The Exchanges

Q a hundred million bucks and say, listen, Byron, keep 20% of the company. I get 80% because I'm bringing the revenue, but you go buy a bunch of these things and build a hundred million dollar revenue company that you're paying out, you know, 10,000 freelancers each year over a 100,000 dollars each. I mean, would you ever go for something like that or do you really enjoy your freedom?

A You know, What I enjoy is taking something that I've been part of building with my team and making it big, much bigger than we have right now. In our way to do that as a bootstrap, self-strap, you know, as an entrepreneur that's, that doesn't need VC funding, and I'm past that anyway, and even private equity would be questionable whether they could help us do what we, what we want to do. Our strategy is to go abroad, you know, go to other countries and take, you know, the, the, the, the self-serving fabric that we've created and make it accessible to people, you know, outside the United States that can grow. So we're kind of doing that on our own. Would I welcome the opportunity to talk with anybody else in this industry and see what it looks like to put businesses together to form something bigger, large, more scalable, so we can put more food on the table for freelance writers and, you know, uh, you know, help our business grow. Absolutely. I mean, it's, It rollups will are inevitable, right, Nathan? I mean, that's, I'm sure you have a lot of fans, you know, that are listening in that are on the PE side and the V, you know, the venture capital side and saying, who can we roll together? Who's doing it well out there, right? I mean, that's a big part of your audience.

AI assessment note: “Would I welcome the opportunity to talk with anybody else... Absolutely.”

Q Do you mean though you're now today in a week bringing on more paid customers than you added in terms of just new free users in the past?

A Well, the free users, I agree with that, your statement that you don't call them customers until they pay, but imagine this, when we were open and free for anybody to try, we could bring in freelancers that wanted to try to see what the platform was all about, or we could bring in people that were kicking our tires and, uh, you know, taking a look at our model, but not spending any money. Those customers, and those are really prospect customers, those Have to deal with them and call them or email them or market to them and figure out what they want. So by gating our model to say, if you're serious about content, we would like you to prepay a 39 dollar fully refundable prepayment. So pull out your card if you, if you really are interested in experiencing the quality of our, of our, of our platform and our service. So that's, that's what I mean. And so when you look at the numbers of Of all of those free people who actually bought a blog post for 17 dollars and 50 cents, you know, we're bringing in more people now that are paying 39 or more just for membership than we were for this.

AI assessment note: “we're bringing in more people now that are paying 39 or more”

Q business and he's trying to get cashflow positive. Um, for, for you though, I mentioned assets on the marketplace side of things. If I pay a hundred bucks through the mark, sorry, a thousand bucks through the marketplace and you help me get a writer, obviously you make your cut kind of in between there. What generally do you take and do you charge me extra or the writer extra?

A Oh, we're, we're very transparent in that, by the way, and most, most of these marketplaces are not, which really bothers me. Um, we're a seventy-thirty split. 70% goes to the freelancer, 30% to writer access, and that will continue on. We have no, no inclination to change those rates. They're, they're very fair, and interestingly enough, um, Nathan, you might find this interesting. Back in 1992, when I first started my When I started my first company, it was called Freelance Access. It was a graphic arts placement agency, literally a temp, a temp company, if you will, but focused on graphic designers and illustrators and copywriters. We, we were the first company, I think in the country to publicly announce our rates back in those days. We also invented something. Um, I, I came up with an idea called the portfolio access system where we scanned in printed samples of Of graphic designers work and illustrators work and printed out 11 by 17 dye sublimation printers. And you probably wouldn't remember this, but dye sub printers when they first hit the marketplace were 40,000 dollar printers.

AI assessment note: “we're a seventy-thirty split. 70% goes to the freelancer, 30% to writer access”

Q Out of curiosity, I think this is going to surprise people. Maybe, maybe it won't be surprising the customer. Don't name them, but the customer that pays you the most monthly, what do they pay you monthly?

A Um, we have some customers that are paying north of a 100,000 dollars a month, you know, to have content created at scale. Um, we have customers paying a hundred dollars a month, you know, including their 39 dollar a month fee, right? So that's, that's interesting because that's kind of our problem, right? We're servicing 93 different industries, more than 90 industries, right? We are servicing SMBs, tiny little startups. We're also servicing Fortune, 500 companies and agencies, either micro entrepreneurs or full blown thousand person agencies that are trying to scale content often for tens of thousands of clients. They're looking to, everyone's looking to us towards Give me a great writer, you know, make sure they're proficient and skilled and make sure that they can work within the confines of what our orders are. The specifications, the requirements, the rule sets that we can tag on to an order to make sure orders are done the right way. Uh, built in a keyword optimization if you need it, you know, checking keyword density analysis or particular requirements. I need X, Y, and Z sourced. I need to know your sources. I need you to research these five websites, you know, or Every project is different, and we're dealing with so many different types of projects. That's the other problem, right? Because we're representing writers, editors, translators, content strategists, and gue…

AI assessment note: “we have some customers that are paying north of a 100,000 dollars a month”

Q Okay, got it. And, and, uh, let's just make it easy. Let's say it was 5000, right? 5000 businesses like me have paid you to access your freelancer talent. How many freelancers have they paid at least a dollar through your platform over the past 30 days?

A Probably about the same number. I mean, when I say they've done business with us, they've made a transaction with us. So, um, remember a couple things, Nathan, we, we charge a monthly subscription fee, you know, for the, for the service. So it's kind of like a platform as a service. Those fees range from 39 to 59 to 79, depending upon what you want. If you just want access to writers and very light software, no problem. But if you want our full service solutions designed, for example, for agencies, That are scaling content. You might need our white label solution, and you might need access to our Shutterstock Getty image photo library. So your content managers can manage content like one content manager can manage content for 50 clients. If you're an agency writer access, maybe more. Um, so the platform builds in automation. It builds in, you know, building a team up, um, you know, uh, launching articles well in advance of when they're due and Working on a month to month basis to place orders, you know, manage the workflow, queue up the content, push it out directly to WordPress, Facebook, you know, wherever it needs to go, um, and using our engines and software to do that. So it's like a, it's like a content marketing workflow software on steroids.

AI assessment note: “Probably about the same number. I mean, when I say they've done business with us”

Q Interesting. Why isn't it cheaper to replace those writers that you pay the most with full time employees that you pay 60,000 dollars fixed and have them write full time?

A Before we launched Writer Access, we were a full service content marketing agency, servicing customers like the company store Brookstone, FTD, Iron Mountain, Salesforce, great, great brands. And we struggled as an agency, like all agencies do, particularly when you're a big agency servicing those big brands. When you lose a client, it can be a devastating hit to the agency, right? Because you have full-time employees, as you just mentioned, relying upon salaries to do the work. But when that goes away, and we had accounts that were half a million, we had one account that was a million dollar account, another one that was about three quarters of a million. We happened to lose We didn't lose those accounts, but they were up on their two year, uh, you know, uh, programs with us and they just kind of ended and we had produced a voluminous amount of content that they just needed to take a time out and say, let us sort this out, see where we're going. We need to take a break. So, you know, that, that really was the trigger for us to say, we want to do this differently. Number one, we want our clients to work directly with freelance writers, right? We don't want a middleman to have to Send an email alert to a client saying your contents ready to take a look at. Let me know what you think. We wanted the feedback to go directly to the writers. We also wanted the tone and the voice Of in…

AI assessment note: “When you lose a client, it can be a devastating hit... Because you have full-time employees”