Over the past few years, it has become increasingly common to book talent — be it for a restaurant or bar, wedding party or corporate event. While most other industries have been thoroughly digitized, booking talent is still primarily done using email, social media, or using low tech agencies. This has resulted in a host of issues facing those looking to book talent. From talent not showing up, or not having the appropriate a work permit, and occasionally talent falsifying their identity to get better rates.
Anjan Luthra, founder, and CEO of GigZoo ran an event management business in university and experienced many of these problems first-hand. Five years later, he’s still tackling the same problems. With private bookings on the rise, Luthra realized that the problem was going to affect a lot more people and decided to quit his job at an investment firm to launch GigZoo.
Revenue forecast of Music Events in the UK from 2017-2023 (in Billion US$) (Source: statista.com)
So what is Gigzoo?
GigZoo is an online platform that solves a host of issues in the talent booking space. Users can quickly source talent online by selecting the place, time and budget. Compared to any other talent booking platform, GigZoo is the only one allowing users to book talent instant in real time, the same way you would book a flight or hotel room. Talented individuals such as musicians not only enjoy public liability insurance, but are also guaranteed online payments. This enables GigZoo to remove friction from the current market, while making it one of the most secure platforms in the booking space today.
Like many recent successes in the technology industry (think: Airbnb, Uber and Upwork), GigZoo is building an online marketplace where people can trust each other to provide services in person. In order to build this type of marketplace, GigZoo partnered with Passbase to verify the identity of all their talent. Passbase verifies users using facial recognition, ID authenticity and liveness checks to confirm that the users are indeed who they claim to be. With these steps, Passbase helps GigZoo ensure that their users are genuine, secure and also have a working permit.
“By integrating Passbase we increased user trust dramatically and booking on the platform went up. Because all talent are verified users have the confidence to book more often.” - Anjan Luthra, CEO of GigZoo
Passbase uses an API-first approach which makes the integration easy and fast. Just copy and paste seven lines of code, and you’re ready to go. This can be done in less than a few minutes thanks to a simple self on-boarding process, with the help of Passbase’s integration team.
“The integration went super smoothly. The Passbase team always took the time to figure out solutions to problems we faced. It was a big effort by the team who we are still in close contact with post integration.” - Hoang Vo, Tech Lead at GigZoo
With a global team supporting the brand, GigZoo is ready to take over London. The team also has new features lined up for launch in the next couple of months.
“We will continue to partner with the best technology firms in addition to our own developers to ensure we continue to lead the market with the most convenient and secure product.” - Anjan Luthra, CEO of GigZoo
Interested in verifying your users online to build trust and increase sales? Sign up with Passbase now and enjoy the best of ID verification.
