However, the concrete possibilities offered by freelance services often remain unclear in the related discussions. I will therefore focus on describing the benefits and challenges of services procured from freelancers in this blog, offering concrete examples of freelance services, and describing how a small entrepreneur can make quick and effective use of freelance services in innovation.
Freelancers are well suited for one-off purchases and jobs. There is no need for the company to hire the freelancer, which brings savings, and the freelancer’s responsibilities can easily be limited to a specific area. An experienced freelancer has worked on a variety of tasks and probably learned to apply their competence in a versatile manner. Since many of the services offered by freelancers can be procured from around the world, the global freelance market ensures competitive prices in several sectors.
The one-off nature of freelance services may also pose challenges to the company if the freelancer is used in an area in which their expertise is needed later, and they are no longer available. Because of cultural and linguistic differences, freelance services may also cause ambiguity in the communication and understanding of wishes and plans. Moreover, in some freelance services, such as writing tasks, it may be difficult to assess the final quality of the freelancer’s work in advance. Therefore, it is a good idea to favour freelancers who offer several revisions during the process, if necessary.
Many international websites offer freelance services on the internet, and the most widely known around the world are upwork.com and fiverr.com. You can find many concrete video examples of fiverr.com on YouTube. In recent years, several videos have appeared on Youtube under the theme ‘I paid... on Fiverr’, in which vloggers acquire services from different freelance entrepreneurs on Fiverr and compare their quality. These videos are interesting in themselves, but they also provide solid practical examples of what can be achieved by freelance services even with very small resources.
On YouTube, you can videos of services acquired from freelancers by theme, using, for example, the following search words:
Logos: ‘I paid in fiverr to make logo’
Website: ‘I paid in fiverr to make a website’
Visual design: ‘I paid fiverr to render’
Video editing: ‘I paid fiverr to video’
Social media: ‘I paid fiverr to social media’
Writing jobs: ‘I paid fiverr to write’
Although many of these videos are very jovial in nature, they quickly help you understand the potential, speed and cost of freelance services. But best of all, these types of purchases allow your company to innovate quickly.
How to innovate quickly and efficiently with the help of freelance services?
When you are innovating your product, service or idea, you will go through a variety of ideas in your head. However, this process of innovation is often not straightforward and many ideas remain at the level of thought. If you are innovating together with others, you may not understand each other’s ideas the same way, and it proves difficult to find common ground for the ideas. In these and other worries, freelance services can be a great help.
Let’s just imagine that you are thinking about your company brand with a group of people; how to update your logo, what colours you want to use, how to communicate your values and so on. To support the conversation and refinement of ideas, you can send descriptions of your needs to a few freelance designers who quickly implement examples of high-quality brand concepts for you. This can be achieved through international freelance platforms by spending as little as 100 euros or less. You will then use these brand concepts to support your brand discussions during the ideation process of your brand. This kind of ideation will save you an enormous amount of time and help you understand things from the same perspective. The same approach can also be effectively applied to other topics, such as social media marketing and product design. And, best of all, this cycle of freelance services and ideation can be repeated over and over again with the freelancers, until you reach the end result you want for your brand.
You may be uncertain about using freelance services, particularly at the beginning, but when you make more purchases and learn to choose the freelancers that suit your needs, the benefits you get can be of real value to your small business. International freelance platforms are not suitable for all acquisitions. Some purchases, such as texts in Finnish, require, in principle, a writer who knows Finnish, and communication may be easier with a Finnish freelancer than with a foreign freelancer. It does not make much of a difference what freelance platform or platforms you use. If you realise the potential of freelance services from the perspective of your company, the most important thing is to get started and experiment.
Author: Peetu Virkkala, Project Researcher, MSc (Tech), University of Oulu Kerttu Saalasti Institute
In Kerttu Saalasti Institute's blog we write about the topics of the Institute's research groups, micro entrepreneurship education and the Institute's general topics. The authors are researchers, experts and members of networks.
Our topics are: micro entrenepreneurship, future manufacturing technologies, regional excellence, micro entrepreneurship education