sĀge Brings the Gig Economy and Intergenerational Connections Together

Welcome Esther! What can you tell us about sAge?

Sage is the gig economy for older adults. There’s so much expertise and experience that older adults have accumulated over years of their career work, hobbies, anything that they really put their minds and focused on and Sage brings an opportunity for them to continue to share that and make money doing so, offering supplemental pension and also bringing meaning and connection between older adults and intergenerational connections.

What made you start this company?

I started Sage a year or so ago. I actually started it for my parents.

There were a lot of things that I wanted to learn. I live in Tel Aviv. My parents live in Montreal. I kept thinking. What if my dad lived around the corner from me? Things like carpentry or welding. And it started to make me think about who are the people who live in our neighborhood, who are the people that live in our community and what are the things that they have to offer.

And there must be a way to pay an older person who still has probably tools in their shed that are just being completely unused. It’s a lot of unused resources and also a way to have that extra connection. That type of family connection. The initial idea was to connect people in person.

So you can set a radius and you can find out who are the people on your block, or the people around your corner. You can learn anything from music lessons to business, to growth hacking. We were set to launch on March, 2020, which was terrible timing to be focused on in-person connections.

So I took a couple of days and then pivoted to bring the platform online. And that was really when we grew. And that was really when we realized just how big this opportunity is and how much potential it has connecting people around the world and being able to see that technology isn’t that scary for older people.

You deal a lot with that. That was really when Sage turned into a much bigger conversation.

How does it actually work? What can people expect when signing up for Sage?

Right now, we pivoted a little bit into the experience economy. People are looking to learn and upscale, but at the same time, they’re looking to meet like-minded people and really have an experience.

And that’s what we’re leaning into. So if you go on our website, there’s a huge variety of categories. Anything from cooking classes to chess or growing your own startup. I’ve used it for my startup. I’ve connected with some of the experts and Sages on our platform.

And once you sign up and it’s very simple, it’s. Two or three clicks and you book a class and then you can sit together with a few like-minded people. It’s a maximum of four participants to learn whatever it is that you want to learn together. And there is an option to connect with the participants, following the session, and to connect one-on-one with the Sage for a paid one-on-one interaction to really get the most value out of what you want to do.

Do Sages get paid?

Currently the experiences themselves are tip based. Following the experience. We’ve had a lot of people share tips with the sages and the one-on-ones are paid. If you take entry to Excel, and then you realize that there’s actually points that you really want to focus on and you want that one-on-one experience. That would be a paid session with any one of our Sages on the platform.

And is it available globally?

Sage is available globally. We have Sages in Canada, USA, Israel, Australia, South America. So it’s very, very, very much global. 

The sages are very excited to hear where you’re from, and it really brings an extra element of culture and diversity to our platform.

It sounds like a wonderful experience for everyone involved. 

Yes. We’ve had really wonderful feedback. I think that’s probably the thing that’s been motivating me the most, really seeing the feedback after every single class, from both sides. Sages and participants.

So what is the bigger vision? Where do you see Sage in five or 10 years from now? 

We want to be the gig economy for older adults. We really want to offer this supplemental pension, many people can’t afford to live on their pension.  It’s a taboo subject that’s being addressed more.

Something else I’ll throw out is age-ism, which is really growing rapidly. And maybe finally starting to be talked about. We are proving that older adults still have so much to contribute. And as they’re being sort of moved out of the workforce, we’re saying, no, they’re okay with technology.

There’s so much that we can continue to learn together from each other. When someone does do an experience, some of the feedback we get many times is people telling us, wow, I didn’t know that this person knew more about this topic than I heard on YouTube or read online.

I think every time it changes someone’s opinion that we’re hoping that continues to spread and really change the narrative on aging and turn it into something sexy and cool. That’s what we’re trying to do.

Some of our other plans on the pipeline is we want to take experiences and really turn them into in-person experiences. Once we come out of Corona, we want to turn them into Sage in the classroom. So if you’re in a classroom, you can really bring in a Sage, maybe someone from across the world, who’s sitting on a zoom and really talking about that historical event that you’re trying to teach the kids about.

We have a lot of exciting. Ideas in store and we’re trying them out in different locations. We’re currently finalists on city of Melbourne re-imagining the city that’s tackling Corona and the city post Corona. We’re connecting Sages specifically with kids in the classroom. We are also part of the SFI project in Tel Aviv, which focuses on loneliness in seniors,on welfare.

So we have a lot of exciting things in our pipeline and our team is slowly growing. We were able to bring in people that are just as passionate about aging and just passionate about solving the same issues. 

We’re really excited to see where this is going. 

I think that’s been a really, really important point here. We have a tendency to forget, just because we have the internet at our fingertips with such a wealth of information, that there are still human beings out there with a knowledge that is more vast than anything we can find online.

So having sages teach us,  from their own personal life experience is invaluable.

We’ve actually experienced that. I think one of actually the first Sage class that ever happened, I still don’t even know how the guy found us, but it was an Excel class. He was based in Canada and our Excel Sage was based in New York and it really proved immediately the value of the connection, because this was someone  who was having trouble with some of his spreadsheets, I think that was a realtor, and he had this 20 minute session and following the session, the Sage followed up with him and said, let me fix your spreadsheets.

I think that’s also the value that we really create is that you’re not walking into a class and walking out. This is someone who came on the platform and is dedicated to their subject and really will put in that extra effort to make sure that it’s completely understood. And we’ve seen that time and time again.

And that’s really where our five star rating probably has come from, that extra mile that Sages will go, where an hour, isn’t an hour, they’ll follow up with you or they’ll stay on longer. It’s something that I’m excited to see more people take advantage of.

Is there anything else you would like to say?

We’re currently building a Sage community and this has always been part of our core beliefs from the beginning, that if we believe in Sage, we’re going to walk the walk. All of our Sages have always been part of a very transparent conversation of what we’re doing in our startup and as things pivot and as things change, we’ve had open conversations about it.

And this is something that we’re putting even more of a focus on by building a Sage community, talking about our struggles, how much time do people like to contribute, really understanding our market and the needs of the community.

So we welcome Sages to join the platform, or even just to contribute to the conversation and help us solve this together.

In terms of funding, we’re currently we’re bootstrapped, we’ve been from the beginning. People ask us a lot about that. So we’re looking at some point to find the right investors who line up with our vision and see us and see the type of world that we’re looking to create and solve this conversation with us.

And that will happen, the conversations are in motion and we’re just looking forward to see where this is going to continue to go. Me and my team. 

Thank you so much for joining me today.

Thank you so much, Keren. This was a pleasure and I’m excited to see your next conversation.