Britain does not exactly have a shortage of side hustles. You can deliver takeaways, sell clothes online, start freelancing, walk dogs, tutor in the evenings or attempt to build the dropshipping empire that somebody on TikTok assures you requires just 30 minutes a day.
What many people do have a shortage of is time.
Taking on extra work sounds considerably less attractive when it means sacrificing an evening, giving up a weekend or trying to squeeze another job around the one you already have.
Prograd is betting there is another way.
The UK startup is part of a growing trend towards earning opportunities that fit into the small pockets of time people already spend online.
Rather than asking users to find another few hours to work, its platform allows them to earn rewards through activities including playing mobile games, reaching in-game milestones and completing online tasks and offers.
The thinking behind it is remarkably simple. We already spend a lot of time on our phones. What if some of that time could earn us something back?
The Side Hustle Has a Time Problem
The side-hustle boom has changed what earning extra money looks like.
Technology has made it easier than ever to find work outside a conventional job. Someone with a car can become a driver, someone with a spare room can become a host, someone with a laptop can find freelance clients on the other side of the world.
But most of these opportunities still depend on the same finite resource: time.
That matters because the people who would most welcome additional income are not necessarily sitting around wondering what to do with their evenings.
Work, commuting, childcare and everyday life already compete for those hours. Starting a conventional side hustle can effectively mean adding another part-time job to the diary.
At the same time, however, there are fragments of the day that seem to disappear almost unnoticed.
Ten minutes waiting for a train. Twenty minutes on the sofa. Half an hour before bed. A lunch break spent scrolling. A commute spent playing a game. Prograd’s proposition is built around making those fragments more valuable.
Meet Prograd
Prograd has evolved from its original focus on helping younger people with their finances into a platform centred on helping people discover ways to make money online.
Today, a significant part of that proposition is gaming. Users can browse opportunities involving mobile games and earn Pro Points for completing activities, such as downloading a game and reaching particular milestones within a given period.
The platform also features other tasks and offers, with the opportunities and rewards available changing over time.
There are no clients to find, products to list or shifts to accept. Someone can look through the available opportunities, decide whether one is worth their time and complete it around everything else they are doing.
For people who already play games on their phones, that creates an unusual proposition: the possibility of earning from something that might otherwise have been purely leisure time.
Why Startups Are Interested in Our Spare Minutes?
There is a much bigger business story sitting behind this. For much of the internet era, our attention has been extraordinarily valuable, just not necessarily to us.
Social networks, streaming services, mobile games and countless other apps compete relentlessly for minutes of the day because those minutes can ultimately be monetised. Advertising alone has turned human attention into one of the internet’s most valuable commodities.
The consumer has traditionally occupied the other side of that transaction. We provide the attention. Somebody else makes money from it.
Rewards platforms alter that equation slightly by giving consumers a financial reason to choose one activity over another.
For game developers and other companies trying to acquire users, getting somebody to download an app and actually use it is valuable. Platforms can sit between those businesses and consumers, sharing some of that value with users who complete the required activity.
Suddenly, the 20 minutes somebody was going to spend on their phone anyway becomes commercially interesting to more than just the owner of their social media feed.
From Spare Hours to Spare Minutes
This could also represent an interesting evolution of the gig economy.
The first generation of gig-economy businesses became very good at monetising spare hours. An empty evening could become several hours of driving or delivering. A free Saturday could become a shift.
Platforms such as Prograd are operating at a much smaller unit of time. You do not necessarily need an empty evening. You need the phone that is already in your hand.
That dramatically lowers the barrier to trying it. There is no application process for a second job, no commitment to work every Thursday and no need to explain to a client that you cannot take their call because you are at your actual job.
It also reflects the way many people now use technology. Entertainment no longer arrives in neat hour-long packages. We consume it continuously and in fragments, whether that means a few TikToks in a queue, a mobile game on the train or a YouTube video while eating lunch.
It was probably inevitable that startups would eventually ask whether earning could become equally fragmented.
The Side Hustle May Be Becoming Less Like a Second Job
There will always be a place for traditional side hustles.
Freelancing can become a serious business. Selling products can grow into a substantial income stream. Taking on additional shifts provides something reward platforms cannot: a much clearer relationship between hours worked and money earned.
But not everybody looking to make a little more money wants to become an entrepreneur after 6pm. That leaves considerable room for businesses making earning more casual, accessible and flexible.
Prograd’s model is interesting because it sits somewhere between entertainment, rewards and the wider side-hustle economy. It does not require users to reinvent what they do for a living. Instead, it asks whether some of the things they already do online could be worth something.
And that may prove to be an increasingly powerful proposition. For years, technology companies have fought to capture as much of our screen time as possible and worked out increasingly sophisticated ways to make money from it.
The next generation of startups may have spotted an obvious counteroffer. If you’re going to spend the time on your phone anyway, perhaps you should be the one making some of the money.
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