Why we think the future of work marketplaces is managed
If you’ve ever used a “work marketplace” like Fiverr (NYSE: FVRR), Upwork (NASDAQ: UPWK), or Freelancer — you’ll quickly realize the experience isn’t all that great.
With Upwork or Freelancer, you post a job, then get inundated with hundreds of resumes from unvetted freelancers who are loosely qualified to your job description. Soon after, you start receiving messages from prospective talent in a bit of a difficult interface. For an example from Freelancer.com, see below…
…after which, you’re expected to select one of the freelancers, communicate and complete all of your business here, and can’t do things like inviting them to Slack — as leaving these platforms to go elsewhere is typically against their Terms of Service.
With Fiverr, you’re instead supposed to search for jobs — as opposed to jobseekers reaching out to you, which is an improvement, but the rest of the experience is about the same as Upwork or Freelancer. Once you choose a job, you then have to pay a freelancer, communicate your requirements through their messaging system, and hope that freelancer is available to take your job, and that you receive your work product on time!
The Good
These platforms are great for individuals, side-hustlers, and microbusinesses, as they provide tremendous flexibility in terms of cost for one-off micro-projects, and for getting esoteric things done, for which it doesn’t make too much sense to bring on an FTE.
The Bad
If you’re running a small to medium-sized enterprise with more than a few employees, these work marketplaces start to make a lot less sense.
Who do you reach out to when work quality is sub-par? What happens when the freelancer takes way longer than expected? Are they prioritizing your work, or is it at the end of their queue? Can they do the job? Can they fully understand your employees’ requirements? What happens if the freelancer just doesn’t deliver? Or doesn’t show up?
Not to mention, your employees that use these services have to conduct a mini-recruitment process to wade through the hundreds of resumes & profiles that respond to jobs — freelancers aren’t vetted. Your employees are forced to use a generic product that hasn’t been built for the use case at hand, and doing something as simple as inviting the freelancer to your Slack workspace risks violating the terms of service for your whole account.
Disputes are also incredibly painful — if your freelancer doesn’t deliver, you’ve wasted a bunch of time hiring, explaining, waiting, and have limited options to recover.
These marketplaces just aren’t geared towards the majority of painful work a business must do, specifically, recurring work.
The Future
We think the future of this space is a platform that puts the needs of businesses first.
Specifically, a platform that doesn’t compromise on any aspect of the experience. Below are some of the things that we believe makes for a winning “work marketplace”:
- A labor force that’s comprised of multiple already high-performing partners that deliver high-quality results. Partners that handle the sourcing, screening, vetting, training, and managing of talent, and all labor administration.
- Quality Assurance is a given and runs scalably, say, by proprietary artificial intelligence that identifies and rectifies issues in real-time — before they begin to fester, enabling a consistent, high-quality experience that scales.
- Purpose-built products and software, geared to the modern age — enabling a great experience that’s secure, beautiful, and easy to use, no matter the task at hand.
- Meeting clients where they’re comfortable, enabling clients to invite their talent to Slack with Slackbots, text them, call them, use mobile apps, desktop apps, or Zapier apps.
- A healthy mix of focused and broad, such that clients still feel they’re getting (and can get) a lot of their needs met in one place, but critically, focusing on the most common recurring needs, and on doing them well — as opposed to an incredibly broad platform that caters to many esoteric needs.
- SLAs that inspire confidence, from guarantees pertaining to fast, predictable response times, to the number of daily updates you should expect to receive.
- Incredibly easy to get started, no wading through hundreds of resumes hoping to pick a candidate that won’t disappoint. Instead, by default, you get who you get, and they won’t disappoint!
This is what Wing is building — a new kind of work marketplace. One that’s managed & curated — targeting the subset of work that’s recurring & common across businesses of all types, and leveraging proprietary technology to improve quality, and facilitate high average client spends, high retention rates, and an increased propensity for clients to upgrade.
The future is Wing, and the numbers seem to agree
We focus on recurring, common needs, lending to an incredibly high average client spend, at $12,060 — that’s over 83X higher than Fiverr’s ($145/yr). In addition, as a result of our high-touch, managed experience, we’re able to command a much higher take rate, at 35.2%, that’s nearly 2.6X that of Upwork’s (13.6%), and 1.44X that of Fiverr’s (24.5%).
As a result of our promising early metrics, demonstrated ability to scale the model & quality, increasing organic growth, and rapid month on month growth — we think that we’re well-positioned to take on the world’s largest work marketplaces, and win.
If you’d like to learn more about Wing, please don’t hesitate to reach out at karan@getwingapp.com.
