William Jones IV wants to turn a city into a neighborhood. That’s the idea behind his website where Little Rock residents describe chores they need to complete, and other locals bid to do them.
The site and phone app, called JobShare, launched earlier this month and has 250 users so far. It connects two types of people in a community: Those with no time to finish their to-do lists, and those with extra time who want to help out and make a few bucks, he said.
People can post an odd job and sort it into a category like “yard work” or “home improvement.” Pre-approved providers in those categories can submit their price, and clients negotiate from there. Each potential worker goes through a background check, Jones said, and the client reviews the service once the job is done. A post for home cleaning yielded three responses within two hours on a recent weekday.
Retired west Little Rock resident Judy Warren said she found JobShare after seeing it on a Facebook page she follows, Forbidden Hillcrest. She remembered her carport needed cleaning so she posted the task, and it was finished within a day.
The service is unique, Warren said, because it’s mostly one-on-one help for an hour or two, which is harder to find from brick-and-mortar businesses.
“[JobShare] pops into my mind so much now ... maybe we could do this, or maybe we could do that. It really spurs your thinking,” Warren said.
Melanie Lowery, who also heard of JobShare through Facebook, said she does not have a “designated handyman” to take care of household chores. She found someone to cut up a tree stump in her yard — a task friends promised her they would do, but “nobody ever did,” she said.
Lowery also found a weekly supply of locally sourced eggs through the site. That "job," and others people have posted, is something Jones said he never thought of when designing JobShare. He assumed the business would stay hyper-local in the Hillcrest and Heights areas, but users have popped up in all parts of Little Rock.
“The possibilities are endless because this isn’t a business selling one thing. It’s a marketplace,” Jones said.
When he thought of JobShare more than a year ago, Jones' family at first did not understand why he stayed up past 2 a.m. most nights to develop it, he said. He works at his family business in the Little Rock branch of the jeweler Sissy’s Log Cabin (his grandmother is Sissy, the founder). And his parents worried he spread himself too thin, Jones said, especially when he sold his new Mercedes C300 and half of his possessions to fund the venture.
He remembers running that idea by his girlfriend, saying: “I’m going to sell half the stuff I have and my car, and I can’t promise you it’s going to work out.” But she said OK, so Jones swapped out the Mercedes for an old Ford Fusion with 270,000 miles.
Building JobShare took all of his savings and most of his time, Jones said, but it’s paying off. Some users are friends and acquaintances of his, but the base is growing. And though it took “quite a bit” for his parents to see the site could be profitable, his dad now owns 30 percent of the company, he said. Jones gets 15 percent of each transaction.
Though Jones said he wants to take the project as far as possible, he does not plan on ever leaving the original family business.
“I grew up working here my whole life, and I never truly want to get away from that,” he said.
Still, he hopes to launch new versions of JobShare for other parts of Arkansas, like Hot Springs and Jonesboro, this summer. He’s brainstorming more categories of services people need, including tutoring and business advice.
Every time he looks at the odd jobs people post, he sees more possibilities.
“It’s really kind of endless what people are willing to do,” he said.
