Ain’t No Shame In The Pivot
Let’s call a spade a spade, we’ve pivoted.
It’s funny how there’s this weird air around “pivoting” that indicates you’ve failed in some way, so people avoid admitting it. And I was one of those people too; it took me a while to come to terms with our pivot and to start letting go of the idea we’ve been working so hard at, and picture a different future. At the end of the day, we’ve pivoted because we’ve found something that solves the problem exponentially better, a solution that has grown our revenue by 400% this quarter, and is incredibly unique. And even if it doesn’t work (I mean, I can probably list about 1,000 things that *could* go wrong still), what’s important here is that we’re pushing, we’re innovating, and we’re not settling for mediocrity or for solutions that may already exist.
So where’s the shame then? There shouldn’t be any, so this one is for you fellow founders, here’s our story, here’s our thinking around it, and here’s our ever-evolving hypothesis about the future of work.
1. It’s different! But the same, tbh.
When Wethos first got to market we put something out that was, quite frankly, pretty similar to a lot of other freelance platforms, and offered one-to-one matching of freelancers with projects. Albeit our brand and market focus was very different, the product and service itself was very much the same.
I had always struggled with this. With investors, with myself, with the team. We craved something original or different; we knew this market needed a unique service, we just didn’t exactly know what that was. So we built what we did know. About three months in my lead investor sat down with us for our monthly meeting and point blank told us the revenue wasn’t good.
Now at this point, I’m defensive, annoyed, and honestly exhausted. We had just busted our asses for months getting this to market and only TWELVE weeks in YOU’RE going to tell me it’s not working?? It needs time! I’d tell him, we haven’t even optimized anything, we need more features!
I’d be wrong.
And as six more weeks of mediocre numbers came through we started pushing sales as hard as we could. I called my co-founders and we immediately agreed that we needed to whip our shit into shape. Pull the trigger on HubSpot, grab those email lists, we need to do something. We also slashed our burn rate to a third of what it was, I let go of four people, the office, we lowered our salaries, and mainly, we started using the shit out of our own freelancers. Here’s the thing: money will buy you time or resources, it won’t solve your problems. At this point, without clear product-market fit, what we needed was time. Resources are useless unless you have something for them to work toward, and you’ll waste a lot of time AND resources scrambling around trying to find a focus. So, we made a super hard choice to cull our team down to buy time, which was one of the hardest things I’ve had to do to-date and I’m sure much harder on the people we had to let go of.
2. Find the real pain, find it fast
While Claire was doing that I immediately started taking meetings. I sat down with a few of our larger clients, I talked to the freelancers, the “sales team” (lol, literally my cofounders), and we would debrief and do retrospectives every single week. Over the course of about six-eight weeks we pitched every model of freelancing we could think of, resourcing pools, temp-to-perm hires, on-call individuals, trying to figure out what the market really needed.
The one consistent factor we found over and over again was that the resourcing problem in the nonprofit space was exponentially worse than we had originally anticipated. Organizations were constantly looking for a “unicorn” person, someone who could do it all, who could wear 10 hats, because that’s what they were doing and that’s what they were used to. Since those expectations felt too unrealistic for us to fill, we slowly started to pair freelancers together and sell scopes of work that were inclusive of several different phases and skills. More like an agency. And that’s when the market told us what it really needed, not out-right of course, because that would be too easy:
Teams.
Our organizations needed more than one freelancer. But not separately, together.
Which sounds, I’ll admit, fairly obvious. I mean, agencies are already a thing, many people use them. But coming from a background in advertising, we knew traditional brick and mortar agencies to be fairly inefficient, expensive, and rigid, and the best talent we had worked with were the people most frustrated by the bureaucracy. This begged the question, what if we cut all of the bullshit and just let the people do the work they love? Do you actually need all of the bells and whistles of an agency? Or can what you’re buying when you work with an agency be recreated by remote individuals working together toward a shared goal?
3. Why this market, and why now?
What’s interesting here on a larger level is that nonprofits actually function in a unique way that allows pre-paired teams to thrive particularly well in this space. They usually have core heads of departments that can essentially wear all the hats and run the show as if they are every person that is supposed to be in that department as well. On top of this, the public doesn’t want them “wasting” money on overhead or hiring (this is stupid, btw), so they are inherently at a massive disadvantage trying to solve these problems. Nonprofits are consistently expected to fix deeply complex, long-term societal issues with short-term funding and resources, it puts them in an impossible position to succeed.
Because of this unique structure, what many of organizations were craving was actually the ability to rent already pre-assembled teams or departments while funding shifted between projects and programs. Normally in order to hire a “team” you have to hire an agency or consultancy, which frequently pad their rates so heavily that it becomes unaffordable to keep them on an ongoing basis. But not anymore.
Our Teams model allows nonprofits to hire multifaceted, remote groups of people who can work together on a larger initiative over a short period of time. This gives them the flexibility to pop up micro-teams whenever they need to increase capacity. We use data and machine learning to pair remote individuals together out of a pool of thousands of heavily-vetted freelancers. Our tech is actually modeled after cooperative multi-player gaming, better known as X-Box Live, in which players join parties to play games together in real time. This makes the opportunities endless, more endless than an agency with limited staff and resources, and that is highly specialized in one area like marketing or PR. Our internal resourcing automation keeps our markups low, it puts more money in the freelancer’s pockets, and it gives our nonprofits a more flexible and affordable resourcing solution.
Nonprofit operational structures are quite innovative in a way, and way ahead of the curve when it comes to for-profit infrastructure as well. There was just never a service that made running such a lean organization actually realistic.
What we now think could be the future of organizational structures, nonprofit or potentially others, is core department heads surrounded by flexible, rentable micro-teams.
3. Don’t re-invent the wheel… or do?
We say we’re shifting toward more flexible work, which I believe. But focusing on filling individual seats sort of misses the mark. As a culture we’re increasingly expecting people to be jills-of-all-trades, to do design and development, to know how to run paid social and write creative copy. The expectations have gotten so unrealistic that hiring, resourcing, and talent retention has become a nightmare for organizations and workers alike.
With this new strategy, we now pose the question: why hire a full-time “unicorn” when you can rent a part-time team?
Freelance is great, but it’s also lonely, and we were watching our freelancers miss out on larger initiatives at our organizations because they didn’t have an effective way of finding each other. Not to mention, so many initiatives need more than one person working on it, and our professional networks today are made up of vanity connections on platforms like LinkedIn with no real value to add.
By creating an algorithm that pairs them together, our scope of work grows, our freelancers are catching bigger fish, and in line with our core vision, we’ve fostered a place where people can find more meaningful work and now, more meaningful coworkers. People connect with one another through the causes that mean something to them. It’s about true community, an actually useful professional network, and an opportunity for them to use their skills to solve some of our worlds toughest problems.
For freelancers, it’s a lot like joining an agency, but it’s more like joining five of them. As a designer you could allocate your time across as many projects as you have bandwidth for. You’re part of a multi-faceted platform that has an endless amount of different clients/projects/teams to choose from. You can rotate on and off accordingly, and you can cherry-pick the projects you want because they’re so much bigger.
We can’t do this at scale without a safety net of course. We put our freelancers on steady billing cycles through projects regardless of any procurement periods or odd payment timing. They get the peace of mind of a steady paycheck as they are employed by Wethos, but with the autonomy and flexibility of freelance. In the future we look to expand into offering healthcare, insurance, maybe even 401Ks or school loan matching programs. We hope to make full-time freelance more accessible to everyone, to unlock skills that are too-often today trapped inside of traditional companies. Because freelancing alone as a media buyer might be tricky, but on teams it becomes exponentially more possible.
We want to give freelancers the autonomy and flexibility they love with the security and community of working full-time at one company. Intentional churn.
4. Just keep moving
After we launched teams in July, our revenue grew 400%, and about two weeks later we made the incredibly tough decision to shut down our offering of individual hires, and instead solely offer teams moving forward.
In Q3 overall, which is almost entirely due to my cofounder Claire Humphreys stepping up and closing contracts like nothing I’ve ever seen before, we continued to grow and quadrupled what we had done in the quarter prior. We have organizations booking teams months in advance, putting them on retainers, eventually allowing Wethos to become their “agency-of-record”… for anything. It frees up nonprofit folks to find a more flexible solution to working both with and in nonprofits for a more sustainable paycheck.
I think looking for product-market fit is a lot like looking for love. You keep *thinking* you’ve found it, but until the real thing comes along you just have no idea. We knew we had the right problem, we just weren’t looking at the solution in the right way, or rather, we were too focused on improving our existing solution to notice that perhaps the core of the offering needed to be revisited entirely. This sector is unique, and wildly understaffed; they needed something different, a resourcing solution that’s never been done before.
My advice when you’re pivoting is to just keep moving, because if you stop moving, you’ll likely drown. Chances are in those moments you don’t even realize you’re pivoting, all you know is that something is not working as well as it could be. There is so much clarity that I can articulate now that I’m looking back on this, but at the time we were just testing and learning on the fly, as scrappily as possible, to figure out where we could innovate. When ideas weren’t working we pulled the plug quickly, readjusted, and tried again. We didn’t just wake up one day and yell “eureka!”, the epiphany came washing over us in a period of weeks. We didn’t try to copy competitors, we didn’t blindly build tech no one needed, we listened to our customers and we executed by any means necessary. With every new conversation we shared, it got a little clearer, the fog lifted ever-so-slightly, and we felt we were on to something. And when that something worked, we kept pushing it, making it better and more scalable, and we quickly made the decision to pivot and do one thing well rather than two or three things terribly.
Slowly but surely, we crept our way into what today is collaborative freelance, which feels so fucking obvious now that it kind of makes me want to scream.
What else is new.
