Max Brun discusses Upwork's strategy as a horizontal marketplace, explaining why the platform chose design, web development, and marketing over specialized verticals, and how partnerships help vet talent across diverse categories instead of building everything in-house.
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So, you know, were there any specific kind of learnings as far as, you know, how you managed across so many categories when it comes to that on the talent side at Upwork?
This is a really, really tough call on, you know, putting myself in the shoes of, you know, if I'm starting a talent marketplace today, do I go vertical or do I go horizontal, right? And vertical, obviously, like there were many, many points in time of building product when I thought like, why aren't we dedicating more resources to this verticalized roadmaps? you can delight your users more easily. So better user experience, you can have specialized tools and flows. But the beauty about horizontal marketplaces, especially if they can kind of, if the demand can get more, like can access more than one type of supply, is that unit economics tend to be better. So for us, it was really, really difficult to be great at, you know, vetting an engineer and then a call center person in the same flow. So one of the, you know, one of the things we started looking at and actually implementing was on recognizing that you need specialized capabilities to do this and then using things like partnerships. So we developed partnerships to you know, for technical talent vetting. And then like we have this roadmap of other ways to vet talent because vetting talent is, is one of your secret, you know, it's, it's a, it's really a core capability that you need to have. You need to get that right. It's the first question that your supply side is going to ask, like, how do you vet these people? How do you know they are who they are? How do you know they're going to be able to do the work? So in that horizontal marketplace, approach. I think it's really key to pick categories. Like we never went into in-person work because it's, you know, not as adjacent as design, web development, marketing. Like those are our 3 big ones. And then really recognizing, okay, do I buy or build this capability to, you know, understand who the worker is and then Maybe some tools as well. We invested in some tools to make the work product easier to happen, but we did not take the approach. It wasn't a luxury to say, we'll build all of this ourselves. Like it's, it's all going to be done in-house.
