Pros
If you care about morality, equality, business models that actually help people and policies that safeguard employees then Bark is not a company for you. Save yourself from the greedy, selfish and toxic founders and please look elsewhere. If you had to be pushed to state a pro for working at Bark then the answer would be the other employees who are just trying to get by. Many of which are happy to jest at the founders erratic leadership - which adds a certain camaraderie to surviving in what is a very uninspiring work environment.
Cons
If it wasn’t already clear you're in for an unfortunate unravelling of the uninspiring greed fuelled engine that is Bark. - Immoral business model Bark was never meant to help professionals, priority number one has always been making as much money as possible. The business model consists of purchasing google search ads on targeted professional services terms, getting those clicks to become potential clients by filling in questions and then selling these as leads to professionals. Search results are a scarce resource where the highest bidder wins. Organisations who can lock up an increasing amount of supply (leads through ad spend) make it increasingly harder for individual professionals to compete with lower budget ad spend and less resources to get the same click through rates onto their own sites. The larger Bark and similar companies become the less options that professionals have in being able to compete with big company search advertising budgets. Usage of Bark for professionals means paying more than they would through using Google search itself. Bark could decide to charge a flat fee and make it easier for service professionals to advertise with Google or a flat fee to aggregate advertising for professionals. Instead however it sells a lead to as many professionals as possible with the highest markup percentage. This is a monopolistic and immoral business choice to maximise profit and not for improving return on investment for professionals. Even with massive churn, professionals phoning in angry or leaving bad Trustpilot reviews the founders have still not changed this approach as they are aware it is a necessary evil. As long as total revenue is going up that is all that has mattered to them. Look at the Trustpilot 1 star reviews from professionals, ask to see the vision video where Andrew calls himself a money monster, ask to look at the quarterly presentations and look for Kai’s messages in the general chat - always focussed around revenue and profit and never about reducing advertising costs for professionals and improving their take home pay. The business model is unsustainable and immoral. When the world is facing increasing wealth inequality and you have Andrew who already has more money than he knows what to do with pushing a business model that is evidently unfair on professionals it becomes very clear on the type of person he is and what he stands for. Lining the pockets of Andrew and Kai was always far more important to them than the livelihoods of thousands of professionals. - Dark product decisions Andrew and Kai have been happy to push product features that clearly hurt professionals. Auto top up features that were unclear to professionals so they end up spending money they didn’t intend to with a no refund policy. Even with the team pushing against this feature it still didn’t get changed. Pushing Elite Pro subscriptions that can often have no positive impact on securing new leads for the professional but means £20+ revenue for the company - for doing nothing! - Throw away employees Whenever problems occur with employees Kai and Andrew are terrible at resolving issues or showing any sense of compassion. They are happy to fire you at a moment's notice even if that employee has been working with the company for multiple years. You mean nothing to them, remember that. Ask what happened to the last five people that were fired, how they tried to resolve it, what warnings they gave. Andrew has little self control and often will make hasty decisions. Learn everything you can about the history of Bark employees who left and got fired. - Differing employee compensation There are a number of employees at the company who haven’t received a pay rise in years nor a compensation change. Andrew and Kai never approach staff to try and do performance reviews and are happy to take advantage of people who don’t feel comfortable asking for a change in compensation. Ask about each employee's progression and how their compensation has changed in the teams and you’ll find out all you need to know (or they’ll happily lie outright to your face!) - No share option security If you leave the company your share options lapse. Multiple employees have approached Andrew and Kai on changing this with reasons why it’s a terrible policy. Andrew and Kai happily ignored good reasoning and a large part of the team. What makes this more sinister is when they fire people erratically they also financially benefit from it by taking back the share options. Andrew and Kai have no bounds on how greedy they are. --- Please do your due diligence before considering investing time or money into this company. A greed focussed business with toxic money obsessed founders is the last thing the world needs right now. Bark will hurt far more professionals and employees before it ends, though hopefully, with any luck, you have read this and won't let that include yourself.
