The timing of Nic De Bonis' renovation was not ideal.
"My wife was pregnant with our first child and as you do we decided to renovate before having the baby," says the 37-year-old. "We had an aggressive deadline and I had two great carpenters and builders on the project, but I realised they were struggling to get subbies and get them to the site on time."
![Siblings Alexandra and Nic De Bonis are the founders of Workyard, an app aimed at the construction industry.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170819045635im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/x/y/0/j/k/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gxy0p4.png/1503015602789.jpg)
This was the genesis of Workyard, an app which aims to make sourcing subcontractors for construction projects easier and more reliable for everyone.
The app was created by De Bonis and his sister, 31-year-old Alexandra De Bonis, in 2015 and since launching has almost 20,000 contractors using it in Sydney.Â
![Workyard has signed up over 20,000 contractors.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170819045635im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/x/y/0/j/8/image.related.articleLeadNarrow.300x0.gxy0p4.png/1503015602789.jpg)
Not paying for leads
"It was interesting because there was LinkedIn for professionals, but there was nothing really for the construction industry," says Nic De Bonis.Â
"The first version was more a networking tool for tradies. It was based on sharing the projects you were working on in your area, then we started to see a lot of people approaching each other for work. From that we started working on the jobs marketplace."Â
Users can post jobs on the app for free and Workyard takes a commission of five per cent on successful jobs.
"People really like that they are not paying for leads," De Bonis says. "It incentivises us as well to make sure it is successful."
The average job posted is worth around $20,000 and De Bonis says $10 million worth of jobs are posted on Workyard every month.Â
The brother and sister duo are part of Australia's burgeoning app sector with the Progressive Policy Institute study 'The Rise of the Australian App Economy,' finding Australia's app economy has grown at least 11 per cent since 2014 and has created 113,000 jobs.
"The iPhone and the App Store were the beginnings of a global App Economy: an army of app developers writing mobile applications for billions of users," the report says.Â
'Sometimes you go into brother and sister mode'
Nic De Bonis built his career in the tech sector with previous roles including working at CBA helping build the CommBank app, while Alexandra De Bonis has a background in product design.Â
From the start we wanted to create a global product and I think it's getting increasingly easier to do that out of Australia.
Nic De Bonis
"From a family point of view we come from a blue collar family, I'm the only tech nerd in the family," says De Bonis.Â
Co-founding a business with a sibling has its pros and cons, he says.
"Starting a company with someone you don't know very well would be harder," he says. "There is a deep level of trust and we just speak our minds so that's great. The hard thing is keeping it professional and sometimes you go into brother and sister mode and realise you wouldn't talk to someone else that way. The good thing is we have been working on this for two years and haven't killed each other. Mum is very proud."Â
Mobile first
Initially Workyard was only available on iPhone with a desktop version launching a year later.Â
"Mobiles have been very important for this business," De Bonis says. "The mobile has become the tradies office. A lot of the subbies and small guys are running their whole business off their phones."Â
Workyard is growing quickly with seven staff, but De Bonis is looking to triple the team in the next year.Â
"We were part of Startmate accelerator so we did that at the start of last year and then raised a seed round from Blackbird Ventures in Sydney," says De Bonis. "It really helped us focus on what is important in the business and it created the connections we needed. You learn a lot just by pitching your business and getting feedback."
Creating a global product
Investment of $1.3 million by Blackbird Ventures is allowing Workyard to expand from Sydney to Australia-wide and to the United States.
"The opportunity is so huge there," says De Bonis. "From the start we wanted to create a global product and I think it's getting increasingly easier to do that out of Australia."
De Bonis says Workyard addresses some of the deeper issues in the construction industry.Â
"There is a lot of problems with people not getting paid on time or not getting paid at all," he says. "We are really focused on building trust. We have a two-way review system and both parties review each other and we really take the time to do upfront checks. It's definitely a big issue in the industry there has been Senate inquiries into it, it is a big problem. There is opportunity for technology to really solve that problem I think."  Â
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