Roamler’s Co-Founder Wiggert De Haan On Location-Based Crowd-Sourcing

Some time ago Daniel wrote an article on Roamler, a new app from Amsterdam that provides a totally new way of exploring the city. Roamler enables its users to earn real money by completing location-based assignments. Companies can outsource tasks that usually relate to marketing and promotion, ranging from checking a product’s placement within a store to the individual publicizing the product in different ways. We asked five questions to Roamler’s co-founder Wiggert de Haan.

1. Can you describe Roamler in one sentence? And how did you come up with this idea?
“In fact, Roamler is a mobile workforce that enables smartphone users to earn money and get new experiences. We came up with this idea during a market research project for a company that rents out advertising space at bus stops. In the past we had to visit every bus stop to do research on location. With Roamler we can improve that process immensely. We wonders how useful it would be to ask nearby people to complete a small assignment on the spot…”

2. Should we consider Roamler a hyper-flexible employment agency or rather a new type of market research firm?
“Roamler is more like an employment agency than a market research firm. Of course, we deliver data to market research companies but that’s mainly for inspiration, as well as qualitative data. Roamlers (people that use Roamler, J.B.) can get information from the street that could be interesting for research agencies.”

3. How much money can you ideally make with Roamler?
“That depends on how much time you spend completing tasks with the app. There are Roamlers that have earned hundreds of euros a month, but the majority of our users earn some tens of euros a month.”

4. Until now, assignments on Roamler are posted by companies. Will it be possible in the future for private persons to post assignments as well?
“That’s one of the features we’re currently working on. At the moment it isn’t possible.”

5. What will be the future of Roamler and these kinds of services in general?
“We predict that there’s an enormous market that wants to pull information off the street. There are many new applications you could think of. Plenty of information isn’t yet available in current databases, for instance ice cream stands in Summer time, or places to sharpen your skates. With such a tremendous mobile workforce there’s so much to explore…”

Roamler is currently invite-only. As Roamler has recently launched in the United Kingdom, we have ten invite codes available for our UK readers! Wanna try? Drop us a line at mail@popupcity.net.