Expertise Cloud — How to run your business with freelancers?
When starting a small business, every cent makes a difference. Before you attract the investors and customers, you are relying mostly on your savings and good will of your family and friends. You simply cannot afford to hire an army of employees to work on your project. But DIY is not such a glorious option neither. While you probably can do many things yourself and would also be ready to learn and develop your skills and understand every aspect of your business, it’s next to impossible for anyone to be good at so many different aspects. The investment might look like 0 (but it never is — your own time is not free either), but the progress is slow and the results can be unexpected.
But what if you could get just a pinch of an accounting mind, a paragraph of mind-blowing copywriting, a twist in optimization for search engines, a pimped landing page, a boosted conversion from your FB ads or a piece of code for a custom feature to distinguish your website from the others. All that from people who specialize in each of your requirements, without hiring a single full time employee that will get bored on company time — because almost no role has enough workload for 40h/week in the initial phase of the project. And 0 office and equipment costs. Welcome to the free land of freelancers — professionals who offer their expertise in quantities you need at the moment — just as clouds offer the gigas of their servers…
The arrangements you can have are super flexible, and here are a few examples:
Full time for a short period of time
A professional can work on your project full time (around 40h/week) for a short period of time. This type of an arrangement might be suitable for a software developer building your platform from scratch. Depending on the requirements, that can take a few weeks or a few months, but once you are satisfied with your product you can enter the maintenance mode without the need for a full time engineer (if your MVP renders your idea successful, you’ll probably opt for developing new features at some point, but let’s stick to the initial phase). A tip: try to establish a long term on an as-needed basis arrangement with the same developer who initially built your platform — resolving the bugs or making adjustments would take much more time if requested from somebody unfamiliar with the application.
Long term on an as-needed basis
A suitable arrangement to work with a programmer or UI/UX designer who did the initial work for you. Now you might wanna call them in when a page needs a makeover. It’s much more efficient than always getting a new person who then needs to get familiar with the work done previously. Another example would be a copywriter, it’s nice to maintain the same writing style throughout your copy. Try maintaining a good professional relationship so that your freelancers keep counting on you and make themselves available when you need them.
Long term part-time
A virtual assistant — here you go. Somebody who will become part of your life (indeed, some VRs overtake booking the flights and AirBnBs etc. for you) for many fruitful years to come — working 10h/week on your business and persona 🙂 The nature of this work requires high level of familiarity with your ways of handling stuff (for example, you might not have a preference for naming conventions for the variables the programmer is using, but most definitely you’re gonna want your emails classified just the way you do it and responded to using the tone as close to your very own as possible) — so water this plant the best you can. 10h/week would suffice in most of the cases.
Another example would be a product manager overseeing the product development and team work. For small teams (5 people), 15–20h/week should be enough. Or, a digital marketing expert if your business relies on regular campaigns (you can always increase the workload — remember to inform the freelancer in advance — if you plan to launch a particularly big campaign etc.)
A one-call stand
On a very one-time basis you’d like a consultant you will have a long call with to get a professional advice. It can be a legal advice by a lawyer for instance, or a tech one. An example role would be a software architect who would advise you on the correct tech stack for your case, so that you can go ahead and hire the developers specialized in that very stack. Another example would be a branding expert, who can do your brand audit and tell you if you are on the right track. In addition, it could be a domain knowledge expert — say you are building a platform for language courses, you might wanna have a chat with a language teacher explaining you if audio is the way to go, or you should include video lessons as well. Etc. etc. You can order an hour of a super productive conversation with an expert and spare yourself the research and wrong decisions.
In addition, all these arrangements can be adjusted over time as your startup grows and your needs change.
Need a hand? Need a piece of a trained brain? Get it from the cloud 🙂
For top software engineers and designers: www.toptal.com
For experts in various fields and with various hourly rates: www.upwork.com
For simple, low-budget tasks: www.fiverr.com
As the name tells: www.peopleperhour.com
As I offer my expertise as a software product manager helping startups get set up, I also help contract(via global marketplaces) the best professionals for your business and make sure your remote team is a high performing one.
