriptions, photos and other details, and get paid for it.
Let’s say you are great at cooking lasagna, you could decide to offer a cooking lesson to Gidsy’s community members or to cook a special dinner for them and get paid for your service. In order to join Gidsy, you just need a Paypal account. Gidsy takes care of money transactions, customer support, cancellations, refunds and marketing in return for 10 percent service charge. Because Gidsy is an enterprise and each penny counts. According to the company policy, even a small financial commitment (the minimum price for each activity is 5 dollars) is the key to happy organizers and participants.
Although it isn’t officially a social enterprise, Gidsy does play a social role. It encourages people to earn extra money (which doesn’t hurt, especially given the hard times we’re facing) by meeting other people and sharing our knowledge.
