 "How Upwork became a billion-dollar freelancer marketplace")
Hiring the right person for your business used to take weeks. But online recruitment platforms like Upwork, which helps freelancers earn $1 billion a year, are bringing it down to an average of three days or even a few hours.
Bonnie Sherman, Upwork’s vice president of mobile, enterprise, and workplace products, gave Arcadier some practical advice on key factors that impact the marketplace experience, and on how to grow your marketplace sustainably.
Stock the pond
When oDesk (now Upwork) first started, the team reached out to their personal and professional networks to build an initial base of freelancers. The key to solving the chicken-and-egg problem is to identify which side the marketplace absolutely cannot function without.
Understand your buyers and sellers
Simple ecommerce marketplaces aim to drive transactions and have everything completed in a single session. As such, Upwork’s efforts in figuring out what affects the user experience is much more extensive, as is the team’s considerations of the metrics to measure.
Create trust by providing transparency and visibility
Some of the ways the Upwork team creates trust is by having criteria for who can interact in the marketplace, communicating these criteria and the role the marketplace plays, and offering guarantees for some aspects of the transaction.
Grow and differentiate
Size matters in a competitive landscape, but you can also compete in a specialized category. You could develop and tailor the experience specific to that category and gain traction that way. Upwork caters to jobs in a broad range of categories, so it’s a more generic experience.
There is a lot of trial and error involved, but Bonnie insists that a marketplace operator should take negative incidents on the marketplace as growing pains or wake-up calls.
