Hey guys, I want you guys to validate by startup idea. I’ve been a freelancer for over 3 years and my annual revenue on average has been around 100k+. I primarily sell on Fiverr. Fiverr takes around 20% of the income earned and I’ve been trying to break out of Fiverr and build my on agency outside. One of the biggest plus points about Fiverr is how easy it’s to communicate and manage projects and once things start taking off, leads are not a problem. There’s too much I can handle, but I can’t hire people because I can’t trust anyone getting access to my account for operations. Fiverr essentially doesn’t allow you to grow past a certain point. And on top of that when you start earning more, the 20% commission becomes an extremely large amount - like I’m paying like $20k every year as commission to Fiverr.
I’m planning to build a Freelancer centric platform that doesn’t take any commission. We’ll be building a vetted marketplace integrated with SAAS that’ll help you sell productized and subscription services (with pause feature as well). You’ll have a dedicated dashboard where you can track all your orders, communicate with clients just like Slack, and also send custom offers. There would be dedicated Inbox and chat feature inside every order. You’ll have granular features such as invite team members, create groups with accessibility control - like internal chat, hiding quotes from team members etc.
Each potential client would have a dedicated client dashboard, where they can add potential freelancers or agencies. Once they add them they can order your services from their dashboard.
Now how do we make money? Pretty straightforward, we charge like $20-$30 a month for all the participants for accessing our SAAS and marketplace. Maybe we’ll integrate an additional team member pricing as well.
Think of it like Asana, Slack and QuickBooks combined together attached to a freelance marketplace for lead gen. A one stop solution to sell and grow your business without limits.
Personally if such a solution existed I would have happily used it, because when working outside Fiverr I’m already spending money on Slack, Clickup, Stripe, Gdrive/Onedrive, Email, Website hosting and a lot of other things. On top of that, lead gen is a whole another problem, a lot of cold emails. Fiverr has been nice to me, but I can’t bring my clients outside because of fear of getting my account banned.
This seems like a win-win situation for both freelancers and buyers.
The idea is a bit vague, I need to make things clear concise if I move forward building this. Also one of the concern is, would I be able to make this a profitable business. There is a reason why Fiverr charges 20% commission.
I need all the insights I can get from you guys.