Using freelancers to grow your startup

When you are in the early stages of your startup, you want to spend your time on validating your idea and showing that people are actually willing to pay for what you are providing. As time moves forward and you realise that this is the case, you want to grow your business as fast as possible. In this phase, it is really important to just work fast and get shit done. What better way to do it than by using freelancers!

Freelance lottery

Using freelancers can often be seen as a lottery. Using sites such as Upwork provide you with the history of the freelancer due to their star rating and how many hours they have worked. All of this is pretty meaningless though if they cannot perform the task that you want to do. At my company we have invested heavily in freelancers over the past weeks to help with our sales funnel and we are just starting to see the rewards. There is a real lottery as to how effective a particular freelancer will be and you need to monitor the early performance to see if they will be effective for your company.

The best way to test this is to never give a freelancer more than 4 hours a day to play with at the start. You can always up the hours if they turn out to be good and if they aren’t well… you can let them go. The only time wasted will be the time you spent explaining the role to them. From our experience it can take 2-3 hires to find a decent one who is worth sticking around.

Using a system that works

There are various ways to manage your freelancers and you will need to keep on top of things if you want it to be a success. The best way that we found for it to be successful is to check in with all of them every morning and be clear what you expect for them to do that day. If they are clear with your expectations then they will work to meet them, it’s pretty simple.

Another thing that you should really do is to have an open chat with what you want them to do and if they have any questions then they can ask questions. Using freelancers for our projects, we often use more than one to work on the same thing. Opening a Skype group chat for the project and introducing the team to each other goes a long way. You will see that they can discuss any problems in the group and more often than not one of them will be able to answer another’s questions. If nobody knows then you can jump in and put everyone straight saving your precious time.

Keeping an open channel where your freelancers feel free and comfortable to ask you questions is important. They want to do the job well and if they are unsure, they should feel free to ask you about it. Pro-active people are the people you want to be working for you so whenever anyone messages me directly about something I am super happy that they have taken the initiative and will answer them fully.

Why aren’t more startups in Asia using freelancers?

I am always surprised with the people I meet doing a lot of grunt work manually and using their precious resources to get it done. One of the first things I learnt when going to the full time CEO role is that, your time is the most valuable thing you have so if there is a way to free it up then you should take it. If you can free up hours of your day by using someone willing to work for $10/$5 an hour then it makes sense.

A lot of the startups I have spoken with in Singapore tend to not like to outsource and try to build everything in-house. Maybe it is a fear of sharing their ideas or maybe it is just that they do not know about the great potential of using such services. Either way, the world is small and getting smaller. People can be hired to help you and provide great value for little expense. Language and internet speeds are no longer a problem and I envision a future where more companies go to MVP stage and beyond on the basis of an army of freelancers. What do you think?