Blackbear: online platform that frees companies from endless piles of work

By Aafke Eppinga

Exploring ways to use captured CO₂, creating an overview of sustainability developments, or analyzing all delivery apps in Belgium. These are just some tasks that the nine thousand “Solvers” – domain experts and young and experienced professionals – from Blackbear‘s database can apply for. Joep Wittebrood and Stefan Hoogenboom’s platform features assignments from hundreds of clients to which thousands of professionals can subscribe. In other words: Blackbear matches the right people to the right job. Whether the Solvers work from home or on a Balinese beach is fine.

Endless piles of work

It all started when Wittebrood worked at Red Bull in his college days. “With an iPad and a backpack full of cans, I went out on the streets selling Red Bull. The company was very target driven. So: with as few people as possible, doing as much work as possible. This created a huge workload and many tasks were not handled well, or were left lying around. That’s when Stefan and I started thinking about how we could tackle this problem.”

That idea grew into Blackbear: an online marketplace for flex work with now more than 150 clients, including DHL, Gasunie, and the Ministry of Infrastructure and Safety. The platform takes everything out of the hands of clients, from administration to finding the right people and financial administration.

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Solvers can apply for one-time jobs, long-term projects, or even a temporary in-house role with a client. They are not paid by the hour but based on output. Wittebrood: “As long as the result is good, a solver does not necessarily have to spend forty hours on an assignment if it can be done in thirty. We make sure that the client’s review process is fair.”

In the early days, the platform consisted of a variety of features. “At one point, we built over twenty features, and Solvers could also go on our platform for personal development. We fell into the classic trap of wanting too much. Now we just reduced that to one feature: matching the right people to the right assignments. And we handle the administration and payout.”

Blackbear guarantees the quality of its Solvers by analyzing all kinds of data at the back end. Solvers build a professional profile and motivate why they are suitable for each assignment. Assignments come from various fields, such as HR, tech, marketing, IT, the energy transition, and the legal sector.

Who is really waiting for sustainably produced nylon?

Fibrant is one such client. The company is a global producer of caprolactam, the raw material for nylon used in cars, clothing, and carpets, among other things. The energy-intensive process typically releases – a lot of CO₂. Fibrant has been committed to reducing that environmental impact for years. For example, it captures gas released in the production process, is researching ways to recycle nylon, and the factory is becoming more sustainable, including by reusing heat, explains Wouter Heinen, competitive intelligence manager at the company.

“A producer in China emits at least ten kilograms of CO₂ when producing one kilogram of caprolactam. We now have a ‘footprint’ of just over three CO₂ per kilo of caprolactam, the smallest of any producer. So Fibrant can deliver a ‘green’ benefit but is at the beginning of the value chain. So, it was important for us to know which consumer brands were marketing themselves as ‘green’ and sustainable so that we could approach them with our sustainable proposition.”

And so Heinen set out an assignment with Blackbear to compile a list of thirty companies in sportswear and carpets that advertise themselves as forerunners in the transition to sustainable products. “A critical assignment that stayed with us because we didn’t get around to it. No one is sitting here with their feet on the table twiddling their thumbs.”

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Maze of European legislation

A more prominent example is European legislation on green initiatives – think taxing CO₂ emissions from imported products CO₂, or legislation stemming from the Green Deal. “Too much for us to keep track of it all,” says Heinen. “If only because the complex texts come from officials in Brussels. A Solver lined up for us what legislation there is, what is still to come, and what impact it has for us.”

As a client from the very beginning, Heinen has seen the company grow. Initially, clients had no say in the Solver, who eventually came to work for them. “That felt a little unbelievable anyway, so we pointed that out. Now we do have a say in who will carry out our assignments. Blackbear is open to feedback and does something with it, which is very nice.”

Fibrant is not the only one on the Brightlands Chemelot Campus using Blackbear’s services. Brightlands entered into a license for all companies on campus. “They offer it as a service for their tenants. It makes it very easy for them to try out our services,” Wittebrood said.

The entrepreneurs’ ambitions are significant: the number of Solvers should increase fivefold, and the company wants to gain a foothold in the United States. But, in doing so, growing sustainably is very important. “You see increasingly these days that platform companies rise very quickly but disappear quickly. We need to expand our European base before going to the US. We want to build a sustainable company that will take the flex work market to a new level.