Hello everyone. I’ve been thinking on developing a platform where independent workers can advertise their services and people looking for hiring people (either for full-time jobs or short-term contracts) can meet, have conversations and possibly do business.
The current major platforms out there nowadays have a serious flaw: they treat their userbase as their private cattle, as their income slaves! As examples, freelancer.com is full of tiny traps and takes 10% of all of the income that is done through their platform and Upwork takes a whopping 20% cut! Both of these platforms provide little to almost no value yet demand this insane tax from their users. I solely use these platforms as meeting places to find new regular customers, and even for this purpose they are of little use nowadays. It’s no wonder that the quality of the bids of these platforms have decreased dramatically: who would accept to work in such disadvantageous terms?
I think that a business model around taking a fixed fee from the users that is used for the maintenance of the databases and servers is viable and could severely undercut these lazy business and give them a run for their money. The bigger the user base, the smaller is the individual fee (because the servers can handle the load of many users, making the individual cost smaller).
Is there someone else that also faces the same issues that I face and would like more competition in the independent worker networking business?