Hipages connects tradies and homeowners through a digital platform

Tradies are turning to online marketplaces to source their jobs and connect with homeowners, one of these platforms is hipages.

Hipages, is an online platform where homeowners and tradies are matched based on the job poster’s requirements. Homeowners can hire from a vast range of services from removalists, plumbers, concreters and even pest controllers.

Roby Sharon-Zipser, CEO and founder at hipages said connecting tradies and customers is done through qualitative and quantitative research on the homeowner and tradesperson.

“For the tradie, in particular, we identified that many of them still work in very rudimentary ways, particularly around the pad and pen. The way technology has evolved, it doesn't have to be that way.

"We can give them a lot more time back to do actual work or time back into their busy lives so that they can spend more time with their friends and family. We are listening to what they have, their pain points, and then building products and services to match that need,” he explained.

The adoption of the new technologies in the industry is sitting around 20 percent, but that doesn’t mean that tradies aren’t implementing new tools.

Sharon-Zipser said there's definitely a level of sophistication differential to other industries around technology adoption.

“Trades are really good at their vocation, problem-solving, street smarts, they're really awesome people when you chat with them. They have been a bit slower in the business adoption, so when they go to TAFE or study their trade, they talk a lot about the actual trade itself, but not about business management, and applications to help them manage their businesses better,” he said.

Sharon-Zipser said hipages is putting them on a journey to help them adopt that technology.

He said, “The way to do it is to make it as seamless and as simple as possible. The application that we use, one of them is hipages, of course, which is the marketing mechanism to get them work or connections to potential customers.

“But also, Tradiecore is a software that will help them manage and run their business. We do it all in the app, it's designed with the tradie in mind, on the go being able to do quotes, doing invoices, collect payments, integrate into their accounting software.”