Travis Skweres
Key Takeaways
- Get to know your target demographic before launching a community site.
- Don’t rush your site launch; be prepared to address technical and usability issues.
- Online commuities are also developed through offline, real-world interaction.
- You’ll likely have to demonstrate the value of your site before monetizing it.
- Be available, approachable, and authentic at all times!
First of all, what is Werkadoo? How did the idea for Werkadoo come about?
Werkadoo actually started as a brick & mortar service in Houston, Texas, called House of Talent. H.O.T. had a group of freelance professionals whom we would match with businesses to create their “remote back office” and get whatever they needed done, from admin support to full scale large projects. We also had an actual house where we leased out cheap workspace to our freelancers, giving them another place to go to be productive. We had a great reputation and were growing very quickly, and we didn’t want to buy a bigger house, so we decided to take the concept online!
Is Werkadoo intended to be a direct competitor of bidding sites such as Elance, Guru, and Rentacoder; or are you envisioning a different business paradigm altogether?
We do currently see eLance and Guru as our biggest competitors, but Werkadoo’s vision far exceeds what these guys are doing, and our ultimate goal is to become something far different. We’re giving businesses the ability to hire entire remote teams and manage them all effectively online, like a virtual office.
Unlike eLance, on Werkadoo you can hire 10 different people and assign them all to the same project, allowing them to all share documents, communicate, live chat, and do everything required to get the job done. In addition, when you hire a freelance professional through Werkadoo, you never have to hire them again, and they’re always in your talent pool. If they did a great job, this allows you to continuously give them projects as needed, creating more stability for the business, and more revenue for the freelancer.
In the end, we want to foster long-term relationships between our freelance professionals and our businesses, making them more like remote employees and less like one-time contractors. And ultimately, we don’t want to be a “bidding site” either. We want to be focused on quality, not quantity. This stuff will have to get ironed out as we go, though, because we’re still getting feedback from our users to define the optimal business model!
The bidding sites I just mentioned do not include many social elements (Elance and Guru have blogs, and Elance has special interest groups), but Werkadoo Beta features a blog, forums, groups, and personal dashboard for each registered werker. I consider this to be an important differentiating factor, which is why I asked you to let me interview you in the first place! How does the concept of community figure into your business model: how do you plan to leverage community to make your customers more successful?
The concept of community is extremely important to Werkadoo for a lot of reasons. For one, when doing our preliminary research, we found that one of the biggest objections to hiring freelance workers was: “I don’t know who this person is. How do I know they’re good at what they do?” So we decided to add a community section to the site, where freelancers and businesses could get to know each other and interact before actually doing work, which reduces the ambiguity that comes along with remote working. The community will make both sides more successful by lowering barriers, increasing interaction, referrals, and so on. Also, we’re all about transparency and listening to what our users have to say. At the end of the day, without them, we don’t exist! Through our community section as well as blog, twitter account, Facebook, etc, we try to stay as connected to our users and crowd as possible, allowing us to take their ideas and feedback, and make our product work better for them.
Building up critical mass on a community site that is subscription based or ad revenue driven seems like a tricky venture. How do you convince people to pay to join and/or advertise on a community site before a healthy-sized community develops? Any advice for those seeking to create a community site that generates income, be it ad-based or subscription-based?
When Werkadoo first launched, we had a subscription based model…silly us! We received an enormous mass of emails telling us basically that “Hey, we’re not going to pay for a beta site!” And it makes sense: we have to prove our value to our customers before they’re going to pay.
Based on our research and feedback from the community, we decided (for better or worse) that we wanted to go with a subscription based service as opposed to our competitors, who charge a commission on all projects through the site. We want to do this for two reasons: Freelancers hate to have an enormous commission taken out of their paychecks (and they’re right, that sucks!). And two, charging commission for projects through the site forces Werkadoo to police our community. If we charge a commission, people will try to find ways to work around it and contact each other outside the site to avoid paying the commission. We don’t want to deal with that, and we don’t want to be the police, so we decided that a basic subscription fee for access to the community or tools would be best.
The problem with that, though, is people need to REALLY be convinced of the value of something before they subscribe, so that’s our challenge now. Being a new site that’s under 90 days old, we have to show that we’re here to make them more successful in the long haul, and that we’re worth it.
So as of now, the site is still free to use, and we’re playing with different subscription tier ideas and other business model ideas submitted by our community members, but we have still not found an optimal business model to go with. We’re taking it one step at a time.
As for advice for forming a new online community, depending on what business you’re in, to build critical mass you most likely have to be free. It’s becoming harder and harder to be supported by ad revenue, especially these days, but right now that’s the only real proven way to reach critical mass because of the low barriers to usage entry.
How did you prepare for the launch of werkadoo.com?
We did a lot of research and spent a lot of sleepless nights. We began development of the website in late January, and went live on April 1st, which means we pushed out the beta site from nothing in only a few months!
Can you elaborate on the kind of research you did in preparation for the launch of werkadoo.com, specifically as it relates to building out the community component? Any lessons learned?
Most of our research in launching Werkadoo was based on freelancers, the types of freelance work being done in the US today, the size of the market, the competitors in the space, and the quality level of service to the market. We found that no other site out there had a social media component, and so that was our reason for implementing it on Werkadoo. Plus, we just like being social ourselves, and we have seen the real value of social media in staying connected with your customers.
Did you set any specific goals to define a successful launch?
We weren’t sure what a successful launch looked like. We knew we would have bugs and just wanted to get the site out there in the hands of the people. We spent the first few weeks just monitoring feedback and finding bugs. We’re still finding bugs!
How effective do you think your pre-launch preparations were? Any important lessons learned?
We learned not too rush too much, and perhaps do more testing before going live. We put a self-imposed deadline of April 1st, but we could have probably waited a few weeks longer, ironed out more of the site problems, and went live at a later date, with less issues.
What tools/methods have proven to be the most effective in building the Werkadoo online community? The least effective?
Twitter and Facebook have been extremely valuable in building the Werkadoo online community, especially Twitter. It allows us to communicate instantly with our fans. We can tweet about new jobs posted or new werkers joined, changes to the site, etc. It’s all about getting in on the conversation, participating, and being reachable. We currently have no advertising to speak of, but our registrations are growing 30–40% a month, mostly through social media and word of mouth.
I know the Werkadoo staff put a lot of effort into being visible at events such as SXSW Interactive. How much do you think “offline” promotion figures into launching and maintaining a successful community site?
Live events are extremely important to us. It goes back to being transparent and involved in the community. It’s so much more valuable when a user or a fan of Werkadoo can put a face with the site, and know the people behind the scenes. At the end of the day, we’re people just like you, trying to make a site that makes freelance professionals more successful. We don’t want the image of being a “corporate entity” or a huge website behemoth; we want to know our crowd and have them know us!
If you could give others looking to launch a community site one piece of advice, what would it be?
The cardinal rule is you have to be genuine. If you’re just trying to screw people or make a buck, they’ll find you out, and you’ll soon be left alone. If you truly believe in what you’re doing, and truly want to use what you’re doing to help others, then you can leverage the community to get involved, join the conversation, get feedback from your users, and participate in discussions. This will ultimately contribute to the overall success of your business.
Thanks, Travis!
Many thanks to Travis Skweres for taking the time to answer my questions. Questions or comments for Travis? Find him on LinkedIn or follow Werkadoo on Twitter.
