A More refined model of guaranteed freelance work

Intro

I want to create an updated post on my first set of articles I’ve ever written for the freelance economy. They’re titled “The Future of Freelancing”. The main idea was that work can be guaranteed if you let freelancers join projects immediately. It gets rid of the need to pitch.

With 60%+ of freelancers in the US concerned with creating consistent income, it’s a worthwhile problem to solve.

At the time, the idea was called Bedrock. A pitch explaining it can be found here.

(The only reason the name changed to Bedrok is because I needed a cheap domain. Bedrock was, regrettably, taken. Sad face…)

Now that I’m implementing what I was talking about in those articles, I’ve got a more clear vision on how pieces fit together. Most notably I’ve found more clarity on the value proposition for clients.

Update

In the beginning, these were Bedrok’s two value propositions. One for freelancers and one for clients:

1. Guaranteed work for freelance designers (and eventually all freelancers)
2. Same day delivery on a project

I struggled for a long time to figure out what an equally substantial value proposition would be for clients. The current one lacked oomph. A freelance marketplace serves two audiences after all. And to leave one value prop lacking was sure to stunt the growth.

The specific language I used was: “Post a project today, have it done today.” There was nothing special about that, though. People deliver projects with a quick turn around all the time.

The way I was accomplishing that delivery speed was by enlisting multiple designers to work. And guaranteed work is made possible by letting freelancers join projects without pitching.

Inevitably, if you let people you didn’t vet into a project, your first question is going to be “Okay, well how do I know I’ll get quality?”

My answer to that was iteration. Making multiple improvements to a thing tends to produce a higher quality product. So you could offset the need to find the “right” freelancer when a couple of them could close the gap by iterating right now.

In the time it takes you to find a freelancer you like, the others have iterated their way to an acceptable level of quality the same day. The client gets their work done today and the designers get consistent income.

I don’t think I ever concerned myself with the size of the project though. I held a limiting belief that only had me concerned with small projects. Insignificant things like landing pages, or logos, or illustrations.

The missing link

There was still something missing though. It wasn’t until reading about Adam Smith’s book on The Wealth of Nations that things started to click. One of those things being the division of labor. A big takeaway was this:

A nation prospers when people specialize in the production of goods AND when that nation is easily able to ship those goods within its borders.

You can put out things far faster when lots of people specialize on a single step in the process. This is how Henry Ford made cars accessible for the average American.

Cars can be built in a day.

Right, whole cars can be built in a day. That’s not necessarily a profound statement, but it was a helpful shift in thinking.

It’s these connections that changed how I conceived of the client value proposition:

1. Freelancers always being told to “niche down”,
2. The division of labor in Adam Smith’s book,
3. The production power of the assembly line,
4. And the fact that mass production reduces the cost to make something.

That reduced cost makes a whole new suite of products accessible to the masses. And societies have always flourished when normal people have had access to things previously reserved for the few.

Examples include banks, the printing press, modern medicine, no-code tools, the internet, and many other things.

A-ha moment

So with all these ideas ruminating in my mind under the shower head, I thought, “what if you can post a project of any size, and have it done in a day?”

It should reduce the cost to produce things, lowering the barrier to entry for normal people to get access to products they never would have before. Entire apps designed and developed in a day. Entire businesses built in a day. Entire books written in a day. Heck, personal rocket ships built in a day?

The rocket ship one sounds crazy, but complex things can always be broken down into simple pieces. And if you have a nearly limitless amount of talent ready to work, the limiting factor is a robust process. That robust process might mean me spending hundreds of millions of dollars to create the infrastructure needed to make that rocket. But there is a solution.

Sometimes that’s what innovation needs. A great book to read on that is called The Innovation Stack. In essence, building something new means you have to build a lot of new things that “stack” together to produce that final novel product.

What I’m getting at is that an assmebly line is the mechanism in the freelance marketplace to make many things more accessible to the masses. Maybe there is a demand for personal rocket ships!

It was this realization that fundamentally changed the course of how I was thinking of Bedrok.

Instead of working on small projects (like I had originally thought), supply the largest projects possible. And leverage the millions of freelancer who want to work to create that reality.

This creates differentiation in the market, and it doesn’t take away from competition. Peter Thiel says this in Zero to One:

“As you craft a plan to expand to adjacent markets, don’t disrupt: avoid competition as much as possible.”

Each additional market expansion allows for multidisciplinary teams to arise within Bedrok. This increases the size of project that can be done in a day. So we focus on an entirely different segment of project size. One that goes from:

big -> mindboggelingly large.

So the larger the projects, the more unlike any other marketplace we are.

This should mean that there’s no overlap on the supply of clients in current marketplaces. Thus, competition is avoided. Here’s an illustration:

And to put it in perspective, the potential size of a project is only going to go up, meaning there’s blue ocean for days:

The Vision

My goal is to dramatically improve 1 billion people’s quality of life by 2052. And reducing the delivery speed and cost of increasingly larger projects is how that can happen.

This was Fred Smith’s vision with FedEx. Overnight shipping.

This is what Amazon does. Two day shipping on, like, everything.

Recall that Adam Smith’s prerequisite for a nation to flourish is by making it easy for products to ship domestically. This is exactly what FedEx and Amazon do.

So Bedrok’s aim is to be the same day shipping of non physical goods. (Now I did mention having a rocket ship designed and built in a day. There’s definitely a place for that, and I fully intend to go that far and further in the 20+ year plan. But for now the focus is on digital.)

THIS was the substance I needed for the client value proposition. Startups are recommended to solve a particular problem 10x better than what’s out there. And speed on large projects is a great place to start. It’s worked in other industries. Why not here?

Again, from Peter Thiel:

“Or you can radically improve an existing solution: once you’re 10x better, you escape competition. PayPal, for instance, made buying and selling on eBay at least 10 times better. Instead of mailing a check that would take 7 to 10 days to arrive, PayPal let buyers pay as soon as an auction ended.”

Synergy of the value propositions

Now look at these two value propositions again:

1. Guaranteed work for freelance designers (and eventually all freelancers)
2. Same day delivery on any size project

In short, both of those are met very simply by a two mechanisms:

1. Letting freelancers join a project without pitching.
2. An assembly line for freelancers to slot into for each project.

And it’s even crazier because I think these two value propositions actually complement each other extremely well. That’s because:

The more projects there are to do and the more complex they are, the more people are needed. Thus, consistent work is made possible for more people when there is more to do on the platform.

Peter Drucker says that innovation should be simple and focused. It should only do one thing or it confuses people and won’t work.

It’s that simplicity Bedrok has found. Two massive value propositions met elegantly by two simple mechanisms.

I should’t get too far ahead of myself though; A project still hasn’t been posted on Bedrok, so I’m still theory crafting. But the foundation that I’m building on isn’t pure speculation either. It’s taking principles which have worked in other industries and applying it to freelance marketplaces.

Contrarian Views

Peter Thiel mentions that going from Zero to One (building a business that makes new things) implies contrarian thinking. If we’re to create the future, it means thinking about the present differently than others. It means seeing opportunities others haven’t considered.

Although Bedrok isn’t much different from manufacturing plants of the 20th century, it is contrarian in this view:

Picking talent is unnecessary in the freelancing space.

Where freelance marketplaces are going wrong

AI is definitely a topic worth discussing for freelance marketplaces. The most common use case I’m seeing is businesses using AI to be able to intelligently pick the “right” freelancer, but this seems bad for a couple of reasons.

1. The freelancer isn’t afforded the ability to work whenever they want on whatever they want. They’re not given 100% autonomy
2. It’s putting AI to solve a problem that can be sidestepped completely. Let me illustrate what I mean.

Back when people rode horses in towns, it wasn’t long before those same horses started pooping on the streets. Now you’ve got poop on the streets and everyone can smell it. That’s a pretty big problem.

At the time, councils would get together and propose solutions on how to solve this horse crap issue. Poop scoops and poop buckets galore. But what eventually happened? Cars were made accessible to the average person and horses phased out of use.

AI is the convoluted poop scoop solution in the freelance space. Building the future of work isn’t going to come through some super charged picking solution, but eliminating the picking altogether. A complete lateral move. Or a complete vertical move if you’re thinking Zero to One style.

That’s not to say that AI is useless; there’s absolutely opportunity for it. But in everyone’s well placed zeal of AI, it gets applied indiscriminately to everything under the sun.

Bedrok leverages the fact that there are tens or hundreds of thousands of people ready to work right now, and, if intelligently structured, could create a really powerful assembly line to complete any size project in a day.

This statement sums up my vision well:

Don’t waste time picking the “perfect” person. Instead, build a great process where normal people can work together to make an exceptional product. All in the same day.

That’s how you build the future of freelancing.

That’s how you build the future of work.