Transitioning from survival to stability in startup growth
Overview
Building IRL community with a distributed team.
Base is working on fighting the loneliness epidemic in America with curated IRL experiences and a mobile app that helps their members reconnect. They recently raised their seed round, and are leveraging part-time and freelance talent as they scale Base, in new cities and virtually.
After attending Jeffersonian dinners, the founders felt that the best way to form human connection is in small intimate groups of five to seven people. They want to democratize that type of dinner party and bring it to a much larger audience.
The Challenge
Base is solving a large problem that a lot of Americans face, and that resonates with the people who want to work with them.
In order to build Base, they’re leveraging many different people: from interviewers to chat with prospective members, engineers to build their app and refine their algorithm, event coordinators and couriers to help with IRL set-up, and even customer success roles to support their members.
Base was using different platforms for hiring, invoicing, sending contracts, and making payments to their freelance workforce, which was headache-inducing and resulted in complex and unnecessary processes.
"What Contra allowed us to do is have a better grasp on this group of part-timers we're creating. It's really important for us to source those people, hire them, and manage them easily."
— Kaben Clauson, Co-Founder & CEO at Base
Base.club
The Solution with Contra
Base simplified their flexible workforce operations with Contra in order to scale.
Base is always looking for ways to reduce complexity as a startup, and for them, using Contra for their freelancer management was a no-brainer. By switching to Contra, Base is able to have all of their freelance payments in one place, as well as get insight into their spend, and avoid headaches.
For Base, working with part-time talent and freelancers is part of their hiring strategy. According to Kaben, Base will always have a full-time to part-time ratio of around one-to-five, if not higher.
Outcomes
The time Base saves in sourcing, hiring, and admin allows them to further scale and bring their curated experiences to more cities around the United States.
Base will be launching in more cities soon, aiming to bring their experiences to Chicago, Austin, New York, Nashville, and San Francisco. They are also building out more features and an improved algorithm to facilitate their community in having more authentic connections.
