How we discovered a better approach to freelance hiring
This is the 2nd last issue in our announcement series. This post covers how we discovered a fundamentally better approach to helping freelancers & clients collaborate. Next up is our announcement!
Hi folks,
2 little housekeeping things before this issue:
Our announcement was supposed to be tomorrow. However, we’re unfortunately going to have to delay it until next Monday, October 18th. We’re really sorry for the delay. One essential part of our launch is taking a bit longer than expected to get to 100% and we don’t want to ship until we’re happy with it.
I really appreciate all the people who are reaching out to me as a result of this! Some are founders who are struggling with their own startup issues, others are successful founders reassuring me that yes, it is always this messy, while others are freelancers who feel the pain of the problems I’m speaking about! However, most are people who simply annoyed at the slow build-up and want to know what we’re doing - I promise it’ll be worth the wait!
Peter
As covered in our last post in our relaunch series, I had a crazy concept for a website that gave clients and freelancers equal prominence and told both of their stories together - reinforcing our mission of building a freelance platform that helps the best talent & clients collaborate as peers.
I knew that we were unlikely to find the kind of person who could pull off such a bold design on our own platform - part of what prompted us to consider fundamental changes to how we operated.
In order to figure out how I actually would find this person, I began to spend some of my time exploring similarly ambitious web design projects and getting a feeling for what we needed - scouring the internet in an effort to find the perfect person, and maybe learn how to find the best people.
Discovering a designer who knew how to break the rules
In order to find this designer, I started to figure out a process for discovering and investigating brilliant people:
I’d look up websites that had been shared by designers on Twitter, been featured on various websites, or had won different awards.
I’d dig into the project - the people behind it, how they approached it how usable it was, how beautiful it was, etc. - in order to understand which were a good fit.
I’d reach out to the people who seemed particularly good, and try to pitch them on the idea of what we wanted to do!
Late one night during this search, I stumbled upon a website called Cruuunchify.
It was basically a re-imagining of Spotify’s Year in Review product using Spotify’s API but it felt WAY bolder than what Spotify’s team had produced - like one of the futuristic & slick interfaces in Minority Report.
The designer also broke many of the standard ‘rules’ of design too - sideward scrolling, hovering to play music, objects moving around, etc. - but did so while delivering a smooth & easy-to-use experience.
I dug around to see who was behind and found it was built by a team of talented young people from Nigeria, with a guy called Josh Oluwagbemiga leading on design. They did this entire project just for fun without any affiliation to Spotify!
I reached out to Josh, complimenting him on his work, and pitched him on collaborating to bring our concept to life.
Unlike some of the designers I spoke to, who seemed (perhaps understandably) skeptical at my idea, Josh seemed excited at the challenge!
He came back to us a little while later with some brilliant ideas and the principles for how he thought we should approach this.
It felt obvious that he was the perfect person to help us figure this out!
We started to work together and continued to flesh out a concept that would deliver a balance of usability and 🤯.
As we worked together, our relationship was like few freelancer relationships I’d experienced: a true collaboration between him and our team with us working together and collaborating as peers to solve problems and build something brilliant.
Over the course of the project, he refined and perfected every little detail until we had something incredible.
He helped us not only build an extraordinary website that explained our mission (launching next week!) but also, our relationship with him pointed us towards a new way for freelancer hiring to work in general.
Why can’t this be how freelancer discovery works?
What happened with our relationship with Josh was simple from our perspective:
We had a goal that we wanted to reach and we looked for people who’d done similar things.
Because web design is a visual skill with publicly accessible outcomes, we were able to explore projects and discover someone brilliant through their work.
Due to the fact that we found Josh based on his past work, we knew that he had the skill to pull of our project. We then pitched him on our project!
He was interested in doing it and we collaborated together to create something brilliant!
From Josh’s perspective, the process was also simple:
He made something brilliant and put it out into the world
One day, someone discovered it, recognised his brilliance, and thought it was a fit for something they were trying to do.
They pitched to work with him based on this & he thought it would be an interesting & fun project to work on.
They collaborated together to create something brilliant!
We began to wonder: why can’t this be the same for every freelancer relationship?
What if every top specialist could easily share their best work, and build relationships with clients who respected them based on it?
Every year, hundreds of thousands of talented specialists complete projects that push the limits of what people think is possible in their area.
This could be an analytics expert who makes sense of millions of data points to unlock strategy-shifting insights, a YouTube advertiser who uses thousands of variants of videos to market a product in a customised way to different groups, or a strategist who helps a company figure out how they can enter a new region.
Each of these projects is the result of a deep passion for brilliance in their area of expertise. However, unlike design projects, when most of this work is completed, it isn’t put out there for peers to learn from or for potential collaborators to admire - it’s stored in the mind of the people who executed it where it slowly fades from memory.
What if these people could showcase their best work in a way that’s as simple as a designer posting a screenshot of something they’ve made?
What if potential clients could easily discover & learn about this work and based on it, get so excited about working with a specific person that they’re the ones doing the pitching?
What if, based on this foundation of respect and trust, they could build truly collaborative relationships with these clients that resulted in more incredible that both parties are proud of?
What if every company could explore how brilliant specialists have tackled problems similar to theirs, and collaborate with the people behind them?
Every year, hundreds of thousands of companies are trying to figure out tactics that they can implement to achieve their missions.
They’re effectively fumbling around in the dark, hoping that the people they happen to hire will know all the stuff they’ll need to be successful.
They don’t know what all the pieces are, whether they might make sense for them, or what kind of result they can expect from implementing them.
What if these companies could easily explore all the different possibilities of projects and learn if something similar makes sense for them? What if this could be was a fun, frictionless process?
What if they find ones they love and easily reach out to the people behind them, and pitch them to collaborate?
What if they could work with these talents for as long as made sense, and build something incredible together that helps them achieve their mission?
What if there was a platform that enabled this to happen seamlessly?
What if they built the tools to help every unique, talented specialist like Josh get discovered by clients who want to collaborate with them?
What if they helped every company like Advisable explore different projects and access brilliant, unique talents like Josh who can help them achieve their mission?
That could be cool!
We’re excited to finally announce everything next week! We’re keen to get every element of our announcement absolutely perfect - our team of full-timers and freelancers has been hard at work for this for so long and we want to do their work justice. If you’re up for giving highly critical, honest feedback on everything, please let me know! There’ll be some sweet swag in it for you (once we have swag)