By Ryan Maia, news correspondent

When Dave Fischer, a 24-year-old from Brighton, began working as one of GladlyDo’s friendly “doers,” the boy he babysits a few days a week was only a baby.

“When I started [the job], he was about 10-11 months old,” Fischer said. “Now, he’s going to preschool.”

Fischer provides an example of the strong relationships that GladlyDo, a startup headquartered in Needham, aims to foster between working adults and local college students.

The idea behind the business is to give students an opportunity to earn money by pairing them with people in the Greater Boston Area who have unfinished chores such as moving, cleaning or yardwork. The students, called “doers,” respond to requests for jobs submitted through GladlyDo.com.

“People need help. Kids need money. We can solve that,” Woody Klemmer, GladlyDo’s CEO, said.

The idea for the company first spawned in the summer of 2006. Klemmer was in need of money for his lacrosse team’s upcoming tour, so he and his friend started a company called WAK Jobs, GladlyDo’s “embryo.”

After a couple years, the WAK duo ceased providing services. However, to Klemmer’s surprise, people were still emailing him with job requests. In the spring of 2014, Klemmer quit his job, moved back to Boston and teamed up with Liam Cunningham – GladlyDo’s current COO – to reinvent the original idea.

Before being hired, doers are intensively background-checked, interviewed and field tested at a few jobs to ensure that they are “good people,” according to Klemmer.

“GladlyDo is all about trust and community, so we hire based on a referral system,” Cunningham said. “We usually only hire students who have been referred to us by doers, since that way we know who they are and that they’re someone we want on our force.”

As a new business, GladlyDo is still in developmental stages and operates on a flexible system.

“It’s an amoeba. Every day is something different:  different jobs, different people,” Klemmer said. “But GladlyDo is growing, stable and spreading.”

GladlyDo currently boasts more than 70 doers and over 100 applicants. Its expansion is based on word of mouth between people who need jobs done and people who have had services provided by the company.

“Our business is firmly founded upon the trust and intimacy we build between our clients and ourselves,” Cunningham said. “So we can’t just throw a million dollars into marketing and hope to succeed. But I think the personality we build and our natural expansion are what will allow us to grow and succeed to the fullest.”

GladlyDo’s executives are creating plans for their budding business.

“To complement our aspiration to become a positive force for good in the community, we’re looking to partner with nonprofits to help them in various ways,” Cunningham said.

While GladlyDo’s primary operations are currently focused in the suburbs west of Boston, a campus representative program is also in the works.

“We have a campus rep at Babson [College] right now whose position amounts to finding suitable doers and generating job requests from the community,” Cunningham said.

Those interested in getting a job done or applying for a job can direct themselves to GladlyDo.com.

Photo courtesy Liam Cunningham, GladlyDo