The future of freelancing (part 3)

What type of value does your freelance marketplace deliver? According to The Experience Economy by Jospeh B. Pine II and James H. Gilmore, there are 5 ways businesses can offer value to its customers.

1. If you charge for stuff, then you are in the commodity business.
2. If you charge for tangible things, then you are in the goods business.
3. If you charge for the activities you execute, then you are in the service business.
4. If you charge for the time customers spend with you, then you are in the experience business.
5. If you charge for the demonstrated outcome the customer achieves, then and only then are you in the transformation business (Pine and Gilmore 1999: 194).

What I’m talking about in this article is how freelance marketplaces can dive further into the transformation business. It’s this type of business which are able to earn more than, say the goods business, because you’re taking the responsibility for the outcomes of your freelancer. I argued in the last article that guaranteed freelance work is the first big problem to solve, and that, after doing that, it opens new opportunities of new transformation for your freelancers.

When we speak of being in the business of transformation, you might be curious as to how we can visualize it; a process to codify how we go about transforming someone. As I was doing some research, I was reminded of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. And, as a matter of fact, guaranteed work happens to fall right in line with the second lowest level — safety needs. The hierarchy then goes to social needs, esteem needs, and self-actualization needs.

However, Maslow’s hierarchy is by no means hard science. It’s an observation meant to describe how man is motivated and fulfills his potential. Plenty of argument can be made about its validity, the order of the needs, how Maslow tested his hypothesis, etc… Other methods of describing human motivation have also been researched.

What I’m suggesting is simply a single way of visualizing the transformation of your freelancers. It’s not perfect — no model certainly is. But at the very least, it’s a good place to start. After we’ve guaranteed freelance work, what are some next steps to transform your freelancers even more?

Love and Belonging Needs

This level refers to a “human emotional need for interpersonal relationships, affiliating, connectedness, and being part of a group.” I think that meeting these needs for your freelancers is less of a “let’s design something so they feel apart of a family”, and more of a consequence when guaranteeing work. The data shows that 55% percent of freelancers chose this career because they want to spend more time with family.

And beyond that, freelancers are more likely to be a caregiver to a child, parent, elderly relative, or someone with a disability.

Lastly, 40% of freelancers cannot work a traditional job because of their family obligations.

It’s fair to say then that a large reason for freelancing is to get closer to the family. Guaranteed freelance work would necessarily cut out the big chunk of time you would regularly spend looking for leads, applying to them, and going through a hire process. Little bits of time here and there amount to hours saved at the end of the week — hours that could have been spent with the family eating dinner, throwing the football, going to a park, or walking around the neighborhood.

John Ruhlin wrote a great book on the art of using gifts to increase referrals and strengthen client retention. He mentions a lesson he learned from his mentor, Paul Miller: Happy employees have happy families. While he takes the approach on using gifts that are both physical and practical to create happy families. But I think the lesson is the same here. The gift you can give your freelancers is increased time with their family. And guaranteed freelance work is a means of creating that extra time. Time isn’t physical, but it sure as heck is practical.

Esteem Needs

The next one in the hierarchy is esteem, and it consists of two components. “(i) esteem for oneself (dignity, achievement, mastery, independence) and (ii) the desire for reputation or respect from others (e.g., status, prestige).”

I have a background in design, so I’ll talk exclusively about design for a moment. One of the invaluable experiences of studying industrial design at Georgia Tech was that we had a studio environment where everyone in the class could see what you were working on. We could ask questions to one another, explain our thought processes on the problem we were trying to solve, etc… Feedback from students and professors was a great tool for polishing your own work. Iron sharpens iron.

What I’ve noticed in a lot of freelance marketplaces is that constructive communication between freelancers is either nonexistent or superficial. Not only does it cause everyone to feel like they’re in a bubble, but no one is able to learn from anyone else. For example, Dribbble has a really large superficial problem. People will comment on work with “good job!” or “cool project!” or even your good ‘ole “keren mas!”

Not very conducive to becoming better… There’s a million possible things to pick apart in a design. What’s the purpose of this color? Why did you design a webpage? Could another medium have communicated this purpose better? And what was the purpose of this project? Why is this copy here? Who are you designing for? Oh geez, you were designing for anyone who likes video games? We need to narrow that down — that’s way too broad.

And so on.

I suspect that, like design, there are other industry standard ways of sharpening one another. If you were a freelance writer, one of the ways to get better is most certainly to keep writing. But the more painful thing is to have people actually read your work! Have you ever had someone read what you wrote out loud in the same room as you? There are few things that make me cringe more than someone reading out what I’ve written…

It’s an interesting problem to think about how each respective craft on your platform could sharpen itself through continual feedback. Of course, you’d have to incentivize people taking time to critique a piece of design or written work. The intrinsic reward of being seen as an expert certainly falls underneath the second portion of esteem needs. But perhaps there are tangible rewards of meaningful feedback and participation:

Maybe top contributors get special access to certain types of clients. Does their status mean that every project they do rewards them with an extra 10% of what they made? So a $1000 project would net them an extra $100. Maybe they get introduced to leaders in their field to help grow their career? Understanding how your freelancers measure growth would be essential to this step. And the only way to figure that out is to start asking them!

If you wanted to take it a step further, you could have some mechanism in place to convert that tacit knowledge of feedback into a database that particular niche of freelancers could access. Capturing tacit knowledge itself isn’t the easiest thing in the world, and it’s another problem entirely to make sure that out of date knowledge is removed (or at least marked). But imagine the effect on your business if your talent base was constantly improving its craft, how they talk to buyers, or how they price their work. Helping your freelancers helps your buyers which helps you!

Self-Actualization Needs

This can be describes as the desire to accomplish everything that one can, or to become the most that one can be. What goals do your particular freelancers have in the next five to 10 years? This could be that they would love to travel full-time and experience the world — their career facilitates a particular lifestyle. Maybe they want to build their own firm and grow it to a certain number of employees.

Turns out, there are a lot of freelance designers who want to make their own firm. A study from 99designs in 2019 shows that a whopping 45% of designers want to open their own design firm in the next 5 years (page 37). That’s amazing data. If we’re going to help them do that, it means we’re going to have to help teach them how to run a business, why they should write a business plan, why niching down is better than being a generalist firm. We could talk about value pricing, and building and maintaining relationships with clients. The list goes on. But these aren’t simply blog articles that they read.

This is when we get to the heart of designing a transformative experience. Design is about communicating the right message to the right audience in the right way. Maybe the best way, based on your audience, is an in person potluck where you invite freelancers and teach them these things in the form of a story. Sound weird? Well, I’m just making it up. But it’s to make a point. We’re dealing with people from all around the world, with a wide range of ages, in different cultures, with different languages, and different desires. We can’t seriously expect a little article to create the effect in lives we want to see. If we want to transform freelancers, keep your business around for the next 50 years, and be insanely profitable while doing it, it means touching hearts in a way only another human can. The phase of being able to pop up little freelance marketplaces with little or no differentiation should die. Becoming an industry leader that everyone else aspires to be means knowing who your freelancers are intimately, and helping them build their best life.

TL:DR

After considering the depth of how you would apply Maslow’s hierarchy to transform your freelancers, the more I think it’s capable of being used in every freelance marketplace. It’s not a zero sum game where, if you implement it first, you reap a disproportionate amount of success. That’s because the desire and motivations of freelancers on one site are going to look different from another. Toptal freelancers aren’t Fiverr freelancers which aren’t PeoplePerHour freelancers. As a result, meeting those desires is going to require novel solutions depending on who you’re designing for. It’s possible to take freelancers in their infancy stage and help transform them into whatever they want to become — it only takes research to understand what they want, and a lot of trial and error to build the products that truly help them get there. (Oh yeah, and I do that!)

This implies that the potential for innovation in the freelance industry, and consequently, the avenues to differentiate yourself, just got a lot larger.

Thanks for reading. If you want to love your freelancers by helping them transform their lives even more, let’s talk. We can create the future.