Marketing to Freelance Companies

Freelance companies that connect freelancers with businesses generally work by taking a percentage of the pay from the freelancer. Obviously a freelancer wants to reduce that "finder's fee," and competing companies could attract more freelancers by taking a smaller percentage of their pay. So I got thinking... what if Viglo contacted the freelancing company, asked them to notify their freelancers that Viglo exists for anyone interested in learning Spanish, and the freelancing company will wave the fee for any freelancer who uses Viglo? Obviously the freelancing company isn't going to eliminate their source of income for Viglo. But behind the scenes, Viglo will actually be the one to pay the fee.

When trying to view this situation through the eyes of the freelancing company, it sounds like a way for the company to build good will with the freelancers that it employs. The company can honestly boast how it's helping it's freelancers develop into better freelancers (knowing Spanish broadens up your options for freelancing jobs), and the company shows that it's so invested in helping it's freelancers that it'll sacrifice some of it's earnings to better it's employees.

To make sure Viglo could afford this, I took the 5 most popular freelancing companies and found the percentage of pay they took... and damn was I in for an unpleasant surprise. It was almost always between 10-20% of the freelancer's pay! (One company was an exception, but you had to have worked for them for a while). There's no way that Viglo could pay these kind of percentages!

I was pretty bummed, but then asked myself, "why are you looking at the popular companies only? Look for lesser known or startup freelancing companies. They'll likely offer smaller fees to encourage more freelancers, plus they're probably easier to contact and would be more open to trying different ideas, like mine." I definitely found some more viable options for me budget.

Screenshot of the notes I've take for each potential company I could reach out to.

I'm not sure if I did this backwards or not, but now that I have my list of potential companies, let me organize how I want this to proceed:

Viglo's Benefits: Aquire new users for Viglo
Freelancing Company's Benefits: Build more loyalty from it's freelancers; improve public image

If everything goes as planned, this is what will happen:

Viglo will contact the freelancing companies (FCs) asking them to contact "X" number of freelancers with an offer that if the FC's employee uses Viglo [need to define "use"], then that user will have "X%" of their fee waived. (The FC can call this offer for their employees an "improvement initiative") The freelancers will then try Viglo and see that they can become fluent with Viglo's help.

Steps to make it happen:

1.) Create the "package" to sell the idea to the FC.
The "package" will be what the FC will send to their freelancers. But what should it include?...

- Video showing how Viglo works.
- An image below the video showing how the freelancer would go from FCs contact message to the freelancer's first call with Viglo.
- Explanation of what the freelancer needs to complete in Viglo in order for the FC to waive the "finder's fee"
But what DOES the freelancer need to complete? Just one call? Does the student need to pay at least once for Viglo to get their fee waived? Need to
think more on this
- A Viglo link that the freelancer can share with others (we'll have to come up with an incentive or "thank you" for the freelancer sharing the link)
- A link to the Viglo call itself.

Various Notes and Thoughts
- The increments of freelancers that Viglo wants to test with (for example, try it with 10 freelancers, make sure Viglo can afford it, then maybe bump up the increment to 30 freelancers)

- Since Viglo is an unknown entity, the FC is likely to be skeptical of Viglo's guarantee that we will pay the fees. So Viglo will need to do something to make sure the FC trusts us. Maybe we will deposit money ahead of time.

- How will we contact the FCs?
Email; find the owner directly at LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc...)
Considerations when reaching out:

- How will we overcome our non-existent recognition, and the potential skepticism of the FCs towards Viglo?
- Give them a vague opening message that gives them just enough info to know the basics of what we're asking from them. Then attach a document with all the details (include a pre-written message that they can use for the freelancers so that the FC doesn't have to put any effort of their own into crafting a message for their freelancers).

If the FC says "yes" to sharing Viglo with their freelancers:

- Have a checklist that the FC can consult to make sure they do everything you want them to do. (we can make sure that they agree ahead of time with the checklist). Here are some ideas of what to include in the checklist:

1.) Include a copy of the message you want sent to the freelancers, and have the FC check it off that they agree to that message.
2.) Agree to a number of emails you want sent out at a time, and a number of "yeses" from the freelancers that you want. Have a date or timeframe agreed to that they will send "X" more messages until Viglo gets our desired amount of students.
3.) Have the demographic of the freelancer you want agreed to (age, location, average earnings per week, etc...). That way the FC isn't reaching out to people we don't believe will use Viglo.
4.) The amount of of down payment agreed to for repaying the fees.

How Viglo needs to do to prepare for this marketing plan:

1.) Find and train Guides
2.) Figure out how to schedule calls between the Guides and students (WhatsApp group? Google sheets? Something else?).
3.) Decide how to confirm if a student is using Viglo because of the FC.
4.) Again, I need to figure out what it means to "use" Viglo enough to agree to pay the student's waivers.

Other Preparations:

1.) Decide how many freelancers we want to try Viglo (maybe we only want a small number to learn what problems we'll incur before choosing to get bigger numbers)
2.) What email steps do we want to take? (For example, do we ask the company to only send out messages to "X" number of freelancers? Then we send out more if we don't get enough interest?)
3.) How much time do we want to give students before they are charged payment? (this isn't just a question for the freelancer students. This is something that needs to be figured out for ALL students)
4 .) Should we have a warning system set up so they aren't just suddenly shocked when asked for payment?

NOTE: [I did all the notes and thinking above, yet this was before the calculations to even figure out if this is something Viglo can afford to do. Do the calculations first, idiot!]

I created a datasheet to actually see some numbers and help me figure out a budget.

Then I chatted with ChatGPT, asking how I should look at these numbers and proceed to think about the situation (right now I feel like I know what data I need, but I don't know what to do with it). It wasn't a productive conversation, so I shifted the topic to finding the specific type of freelancer I want to try Viglo. So I asked ChatGPT how I could properly go about asking the FCs:

"Do you have at least 500 freelancers from the United States, England, or Australia, but are living in South America (except Brazil) who have worked for your company for at least 2 months and are earning an average of $150 or less per week?"

(Rewriting that question above makes me think that I should omit England and Australia to keep the timezones of the Guides and students within 3 hours of each other. Something to consider later)

ChatGPT reminded me that the FCs are likely to be hesitant about sharing data. So I thought about that for a bit, and when I contact them, instead of asking if they have freelancers within these parameters, I'll just write in my message to them something like:

"IF you have at least "X" number of freelancers that [share the list of characteristics], then Viglo would be willing to test this partnership...." followed by the benefits of the FC working alongside Viglo.

Obviously there's a lot more work to be done, but I do like the idea of trying to appeal to the freelancing community. I'm definitely open to suggestions on how to move forward with this plan, or hearing reasons why I should toss it in the garbage.