Envato Notes

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Microlancer: Eating Our Own Dog Food Posted: 08 Sep 2013 07:09 PM PDT Though Envato now has 100+ employees, its most recent product, Microlancer, operates like a lean startup. Microlancer is a marketplace for buying and selling design and web dev services like logo design or PSD to HTML. It helps freelancers access a new source of income, and helps buyers get work done simply and transparently. We launched in beta during April and have been constantly testing, refining and iterating on the product since then. We have a small team, including one lead designer and one lead front-end developer. Like most startups, there's an abundance of design and development work to be done, and a shortage of time in which to do it. While our design and dev leads focus on core product work like designing and refining the Microlancer user interface, we've outsourced a bunch of smaller jobs to Microlancer service providers. This allows us to have various streams of design and development work running at once, while keeping the team small and focused. This vector illustration created by our provider mausventura was based on the concept of "freelance nirvana". It has formed part of our social media branding, was turned into a series of desktop wallpapers, and is now the basis for a series of official t-shirts. We've worked with Sztufi on our official service provider badge, Japh on the WordPress dev for our upcoming Microlancer blog, and pixelnourish to develop our newsletter template. In the coming weeks and months, we'll outsource many more design and development jobs to our own service providers. Sure, it's what they call "eating your own dogfood". But we believe that many startups can benefit from outsourcing non-critical design and development work to a service like Microlancer. Here are a few benefits we've noticed: You can cover skill gaps within small teams. A marketplace like Microlancer allows you to get a wide variety of work done by specialists, including things like logo design, vector illustration, landing page design, app icon design, PSD to HTML and WordPress blog customization. It frees up your core team to focus on its most important work, like the product's UI and key features. It's easy to budget. You know exactly how much the service will cost, upfront. Whereas small projects done internally don't lend themselves well to detailed time and expense tracking. You can have multiple streams of work running in parallel. A designer or developer can only work on so many projects at once before context-switching starts to take its toll. By outsourcing work to different freelancers the work can be done in parallel. If your design and development team feels a little overstretched, consider using a service like Microlancer to handle non-critical creative work for your startup. It will help your team stay small, lean and focused on what truly matters.

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