We use cookies to make your visit smooth, secure, and proudly personalized. Accept all to help us keep improving your Freedom and Glory experience — built on quality, performance, and the spirit of freedom. For more information, visit our Privacy & Cookies Policy.
Cookie Settings
We use cookies to make your visit smooth, secure, and proudly personalized. Accept all to help us keep improving your Freedom and Glory experience — built on quality, performance, and the spirit of freedom. For more information, visit our Privacy & Cookies Policy
Strictly Necessary
These essential cookies keep our website running the way it should — reliable, secure, and ready to serve you every time you visit. They support core features like page navigation, checkout, and account access. Without them, our site simply can’t perform its duty. Because they’re vital to your experience, these cookies can’t be turned off.
We use analytical cookies to better understand how visitors explore our site — what’s working well and where we can make things even smoother. Every insight helps us refine your experience and deliver the Freedom and Glory quality you expect. These cookies collect information in a way that respects your privacy and helps us honor our promise of performance and improvement.
Some cookies come from trusted partners who help us show you personalized content, product recommendations, and experiences that reflect your interests. They also allow features like videos or interactive tools provided by others. We choose these partners carefully, so your experience feels seamless, trustworthy, and true to the spirit of freedom and choice. For details on how we use cookies and manage your preferences, visit our Privacy & Cookies Policy.
Free Shipping on Orders over $100
Carrot-Top is now Freedom and Glory — different name, same people, same commitment to you.
Some of the best ideas start with a bad round of golf and one too many drinks.
Tom Livolsi was having a rough front nine at McGregor Downs Country Club in Cary, North Carolina. He’d self-medicated a little heavy, as he puts it, and when that happens, he wants a cigarette. So he made a call. Within twenty minutes, a pack was delivered to the back of the 11th hole.
He and his friend John Newbury looked at each other. They’d just paid someone to go get something that didn’t exist as a service anywhere. Why didn’t that exist?
That was 2018. What started as a revelation on a golf course has grown into Gopher, a community marketplace app with more than 125,000 users across all 50 states, built around a quietly radical idea: what if the person doing the work actually kept what they earned?
What Makes Gopher Mobile App Different
Here’s how most gig economy platforms work. A customer pays $100 for a service. The platform takes a big cut, sometimes 40, sometimes 60 percent. The worker who showed up, used their time, drove their car, and did the job might see $40 of that.
Gopher flips it. You decide what you think is fair to pay the worker. That’s the number you start with. The platform fee comes out of the customer’s side, not the worker’s. As John put it on this week’s episode: our pricing model is hinged off of how much do you want to pay the worker, and the fees move that way, not in reverse.
It sounds simple. It’s not common.
Tom and John are clear that this wasn’t just a business decision. It was a values one. They’d heard too many stories about gig workers doing jobs for scraps, lead generation platforms charging workers for leads they’d never even land, apps that had sold everyone on convenience while quietly making the workers’ lives harder. They didn’t want to build another one of those.
A Neighbor with the App
What Gopher is, at its core, is organized neighborliness. You need something done — a couch moved upstairs, a flat tire fixed, groceries picked up, a ceiling fan installed — you put it out there and a local person who wants the work picks it up. No middlemen marking up your restaurant order. No lead generators selling your number to twelve contractors at once. Just neighbor one needs help, neighbor two has the skills, the app connects them fairly, and both sides walk away better off.
They’ve had Gophers deliver a bunny to the vet. Fix a flat tire in fifteen minutes for someone without roadside assistance. Get cords to a convention center two hours before a trade show opened. The “other” category in the app — basically just tell us what you need — exists because human beings are endlessly creative about what they need done, and Tom and John decided early on they weren’t going to limit it.
The Person Behind the Feature
There’s a moment in this episode worth slowing down for.
John is talking about a feature in the app called MY Gopher, a way to save and directly request your favorite worker, the person you trust to show up and do great work. He mentions that MY is capitalized. That it stands for something.
Michael Yori was a Gopher on the platform who had completed more than 3,500 jobs with a five-star rating every single time. He passed away on Halloween last year. When John talks about him, you can hear the kind of quiet that comes when someone meant something real to you.
John has a video of Michael’s last delivery. He’d arrived and noticed a flag tangled up in the wind outside John’s house. He didn’t have to untangle it. It wasn’t the job. He just did it anyway, carefully wound the flag back, rang the doorbell, said hello, and went on his way.
That’s the feature now. MY Gopher. For Michael Yori.
It’s a small thing. It’s also not a small thing at all.
Where It’s Going
John and Tom are refreshingly unguarded about the journey. The early wrong developer. The chicken-and-egg problem of building a two-sided marketplace. The investors who didn’t always understand what they were looking at. They’re currently working through a fundraising round with plans to expand into five new markets: Nashville, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Jacksonville among them. The Raleigh–Durham area remains their proving ground, and the numbers there are strong enough to make the case.
What they’re building toward is a full-service community marketplace, not just deliveries but home services, small business labor support, merchant partnerships, and a version of the platform designed specifically for business needs.
But you get the sense, listening to them, that neither of them got into this to build a company. They got into it because they saw something that wasn’t right and thought they could do it differently.
They’re still at it.
Listen to This Week’s Episode
John Newbury and Tom Livolsi join Liz and Bill on this week’s Freedom & Glory podcast for a conversation that’s as honest as it is energizing. Download the Gopher Request app to get services done, or the Gopher Go app if you’re interested in earning. And if you’re in the Raleigh–Durham area, there’s no better time to give it a try.
