Envato, an Australian firm that owns a variety of online marketplaces for digital resources including Themeforest, Audiojungle and Videohive, as well as a number of tutorial and media outlets such as AppStorm, Psdtuts+ and Creattica, has announced a new site today called Microlancer.
It’s an online markeplace aimed at creative freelancers, designed to help them connect with businesses who are interested specifically in hiring out for small-scale creative jobs. Some examples of this could include logo customization, photo retouching and some quick copy writing.
The idea is to help businesses find a quick and easy way of getting little jobs done quickly. So when it comes to updating a specific part of a website, for example, firms don’t need to worry about finding a freelancer that can do absolutely everything related to web design.
Microlancer will therefore be a virtual storefront for small creative services, allowing buyers to choose a very specific task from a vast number of listed freelancers and businesses. Rather than quoting a price after the project has been confirmed, the website will instead offer everything upfront, including prices, turnaround time and revisions, so that both sides know exactly what to expect.
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Once the deal has been confirmed, Envato then handles the transaction from start to finish.
“We believe that for small jobs, it doesn’t make sense for buyers to have different freelancers bid on their job and then assess whether those freelancers can do the job,” Jordan McNamara, support and community manager at Envato said. “At Microlancer we’ll be reviewing all the services on the site, ensuring that buyers have a quality experience. Getting a little job done should be as easy as picking a great freelancer and getting started.”
Envato promises that they’ll handle all of the administrative tasks such as tracking jobs, communications and taking payments, although as a user you will also have access to all the usual features such as profile and service pages.
Microlancer is only being launched in beta to begin with, so if you want to be involved as a service provider, you’ll need to head on over to this webpage and register your interest. The company has emphasized that they’re still finalizing some of the details ahead of its full launch, which is coming “very soon”.
The introduction of Microlancer should put some pressure on Tweaky, a website customization marketplace that was launched last month. The latter has the same focus on very small creative adjustments, handling payments through Stripe and PayPal.
PeoplePerHour is another online marketplace for businesses and freelancers, which launched last summer and rolled out a new iPhone app in October. Neither PeoplePerHour or Tweaky seem to have gained any significant traction yet though, creating an opportunity for Envato to innovate and become a market leader.
Image Credit: JUNG YEON-JE/AFP/GettyImages
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