This was once a promising start-up, now decimated as a result of one bad decision after another made under the inept leadership of current CEO Christopher Keene. Contrary to the redesigned brand marketing, the company has long since departed from any path of serious innovation in the 'software gig economy' or 'remote team' spaces and it now serves as a glorified dev shop – underpaying/overworking freelancers, rushing into risky projects, dealing with high project turnover, and using sticky contracts to transact with a few troubled, often-irate clients. What remains of Gigster is a shell of an organization beset by internal bickering, nepotism, number padding, low bars, and dwindling coffers.
When I left in 2019, multiple clients were threatening to walk due to significant project issues and management was contemplating several financial 'Hail Marys' in order to keep the lights on – all for some mythical inflection point when business metrics would suddenly make sense for a VC-funded tech start-up. The sales team was also struggling to execute on any of the flavor-of-the-week strategies to bring in new work, big logos and – most importantly – recurring revenue streams. From a purely services perspective, not much was on a healthy path.
To make matters worse, the organization is _still_ attempting to clean up the mess left by Keene's firing of nearly the entire engineering & design teams – without any semblance of product discipline. Don't hit a KPI target? Change the KPI! Or, better yet, make use of some creative reporting to mask 'misses' as 'successes.' Either way, product operations seem to largely serve the egos of the executive team rather than contribute to a comprehensible growth strategy. These are the smartest people in the room and will swiftly fire those whose loyalty comes into doubt. One newer VP asked several of my team about our loyalties outright during our initial 1:1s with them. A majority of this team have since quit and the VP remains employed with the company at the time of writing this review.
I sincerely doubt anything has improved.
If you do decide to join Gigster, be prepared for long hours, political conniving, angry/adversarial clients, low morale, disillusioned freelancers, burn-out culture, marketing woo, blame games, and a dismal business outlook. My advice is to skip buying a ticket and watch this train wreck from a safe distance.
