At Snipply we love freelancers, and we LOVE startups. The fact is, Upwork and other freelance marketplaces can be an invaluable source of help for startup founders on a budget. When you are a small team working on big projects with short windows of opportunity, being as efficient as possible matters.
In the past, I’ve used freelancers from Upwork for all different types of projects, from list building in a Google Sheet to full-blown growth marketing campaign work. These platforms effectively allow you to hand off some of the research, planning, and even execution of projects so that you can focus on what you do best — building your startup.
Throughout the process of building multiple Upwork freelance teams, I’ve identified some key takeaways as to why you absolutely need to have a freelance team to help you scale your startup.
You can eliminate working on medial tasks.
This is a pretty simple reason why you need at least a basic freelance team. Being able to outsource menial tasks ends up providing a lot of the value outlined below.
You can turn your intro-level employees into managers.
Remote teams don’t displace any of your current team members, but they definitely increase everyone’s productivity and efficiency. By outsourcing busy work, you and your team can focus on what’s best for your startup, and will have more time for reviewing and polishing work.
You’ll be able to meet deadlines faster.
Due to being able to hire talent dispersed all over the world, you are able to add more time to the work-day. If managed properly you’ll be able to hand off work items at the end of the day and pick up where the freelancers left off in the morning.
You’ll add specialization to your team.
A task outside an employee’s normal skill set that might take three hours, could take an expert freelancer only 10 minutes. The more your team can specialize while staying in sync with the team at large, the better it is for the organization.
Your team will always be on.
A huge perk of freelancers and distributed teams is that when you’ve shut down for the day, your startup and projects keep rolling along. Besides, having more work done in the day, your team can keep responding to posts, answering blog comments, reviewing time-sensitive projects and so on.
You’ll have a team that constantly needs to prove itself.
Freelancers also require repeat business to survive. Freelancers strive to produce their best work, in order to keep getting work from existing clients, which means you can always expect someone's best.
You’ll receive long-term value despite making short-term hires.
You will have turnover in your organization, even the best startups do. When full-time employees leave, you’ll have freelancers as a consistent and reliable part of our team. As they work with you more often and learn your processes, their capabilities will increase and you’ll end up having awesome long-term resources that can also ease the transition of newer hires.
Lower the stress and boost the morale of younger employees.
You can lower employee stress levels by giving them additional resources to get their work done. Besides reducing the likelihood of employee burnout you’d be keeping your full-time employees’ jobs more engaging and rewarding by taking away some of the work they don’t necessarily specialize in or enjoy.
You’ll understand who, when and how to hire your next full-time team members.
A really common error many startups make is internalizing talent too early in their journey to scale. Hiring full-time sales, marketing, design, etc too early can backfire pretty quickly without having the right process, projects, and knowledge resources in place. Need to ramp up for a specific project? Need specific design work done? Start with freelancers first — then as work becomes more consistent, process is put in place, and the right managers are on hand to oversee everything you can start to internalize the right talent.
You’ll be able to take on more work.
By having the flexibility in specialization and more people capable of getting work done, you’ll be able to take on more work. And, you’ll be able to hire freelance teams to help you get more work by adding sales prospecting and marketing talent.
So those are the main takeaways I got from working with basic freelance teams. If interested in building your first Upwork freelance team, or making sure you’re setting them up for success, check out our article on building a killer freelance team here. We’ll also be releasing a complete guide to building and maintaining your freelance teams so make sure to subscribe by joining the waitlist below.
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