Jobs, pains, and gains of freelance designers

Jobs, Pains, and Gains

As part of my research on freelancers, I’ve given my best guess of the top jobs, pains, and gains they experience. I’ve focused exclusively on full-time freelance designers to narrow in on a specific niche. That way it’s a lot easier to detect patterns. This model I’m using is taken from Strategyzer’s method of value proposition design where you determine the most important factors a customer segment deals with, and then come up with a bunch of different ways to be able to meet a few of those desires really well. Of those many different value propositions, I’ve been wanting to test out my version of what guaranteed freelance would look like.

Gains on top, jobs on the right, and pains on the bottom

In essence, if you eliminate the need to pitch to clients as a freelancer and let multiple freelancers join a job to work on it together, you not only increase the speed at which a project gets completed, but it enables the freelancers to consistently earn income.

The benefit to client is that you get access to double the expertise. Each freelancer has their own experiences to draw upon, and ideally, it allows for work to be produced that more accurately solves the clients problems.

That’s the hope at least. It sounds good on paper but could totally crash and burn in actuality.

Meeting Those Needs

This map is meant to show how you specifically meet those jobs, pains and gains. Gain creators and pain relievers make sense, but the difficult one to know how to design for has been the products and services section. The only reason being that there are a lot of potential mediums or combinations of mediums you can use to solve a problem. The ambiguity of knowing that any number of things could work constrains me to put anything down.

And it’s difficult to see at first, but the sticky notes in this map are put in such a way to correspond to the sticky notes they solve on the jobs, pains, and gains map.

I’m currently building a first version of this solution on a no-code platform called Bubbble. You can find the live version here.

So as time goes on and I’m able to test this idea more fully, we’ll see if the logic that makes sense on paper actually translates to the real world.