The AI Gig Marketplace That Went Viral on TikTok

Most startups buy their first users. Serbiz, an AI gig marketplace born in the Philippines, got its eighty thousand another way: two Gen Z founders, a two-person marketing team, and a TikTok account with no polish and no media budget. In a profile published this week, Marketing-Interactive described how the platform became a case study in hustle-era marketing.

The founders are Iyana Argañoza and Aliexandra Heart Po, both computer science graduates who were elected batch presidents at De La Salle University in Manila. Argañoza serves as chief executive and Po as chief operating officer. Their personal networks seeded the first wave of users, Marketing-Interactive reported, because people on campus already knew and trusted them. Then the posts started going viral. The AI gig marketplace began as a university side project and scaled past fifty thousand users in the Philippines within five months, according to VIR.

Two chatbots do the heavy lifting

The AI gig marketplace sits on top of a Filipino habit. Side hustling there is so common it has its own word: raket culture. The problem the founders saw was that traditional gig platforms assume everyone already knows what to sell. "Most gig platforms assume users already know what to offer," Argañoza said in an adobo Magazine interview, describing the gap Serbiz was built to close.

The app runs two AI agents to close it. Earnie works as a personal hustle coach, reading a user's skills, experience, and in-app behavior to suggest side hustles they could start immediately. Scout handles the other side of the market, turning vague buyer requests into clear, bookable gigs. Argañoza told Marketing-Interactive the design goal was to keep both feeling alive and personal rather than technical. It is an unusual division of labor for an AI gig marketplace, and the founders credit it with pulling in first-time earners who would never post on a traditional job board.

The listings tell you the platform's age. Gigs include editing TikTok gameplay clips, tutoring Adobe Photoshop basics, fostering a dog for the weekend, pre-ordering an iPhone from a specific store, and sending several hundred emails on someone's behalf. One much-shared listing offered a "boyfriend loyalty test" priced in Vietnamese dong. BusinessWorld reported that the most in-demand categories are TikTok editing, content creation assistance, and event support, with active earners taking home roughly eight hundred to five thousand pesos a week.

Cracking the TikTok code

The growth story is the stranger half of the AI gig marketplace. Serbiz never hired an agency and never paid an influencer. Argañoza told Marketing-Interactive the team "never wanted to rely on agencies or influencers," because the founders' own Gen Z perspective made virality easier to earn than to buy.

Expansion into Vietnam tested that claim. Neither founder spoke Vietnamese, so they screenshotted local TikToks, ran the captions through ChatGPT, and posted their own versions of whatever was working. Argañoza said the team "went viral a lot," and one post even got featured in Vietnamese media under a headline that roughly translated to a job app using ChatGPT to catch trends making Gen Z crazy. The Vietnam push added more than thirty thousand users within four weeks, with zero paid marketing, according to Vietnamese outlet VIR. The founders rebuilt the app three times along the way.

Retention came from an unexpected place: Telegram. The messaging app became the platform's loyalty hub, where users get early updates and start feeling like insiders. Argañoza said the setup kept retention strong because the community felt closer to what was happening than ordinary app users ever do. For an AI gig marketplace built on viral attention, that insider feeling became the retention engine.

Why the timing works

The AI gig marketplace is arriving into a labor market that keeps pushing young workers toward exactly this kind of platform. The Harris Poll has found that fifty-seven percent of Gen Z holds a side hustle, compared with twenty-one percent of boomers, according to Moneywise's reporting on the study. Deloitte research put the figure at forty-five percent of Gen Z workers holding at least one part-time or side job. In the Philippines alone, the Fairwork Philippines report estimated more than eight hundred thousand gig workers on ride-hailing and delivery apps, while global entry-level postings fell by twenty-nine percent since early twenty twenty-four, according to World Economic Forum data reported by the Grey Journal.

Backing followed the traction. Antler, the global venture builder, led the pre-seed round, and Serbiz is preparing its next fundraising round. Marketing-Interactive reported that the founders now describe the company as an AI social startup rather than a pure gig platform. A second version of the app is slated to add faster payments, improved AI agents, and recognition programs that turn top hustlers into community stories. Po's pitch, given to Marketing-Interactive, was that the startup is proving "hustling isn't just survival," but empowerment that scales.

The model belongs to a wave of creative earning that keeps mutating. The clipping side hustle turned podcast edits into income, doctors are cashing in at four hundred dollars an hour training AI, and QuickBooks data in our report on the side hustle business boom shows millennials treating their gigs as future companies. The AI gig marketplace adds a new wrinkle: Serbiz found its audience by acting like one. Read the full origin story in Marketing-Interactive's profile of the founders.