57 million U.S. citizens are freelancers. A few years ago, many companies preferred in-house specialists, but COVID-19 made significant changes to the world economy, and today, it’s a reality we live in.
Remote experts in various niches usually use a freelance marketplace to find jobs. At the same time, startup founders and well-established companies build new business relations and hire the entire teams on freelance marketplaces. The niche is extremely promising. So today, we are going to shed some light on how to make a profit in a brave new freelance-driven world. We’ll share some superb tips on how to create a website like Upwork, breathe life into it and grow your business on its basis. Make yourself comfortable and have a look!
If you wish to invest in this business and develop a power-packed freelance website with a powerful set of great options, bookmark this page, it will be useful!
Freelance Marketplace: A Brief Definition
It’s a vast online platform where employers and employees meet. Business owners and entrepreneurs go to such platforms to find professional and talented contractors to do some tasks for them. Freelancers usually find project-based jobs there.
How do marketplaces charge money? They are usually charging both freelancers and employers. Upwork’s yearly income is almost $300 million. Fiverr’s annual revenue is more than $75 million. So you can see that this niche is quite profitable!
Main Tips That Will Help You Build a Freelance Marketplace Like Upwork
Building a marketplace that will be popular among users is not always easy. It’s time-consuming and exhausting work, but our pieces of advice will surely help you build the right strategy.
Do comprehensive research and find your niche
The first and foremost task is to study a viable niche market. You have to learn a limited segment of the market, its interests, and requirements. When you finally do this, you’ll define your target audience and understand what services it needs most. Remember that your online marketplace can’t be an all-in-one tool for everyone. You have to narrow your focus, and in doing so, you’ll surely find your niche.
Define a demanded set of features
As well as any other online platform, your freelancer marketplace must have a set of mandatory features. Without them, you simply don’t need to launch a marketplace as users won’t use it. The must-have features include:
• Registration form;
• Freelancer profile;
• Employer profile;
• Verification panel;
• Dashboard for freelancers and employers;
• Search and filters;
• Chat;
• Payment functionality;
• Rating of freelancers and employers.
Think about the app structure
You’ll probably entrust this task to an experienced team of software developers. You still have a chance to keep everything under control but delegate the most difficult part of the process. Remember that the app structure is the central part of your marketplace platform. It defines how your application will work and how its main components will be interacting with each other.
Design and user interface
You can’t complete this stage without a detailed investigation. Decide on a color scheme and come up with ideas for the best intuitiveness. Analyze products built by the competitors and see what colors they use. To avoid all the time-consuming design-related tasks, just hire experienced designers. They will create a clear and pleasant user interface for your app. Remember that the UI/UX design is as important as the app’s architecture.
Database development
As your marketplace grows, you’ll have more users. You have to store data of future users in a secure place. Therefore, in your engineering team, there should be specialists with database expertise.
Ways to Build a Marketplace for Freelancers
With a clear business development strategy and a vision of customer persona, you need to move on to the development of your freelance platform. You can either choose an existing website template or custom app development. Let’s delve into the peculiarities of each method.
If you are on a budget, you can surely opt for an existing template. But remember that it’s a temporary solution. Such frameworks are a good solution for marketplaces with a limited number of users. Besides, before choosing the template, you have to double-check if this tool has enough features to turn your idea into reality. Unfortunately, the majority of SaaS solutions provide zero customization opportunities. Moreover, you can’t build high-quality ranging algorithms using a template. However, it’s a superb solution to test this niche and check the profitability of your idea.
Custom development is the best option in any case. When choosing this method, you’ll surely create a multi-featured, stable, and robust solution that will help you attract users and make a profit. In this case, you can be sure that your platform for freelancers is strong enough to deal with a variety of users. Moreover, custom development also means freedom. You can build a desired set of features and have numerous customization opportunities. Custom development also allows you to create a better tool than your competitors have.
If your goal is building full-scale freelance marketplace platforms with specific functionality, custom software development would be the best option. Professional engineering teams guarantee a full-cycle development process, users data protection, and profound expertise. You can discuss the average web app cost and create a platform that meets your requirements. When choosing custom development, your ideas aren’t limited and you’ll have more flexibility in your business decisions.
