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Building Passionbits, a career-tech platform for freelancers
Passionbits is an online community, that connects freelance content creators with clients, providing job opportunities in the digital content space.
Role: Joined an early-stage startup as a product design intern and continued as a product designer at passionbits. Being the only designer on the team, I had an opportunity to work closely with the founder and the tech team to build the career-tech platform for freelancers.
Duration: 1 Year
The vision of the product is to democratize content creation by building a community of freelance content creators and helping them to get discovered by clients who are in need of content to grow.
Background
The team, freelancing in the content space and handling projects at multiple scales, already had a set of assumptions on what the product needed to address. My role was to research and validate the assumptions and come up with new insights that could shape the product roadmap.
Process
1. Competitor study
Started by studying major freelancing platforms (online platforms and how freelance workflow happens off-platforms) to understand the space and went through user opinions on several discussion forums.
2. Primary research
User interviews were conducted majorly on video calls. The objective was to understand the general attitude of freelancers towards the existing platforms and their pain points. We also validated a few of the assumptions that helped us to build the product roadmap.
Around 10 creators from India and 10 creators from the US were interviewed (The product was aimed at the US market initially). We had to understand the difference between the freelance ecosystem in India and in the US. The interviews were documented and summarised.
3. Mapping interview
Every conversation was recorded and summarised. Each point was mapped on several parameters like payment, finding new clients, building invoices, etc.
Painpoints and data from the interviews were mapped based on the common theme that they are related to, like - pricing, collaboration, finding new clients, etc. The intersections helped us to understand the relation between the different segments.
4. Actions based on the Interview Insights
Inverting the discovery flow
The discovery of creators in most of the freelancing platforms was through the creator profiles attached with their hourly rates. The portfolio and content samples came only at the end of the discovery process. We inverted this flow and put the content piece at the beginning of the client's journey.
Commission-Free
Addressing the high commission fee which was a major pain point for freelancers- The core idea was that 100% of the money should go to the creators and this attracts a better community of creators who deliver great output, which is a win-win situation for both the creator and the client community.
Our initial narrative on the Product Landing page
After the launch,
We started getting sign-ups on the platform, but very less creators uploaded content to the portfolio, especially the short-form content pieces which include brand taglines, product descriptions, etc. This was a major problem because the entire model was built around the creator portfolio.
Redesigning Onboarding Flow
The onboarding flow was re-designed to enable users to understand the value the product offers and they clearly communicate the action that needs to be taken by them in order to access opportunities on the platform.
This did decrease the number of emails/calls we used to receive earlier, enquiring when they could expect to receive job opportunities. However, there was not a significant increase in the number of portfolios built after signing up.
The marketing activities were happening in parallel and multiple experiments like mentoring sessions, portfolio reviews, Instagram education reels and so on.
Some of the screenshots from early experiments with the marketing
Change in the narrative
After multiple experiments, conversations, and brainstorming sessions we came up with a new structure to place the product and change the way we presented it to the freelancers.
Three broad categories were identified based on the stage and motivations of creators in their freelance journey - Start, Sustain, and Scale. The aim was to help these creators to scale up or simply make their workflow efficient.
The product also had 3 broad categories:
Portfolio, which we called the front-end of the freelance business,
Office/Back-end, which enables the smooth functioning of client collaboration, and
Community, helps freelancers to collaborate, refer, and learn from other freelancers on the platform.
Screenshots from the landing page with the new narrative and explaining the value product offers to the freelancers
Learnings
Working in the startup helped me in multiple ways as an individual and also as a designer. To summarize my Key learnings:
Pace: High volume of deliverables was expected from the team while still maintaining quality, which helped me improve my speed of design and most importantly prioritization of tasks.
Communication: Communicating the value of design seemed not necessary in the beginning as I knew that the team had already prioritized design in the product development process. It took me a while to realize that the process of design was highly influenced by the priorities that were already set by the team. Going a step back questioning and analyzing the need for each product requirement at its raw state is something I learned later.
Decision making: The founder of passionbits was my mentor during my journey. I struggled in my initial days with the high-level product decisions that had to be made. But I was trained to make independent decisions and bring in team members to refine and take the idea forward.
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