We just surveyed our 40,000 users to learn what they want. My original vision for the site was not to be another “me too” Craigslist or Yellow Pages for people to list their services for free to get leads. I wanted to create a place for people to showcase their passions, things they are good that aren’t necessarily for business reasons.
However, what happened is that freelancers and contractors adopted our site quickly as a place to get new business. It is nice to have all these users, but they want us to make them more money. Easier said than done. Everyone wants something for nothing. Make me some money. I’ll give you $5 if you give me $10 back. That’s good business practice, but it’s extremely difficult to achieve which is why most businesses fail. It hard enough to do that for your own business. To try to do it for thousands of other businesses is even more difficult. Some companies succeed at it, but most fail.
So we put out two surveys. You can view them here: www.skillwho.com/survey.aspx and www.skillwho.com/survey2.aspx. The results were clear. Our users want more leads, but most of them can’t afford to pay for them. Our users want a free website that sends them regular business. Well, if Craigslist, one of the worlds largest websites isn’t able to meet that need, how can 2 guys working part time achieve that? It’s a tough problem.
One of the things that I’m good at personally is marketing, particularly online. I can take someone’s service and present it in a way that is simple and compelling to potential customers. For example, small businesses often list what they do, without effectively communicating the benefit, which is all people care about. So let’s take a guy that does websites. He may list the features of his service like hosting, copywriting, graphic design, CSS, HTML, etc. But most people need websites to make money. This website designer would get a lot more customers if his primary message was: websites that increase sales and generate more customers. Sounds simple and obvious, but most business owners miss that crucial twist: attaching features with benefits.
I think we could use our skills to help small businesses, freelancers, and contractors get more customers, not just from SkillWho.com, but from the web and community at large. But we can’t do it for free. There would need to be fees associated with the services. Challenge according to our survey results: People 1. are skeptical of everything 2. don’t believe they could afford it even if they wanted it 3. want it free.
Although 14% of our users did say they’d be willing to pay for such services. If we could get 25% of them on a monthly service, that would be a good start. Once they start seeing results, more customers, others would jump on board.
If we become a marketing services company instead of a community, it completely changes our business model. And it’s not what I originally intended the site to be. We’d still keep the community up, but it would be secondary to the marketing services. The other option is to continue with the features I originally intended the have and hope the community adopts it. That’s probably more speculative though. Only about 8% of our users had any interest in talent contests with prizes. The rest just wanted leads for free. I am seriously considering trying the marketing services model. It’s a lot of work to get something like that up and running though. We would need to be absolutely certain that it would be profitable for us and our customers. We’re working on the details of the plan right now. More to come.
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