Freelancer Limited

More details about that in a post from October 21st.

Escrow.com's parent company, Freelancer, released a Q3 business update last week.

It said that Escrow.com's gross marketplace value rose 28% year over year when measured in US dollars.

Now, despite this, revenue fell and the company blamed it on a slowdown in the domain market thanks to it being summer here in the Northern Hemisphere.

I wouldn't just go and hire direct.

I wouldn't go to freelance.com and these other websites, Upwork, and hire someone off there and hope for the best.

By using organisations like us, we've done all the pre-vetting.

We've got people that we know and we trust and we can fit towards a role.

And if you don't market it, What are we doing? And yes, AI is moving faster than what I would say humans could do.

But I also liken it to when platforms like Freelancer and Upwork and all this came up, people could now get offshore development super cheap.

So people were building web apps quickly.

And the reality is you could build all these web apps, but you can't go sell those apps.

It was like a marketplace and it was before its time.

But when I, you know, there are various companies now like freelancer.com or Upwork, you know, it was kind of, it was similar to that, but it was focused on women and it was a kind of a high end brand.

So I started this business and put a lot of money into it and developed the website, the database, spent a lot of money on marketing and so on.

And then I did a roadshow where I was doing talks and events all around the country.

So it's been a long journey.

So you mentioned Uber before, and I'm thinking about a decade or more ago when other companies like Freelancer and Airtasker were being born and developed.

What did you learn from your build on a double-sided marketplace along the way? What were the pitfalls, the light bulb moments that came from doing that and figuring out how will the pieces fit together so that it's successful for everyone?

Yeah, I think, you know, one of the real benefits was that I did this myself as, you know, as a laundry lady in the beginning.

This is like fiverr.com or-

Freelancer, yeah

... freelancer.com, et cetera.

Mm-hmm.

[laughs] Right.

Um, so I was, I was broke basically, painting a bit, building sites, DJing, but I signed up to this thing called Freelancer-

Yeah

... which is like a, a site where you can go, "These are my skills" and then you pitch for jobs.