Why our startup's success was a failure
This post is about how our startup 'succeeded' - acquiring clients & growing fast - but failed in our initial mission of being a platform that respected top talent. Next issue, coming Sunday!
As covered in our last post, we started Advisable because we wanted to help the most talented people share their skills and perspectives with companies that needed them for freelance projects.
This idea obviously isn’t a new one. In fact, it’s one that many people have tried before!
However, as most people who’ve tried these platforms know, there are many problems with them that deter most of the best talent.
Some of them pit massive numbers of people against each other, all scrambling the get the attention of the one person hiring.
Others treat the people on the platform in shady, underhanded ways - not telling them how much they’re earning, taking the client’s side in any disputes, and generally not being up-front about their working arrangement.
While others treat their talent like a product, putting them on sale with thousands of others for clients to buy and dictate orders to as they please.
All of these are manifestations of the same problem: optimising the client’s experience while treating the talent like second-class citizens.
While this kind of attitude and behaviour works for clients and some good talent, it generally deters the vast majority of the top people - meaning “the best talent” these platforms have is more of a marketing slogan for clients than a reality.
We wanted to build the platform that changed this - one that put talent and clients on an even footing and, in doing so, helped unlock the flexible work economy:
Instead of having dozens of people chasing every project, we’d collect data on every user and use this to inform the relevant ones about projects with highly targeted invitations.
Instead of putting people up for sale, we’d let freelancers opt-in for clients to reach out to them when were interested in a project we invited them to.
Instead of being shady with people, we’d try to be as transparent as possible with them at every stage.
We sought to improve all the things that are wrong with the other places and become the place the best people came to find exciting projects - starting with marketing talent.
Working to make this vision a reality - building an MVP & growing fast
We got to work and began to make this a reality. Like all startups, it was a struggle at first as we built out our early product figured out how to acquire and service customers.
After a while, things started to click into place - we began to see hires happen and money being made by our freelancers!
With time, everything was starting to really work and we began to have top companies like Product Hunt, Amazon, and BigCommerce hiring from our platform.
Some of these - like Stack Overflow - hired 10+ people and built whole teams from the freelancers they found on our platform!
We also attracted many freelancers who collectively earned millions from our platform, some over $100,000 alone!
As a result of this, we were growing fast: we had 6 months of almost 30% MoM growth - the gold standard for a fast-growing startup.
All in, it felt like we were on our way to achieving our mission! Around this time, we also closed a new round of funding - a validation of all our hard work since we began!
Asking ourselves: are we really building a platform for the best talent?
In the chaos of a startup, taking a step back can be difficult but this round of funding, combined with a COVID-induced drop in sales, prompted us to do just this.
We started to ask ourselves: are we really building a platform that works for the best talent?
While clients were generally happy, we had mixed signals from freelancers:
Some were earning lots of money, while others were churning after their first project.
Some loved us and the money they made from us, while many seemed annoyed at many aspects of how we did things.
Some freelancers kept transacting through Advisable, while others cut us out once they were hired.
That said, while the shock of COVID hit our business, I wanted us to be ready to come back aggressively once the world adapted.
Realising the platform we’d build didn’t really respect the best talent
In order to return to growth post-COVID, one thing I wanted to do was to rebuild our website. Our website, like every freelance website ever, put clients first - the freelancer experience was an afterthought - tucked away behind a button most people don’t even see.
We began to think: what if we built a website that had both clients and freelancers on equal footing? What if we told both of their stories together in a way that drove home the mission of our platform?
I knew that to pull off such a design challenge would require someone world-class - not just with an extraordinary design sense but someone who was willing to break some of the standard rules of web design too.
As I started my search, I noticed something - while I’d begun looking for someone on Advisable, when I was looking for the very best, I had a feeling I was unlikely to find them on Advisable.
On some level, I knew that - in spite of our efforts - we were engaging in practices that would deter these people.
Sure, we made the process smooth and we did targeted invitations to make sure only relevant people were applied to projects - but we still often had 10+ freelancers competing for each project, meaning applications ended in failure >90% of the time.
Sure, we tried to make all of our processes transparent but being transparent about rejection barely helps with the rejection.
Sure, we weren't putting people up 'for sale' en masse but we were putting the talent second, having them compete directly against these 9 other people for every project.
While we were less bad, we had become, in effect, the very thing we were trying to replace - not the kind of place the genius designer we'd need would likely sign up to.
Deciding we needed to fundamentally change
In our market, both clients and freelancers are fatigued by all the talent marketplaces that have come before.
Time and time again, freelancers have been promised platforms for the best talent, only to discover that these platforms treat them in shady, disrespectful ways.
Time and time again, clients have been promised platforms that will give them access to the best talent, only to find that most of the best talent doesn’t engage with these platforms.
Our initial approach was pretty simple: we wanted to remove all the bad stuff that others did.
However, given the fatigue in the market, we learned that it’s not good enough to be less bad: we had to figure out how to be overwhelmingly better.
We knew we needed to change things dramatically if we wanted to achieve our initial mission.
In our next post, we’ll go through how we discovered the fundamentals of a new approach that put clients & freelancers on equal footing, and, on October 12th, announce the first freelance platform that puts the best talent first!
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