Visionaries told long back that organization size will decrease and there will be more entrepreneurship than ever before in this decade. When I heard in 2015, felt it would be for smaller firms with tiny products and services. I never thought there will be a rush of outsourcing and freelancing. With pay parity decreasing region-wise, it making sense for tech champions to become techpreneur and run on platforms like Freelancer.com, Upwork.com Fiverr.com, etc…
People don’t hesitate nor do enterprises think differently while hiring a freelancer. Thanks to COVID-19 and WFH culture, freelancing got immense popularity.
As a small business owner, you need to gauge the advantages and take the right approach. You can get expertise you might not have in-house and save money at the same time.
And as SMB, you need to figure out what is that special talent you looking to up your product feature, which may not make sense to hire full time on payroll.
Some straight out benefits when you use freelancers are:
Feature approach rather being vague:
This helps entrepreneur or firm to think and decide what is that gap which is stopping product release. Or giving constant heartbreak with a customer complaining about the feature you didn’t master well and the Customer Success index is losing.
With such a focused approach, the entrepreneur is sure of what to ask for, and the freelancer is sure on what he needs to deliver. This gets thing moving in the right direction and building trust. The latest breed of freelancing platforms allows you to search right talent, showing experience of the last project done, and check on the feedback.
The overall process is so transparent that it builds trust around your hire.
Achieve your milestones and get paid:
Freelancing platforms work on strict milestones and their approval by the client. That again builds confidence. You can even tightly map it with your timelines, and if a freelancer misses the timeline, then he might lose the cream out of overall payment.
Some freelancing insists to dump full money of the project on their sites, but then you can get a refund if things don’t work out.
Tech getting specific:
Last time I saw a placard guy who is viral on some social media for his messages on a placard. One such message says “Computer Science Students are not PC repair Man”. There is no General Practitioner in Computer World or maybe an entrepreneur is a GP to connect all expertise.
You can’t have everything in your den and need to take specialization support from freelancers. Here are the latest techs to follow on freelancer sites AI, ML, Data lake, AR&VR, IoT, Blockchain, Edge Computing, Quantum Computing and so many other techs that we never heard.
Freelance platform search engine helps you to find very specific tech with the right resource.
The flexibility of Platforms:
Pay as you use is the greatest winner of the last decade in technology. It replicates the same thing across many technologies.
This flexibility even helps the entrepreneur to move from one project to another without concern of impacting other areas of business. Option to use person when need is real flexibility.
Less Micromanaging:
Micromanaging is bad, it’s bad for productivity, it’s bad for morale and it is bad for the overall business. Micromanaging is the most damaging habits executives can have. With freelancers on board to do your specific work, you are away from micromanaging the person. You can’t ask 10k questions when you can’t walk by the person’s desk.
Things no one tells you:
Freelancers are as good as you read out above, but then you miss many things. Here are the things which you feel lost for:
· You can’t isolate 24/7 with tech gigs, which is so much essential for start-ups and launches
· Freelancers normally manage over 1 client
· Juggling too much and stitching the tech to make your end product
· Feeling scattered
But I still feel you can overcome these and work with a freelancer to form your next start-up and its product.
