Oklahoma Christian University alumni Kevin Lawrence and Connor Lankford launched the mobile app Thoomazo about six months ago, hoping to highlight various student services for alumni to potentially hire. Thoomazo now has a user base of more than 400 people in the Edmond, OK and Oklahoma City communities.
Lawrence said he and Lankford created Thoomazo because they wanted to find ways to help students and the community. Helping as many students as possible reach their financial goals while they are at Oklahoma Christian is their main goal, according to Lawrence.
“Our mission has not changed since we started, which is to provide amazing Christ-like service to the Oklahoma Christian community at an attractive price in order to add value to the college experience,” Lawrence said.
According to Lawrence, they have made several changes to Thoomazo since launching, including working to make the site more user-friendly.
“We have made progress on streamlining the onboarding process for our providers to make it simple to sign on, communicate our standard prices and set expectations for service to our users,” Lawrence said.
Lawrence said they also added more emphasis on social media and advertising by hiring senior Madison Hagood to start a social media campaign to raise awareness of Thoomazo in the communities around Oklahoma Christian. This campaign has resulted in doubling their user base in one month.
“After the first five months, we had a user base of around 200, but after Madison began our social media campaign, we doubled our user base to over 400,” Lawrence said. “We now have over 25 student providers and would love to have more. We still receive orders that we struggle to fill—mainly recurring orders for after-school care and tutoring.”
According to Lawrence, they have also adjusted their organizational structure to be more responsive to specific requests. Marissa Goodwin is head of elderly and child care and transportation, so she filters through childcare orders to quickly identify the most appropriate provider to accept the order.
“I’ve received about a dozen orders through Thoomazo,” Goodwin said. “I get paid for the work I do to pair the providers and contact the users, so my providers get more orders than I take. But on average, I try to give them at least six hours per week.”
Goodwin said Thoomazo has been a huge benefit to her and the other providers because it is flexible and students can receive jobs that work with their schedules. Providers can take as many or as few orders as they want and have the opportunity of building relationships with families in the community.
“Our emphasis is Godly prestigious work, ethics and service,” Goodwin said. “Since we are continuing to build a reputation that represents this, many members of the community and OC alumni are beginning to recognize Thoomazo providers and wanting to work with us.”
Junior Regan Lively said she has been a house-cleaning provider for Thoomazo for about three months. Although she has chosen not to take too many orders because of her busy schedule, Lively said she has accepted about 10 jobs to date.
“[Thoomazo is] beneficial because you can take as many orders as you want or only take a couple,” Lively said. “It’s amazing to work for a Christian-based company.”
Junior Alana Seal is also a house cleaning provider and said she has had nine jobs through Thoomazo, most of which were recurring orders.
“Rather than getting a full or part-time standard job, Thoomazo gives its providers the flexibility to work when they can,” Seal said. “It relieves stress but still provides income and services to those who need them. Knowing that customers can look on our website and see our reviews really helps us to always work hard and constantly put our best foot forward.”
Goodwin said it is easy to sign up to be a provider for Thoomazo on their website.
“It begins with an interview and having us get you in touch with Seth Reiter, our tech professional,” Goodwin said. “It’s as simple as going to the website and creating an account.”
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