Airwork

Ayyyy Airwork made it on Forbes 30U30 Toronto! 🔥🎉

🚨 AIRWORK IS LAUNCHING IN PUBLIC BETA! 🚨

For the last year, Airwork has been in private beta, and we've done a LOT:
1. Launched our MVP business portal and mobile app
2. Processed $120K+ in worker wages
3. Ran 500+ shifts
4. Reviewed tens of thousands of applicants
5. Launched in 6 cities
6. Ran experiments in 8 industries

Now, we're excited to announce that we're officially in public beta! 🎊🎉🍾
This means that anyone can now sign up directly for Airwork and become a part of our community.

As a reminder, Airwork connect businesses with local pre-vetted skilled and general labourers. We only accept the top 5% of applicants, and the software automates everything. WSIB insurance. Background checks. Interviews. Payroll. Time-tracking. EVERYTHING! 😤

We work with Southern Ontario businesses in manufacturing, warehousing, events, restaurants, hotels, cleaning, printing, and more. 🚀

If you're a manager looking to boost up staff for a project or two, create an account for free at airwork.io! 🔥

If you're a worker looking to take control of your own schedule, download the Airwork app on:
1. The Apple App Store: https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/airwork/id1644979123
2. The Google Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.airwork.Llama

Check out our detailed public beta launch here on YC: https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/J09-airwork-canada-s-on-demand-frontline-workforce.

And with no time to waste, Litebulb is now Airwork!

Many companies have fluctuating staffing needs. Ie: a warehouse gets a shipment one week 3x larger than the usual shipment and need to up the staff. A restaurant’s dishwasher cancels a shift last minute. A retail electronics store is gearing up for black friday and doubles up on security guards and staff.

Airwork solves this problem by allowing workers in Canada to pick up shifts at any local business whenever they want and get paid the same day. Workers can download a mobile app, sign up for free, book a shift, and get paid all within the same day, without having to upload any resumes or do any interviews.

We're starting with businesses in BC looking for general labourers, warehouse staff, event staff, and cleaning staff, and will be expanding by sector and region. We've already begun partnering with local schools and newcomer centres to offer low-friction, flexible shifts to students and newcomers.

If you know any businesses with fluctuating staffing needs or workers that want to control their schedule, please let us know at [email protected]!

We've pivoting.

Here's why:

1. The current market is terrible for tech hiring. Several of our enterprise clients went from double digit open head counts for eng roles to 0 overnight. Many of the big tech companies are either laying off employees or freezing hiring, which we expect to last for at least a year.
2. Nobody actually wants to automate onsite interviews. To make truly informed hiring decisions on engineers, hiring managers/eng leads always want to spend time pair programming, problem solving, or conversing with the candidate. Automating this process removes a key mandatory human element necessary in the process.
3. The ROI on automating onsite interviews is negative. LeetCode questions are notoriously bad at predicting real-world engineering capabilities, but they are easy to create and automate. Litebulb-style interview questions are simulations of real work (DB, backend, frontend, Figma mockups + specs), but take months to automate just one question. You wouldn't believe the weird edge cases candidates have come up with.

As a result, we no longer believe right now is the best time to build Litebulb.

I'd like to thank all of our early believers: clients, advisors, investors, and of course teammates for their continued support and dedication to Litebulb.

What's next? We spent June brainstorming and validating, and already decided on the next business to build. Look forward to a BIG rebrand and announcement!

Litebulb is proud to announce that we are backed by Y Combinator and will be joining the W22 cohort!

Silicon Valley-based Y Combinator accelerates hundreds of startups twice a year, with some big players in the technical recruiting space such as Triplebyte and HackerRank, and world-changing startups like Dropbox, Airbnb, Reddit, and Coinbase.

If you're interested in automating your technical onsite interviews, feel free to contact us at [email protected], schedule a demo at https://calendly.com/gary-j-lin/litebulb-demo, or check us out at www.litebulb.io and https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/litebulb.

What a better way to start off the new year than to welcome our two newest members to the Litebulb family! 🎉 🥳

Clarence Ng is joining as our Senior Software Engineer, boasting an extensive background in frontend engineering at high growth, early stage tech startups like Deliverr, Grow, and Edvisor.

Aaron Ngu is joining as our Software Engineer, having completed his most recent internship from Amazon in the prestigious AWS S3 org and nearing his graduation from the University of British Columbia for Computer Science.

Both Clarence and Aaron are based out of Vancouver, and we are delighted to welcome them onboard!!