Getting a marketplace off the ground

Big development:

Find clients on a platform that only need consistent work done.

In my search for creating consistent work for freelancers, I’ve thought about something recently which seems like it could be really helpful in not only providing that consistency, but making it easier to grow the platform. That thing is only pursing clients that need consistent freelance work.

Wow! So insightful Isaiah!

Okay, so that doesn’t sound profound at all. If we want consistent work, we should go where consistent work is. But this really isn’t how marketplaces operate. Marketplaces cater more to one and done project based engagements. Of course there are clients who use these platforms who look to bring talent into a more dedicated role. However, there are a lot of projects, especially in the design world, which don’t lend themselves well to repeat engagement.

Logo designs, brand designs, app designs, and web designs, are the most unlikely candidates for repeat work.

Then you have graphic design, illustrations, posters, t-shirt designs which could occur on a more regular basis depending on the context.

And then you might have stuff like social media graphics that need to be designed with high frequency. Anything having to do with content creation, really.

I was basing how I picked which design projects we offered on Bedrok on a couple constraints. The first being that whatever design we did, it would have to use Figma. Since I’m building a marketplace that has freelance designers collaborating, Figma was the obvious option. And so that limited my scope of available projects primarily to UI/UX. I focused in on web designs and researched the most common web design requests. I had a list of about 12, and started on blog designs.

I finished making the template (Which can be found here) that designers would use to collaborate on for blog designs. Great. But at some point after that, I remember having a tough time figuring out where in the world I would find people who need blogs designed. And then I thought, “Well heck, I can’t just find one, I have to find a lot.”

As soon as I could close one customer to use the platform, they’re gone. And the only way to produce consistency for the few freelancers on the platform is to have a constant stream of new clients every day. Sheesh, I mean that seems like a tall order.

I know Dribbble doesn’t have a robust freelance board, but they used to get 70 people posting a freelance project every day. Meaning that’s north of 25k projects a year.

Finding one client is hard. But finding thousands? So I changed my approach:

To most easily provide value for the few freelancers on the platform, I would need to find clients that need plenty of repeat work.

Chicken and egg

Growing a marketplace has that notorious chicken and the egg problem. Marketplaces deliver the most value when lots of people are on it. So how in the world do you bring people on when no one is getting much value in the beginning? It’s hard, but there are ways to do it.

NfX gives 19 ways to solve it. But If I focus the marketplace strictly on repeated client work, then Bedrok can still deliver value to both parties despite their size. In theory, as long as they’re equal in size, it will be a lot easier to sustainably grow the platform.

Then it’s just a matter of focusing on adding one client to the platform to build continuous freelance work for a few people.

That got me thinking that it would be better to focus on design projects that are evergreen. Blog designs are not evergreen. But I’ve done hundreds of social media graphics as part of my freelancing for a company called HTP. Content creation is big, social stuff always has to be made, so that has to be a much better place to start. Maybe not ideal, but better than blog designs.

I do work in 12 week sprints with a week of break. So when I came to this realization, it was close to the end of the 12 week cycle. I was feeling exhausted with Bedrok, and took a needed week of rest.

After coming back, I talked with the members in my masterminds group about the troubles I was having. Mainly about switching the project offered on Bedrok and finding clients to earn my first $1. My assumption of finding clients in need of consistent was corroborated, but I was also given some direction:

• Focus on peak work. In those peaks of work, find ways to bring in freelancers in mass to accomplish a lot of work in the deadline.
• Or look into technical debt.

One of the drawbacks of software development is this thing called “technical debt”. Here’s a really good description:

“Technical debt describes the consequences of software development actions that intentionally or unintentionally prioritize client value and/or project constraints such as delivery deadlines, over more technical implementation, and design considerations…” (https://www.productplan.com/glossary/technical-debt/)

And technical debt is evergreen. You always have to pay it down. It could be beneficial to throw freelancers at the problem of technical debt so development teams can focus entirely on creating more product for users. So I’ve begun doing some research and talking to people who are much more familiar with it (insert link).

The only frustrating part is that I’m back looking at what projects to offer on the platform. And that means lots of research. But that’s the design process. Multiple passes of discovery and narrowing (shout out to the double diamond method).

There’s something paradoxical about immersing yourself into solving a specific problem. It continually get deeper and more nuanced, far beyond what you would imagine. It reminds of a quote I read in a systems book recently:

“I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when looked at in the right way, did not become still more complicated.” — Poultries Anderson

That’s probably why simplicity is the pinnacle of good design. It satisfyingly distills all of that complexity.