Sam & Emily Fryer
Ideas Program 4
28 Feb 2021
About
Sam and Emily Fryer manage a North Queensland grass fed beef property.
They are often looking for casual workers to help them on the farm, and like many producers across all sectors, they find it difficult to find the right people. Often these employees have to live and work on the farm with the family, so they must be pre-screened. This process of finding the right employees can be time-consuming and stressful.
The idea
To create a more efficient method of hiring casual workers, Sam and Emily are developing an app to match prospective workers to producers, thus providing a gateway for casual staff to find work in the rural sector. After recent exposure to the agtech sector through working with Black Box co, Sam and Emily joined the Ideas Program to learn more about how to make their idea a reality and to make new connections in the world of agtech and startups.
Sam and Emily interviewed a range of producers across several sectors and regional employers at the beginning of the program, understanding their current process to hire workers and the challenges faced. With COVID-19 significantly affecting labour availability, many producers had struggled to find people to fill jobs on farm. They also looked at existing platforms such as Backpacker Job Board and Facebook.
Through the program, Sam and Emily realised that they had little understanding of the challenges and needs from the backpacker perspective. They reached out to backpackers through their networks to understand more of the experience of backpackers in seeking work regionally and found that for backpackers the job search process was also difficult. Many jobs listed were not as described, with backpackers often relying on word of mouth to get accurate information on work conditions.
The F2F program has been an incredible experience, I have learnt so much in such a short time and have created a bond with fellow participants that we will share going into the future.
Whats next
Sam and Emily locked in on the concept of curating jobs for the platform, with a goal to vet the producers and jobs going on to the platform to offer backpackers a differentiated selection and confidence that jobs were as described.
The pair developed and launched a website and Facebook and are planning to launch their “minimum viable” product using simple forms to capture jobs and interested backpackers, and to publish via their Facebook page and newsletter. They hope to fill 5 jobs through this simple product before progressing to a more mature technology build.
Program Partners
