Blue ocean strategy for freelance marketplaces

I want to make sure Bedrok doesn’t compete with other marketplaces, but delivers value in unique ways.

So I’ve been looking at blue ocean strategy again to make sure that the offers I have for Bedrok aren’t simply copy/pastes of all the other freelance marketplaces out there.

The most important thing is to figure out what characteristics freelance marketplaces typically compete on. And after figuring that out you determine what charactersitics you want to eliminiate, reduce, raise, and create.

For clients, I’ve come up with this so far.

1. Price
2. Time to hire a candidate
3. Speed of posting a project
4. Freelance choice (this comes in the most obvious form of proposals. Or having a lot of freelancers deliver on a single posting like 99designs)
5. Wide variety of categories to choose from (copywriting, design, dev, HR, project management, AI, etc…)

I’m not sure whether to include these three below because it doesn’t seem that marketplaces unanimously compete on these qualities:

1. Curated talent
2. Quality of output
3. Project size

Those first two really only make me think of Toptal. And for project size, it seems that it’s implied that projects are on the smaller end. On average, people are using freelancers for small projects — not large ones. So I might be able to put it up top with the other highly contested categories. I wrote an article talking more about project size here.

Here’s how I plan on addressing clients:

Eliminate

1. Freelancer choice
2. Posting projects

Reduce

1. Freelance categories

Raise

1. Curated talent (?)
2. Price
3. Minimum project size

Create

1. Singular client proposition (we only work with clients if they need their project done ASAP)
2. 1 on 1 discussions about your business goals and objectives

Large projects require more thought, so we help consult you. This brings price up, and requires that we have a curated talent base. We’ve eliminated ease of posting projects because we have to collect a lot of info about your business and goals and project. In order to get projects done ASAP, we eliminate the time spent on picking freelancers. And there aren’t many freelance categories because we want to create consistent income for them. And being stretched too far likely means having talent where their skills aren’t necessary on any project.

Freelancers

But for freelancers, I’ve been at a loss to find many value adds.

There are positive reasons people freelance in the first place:

Autonomy to work when you want, for whom you want, at any price you decide to charge.

But those things seem intrinsic to freelancing in the first place, and not characteristics that marketplaces compete on to attract talent to their platform. If you touted a platform where you can’t work when you want, for whom you want, at your price, it’s not for freelancers anymore. That’s an employee.

This is all it seems that marketplaces do to attract talent:

1. Free signup
2. (and maybe a variety of projects to work on?)

Marketplaces of any type tend to have a much easier time getting one side, whether that be the supply or demand. Freelancers are the easier of the two by a long shot. So the fact that a free signup is really all that’s needed makes sense.

And a marketplace traditionally delivers value with more people on it. So doing anything other than a free signup would seem strange. Why limit network growth?

But not all growth is beneficial, and Toptal shows that you don’t need to let everyone in to still provide value for clients.

Research

Fiverr put out some more research for freelancers in the US of the biggest disadvantages freelancers feel working from home.

Research from Fiverr.

Unsurprisingly, lack of interaction with other professionals ranks at the top. And the reason that’s unsurprising is because as far as I’m aware, the interactions that are built into the platform are exclusively client to freelancer. Or rather, communication between freelancers isn’t prioritized at all.

This seems like a simple way to differentiate. But don’t mistake simple with easy. No one’s doing it, but community building isn’t trivial.

Here’s how I plan on addressing the freelancers:

Eliminate

1. Free signup

Reduce

1. Total talent on platform

Raise

1. Price to join ($100+/mo)

Create

1. Guaranteed income
2. Community

The only frustration I have is that the guaranteed income seems plausible only by having a limit of talent on the platform. And when you have hundreds of thousands of people who struggle with consistency, a platform that brings on 2,000 max is barely making a dent.