India is the powerhouse helping businesses around the world: Freelancer CEO

We're actually huge in India, it is the number one demographic for us, says Barrie

One of the positive impacts of the US tariff war may be a high demand for freelancers, believes Matt Barrie, chief executive officer (CEO) of Freelancer, one of the largest freelancing marketplaces. He spoke with Shivani Shinde on the sidelines of the recently concluded India Global Forum on how India is a powerhouse of talent and also one of the major regions of its freelancer base at 30 million. Edited excerpts:

 

How is Freelancer different from other freelancing marketplaces globally?

 

We have the world's largest crowd-sourced marketplace of freelancers, with 80 million people in it. It's growing by about 25,000 a day. We work with businesses, large and small, all the way from consumers who might want something done for $10, to the biggest thing we have been running right now — a $10 million project for gene editing, the central nervous system of humans, with the National Institute of Health, where we tap into the genius of the world.

 

How significant is India for Freelancer?

 

We have about 30 million freelancers from India. We're actually huge in India, it is the number one demographic for us. India is the powerhouse, helping businesses compete against the Amazons in the world.

 

What is the business model of Freelancer?

 

It's like a marketplace, so it's free to sign up as a freelancer. They can bid for projects for free and set up their portfolio. Likewise for clients, it's free to sign up to post a project. It is only after a project is awarded that we step in. If you give the project to them and they accept it, we charge the client 3 per cent and the freelancer 10 per cent. It's actually very inexpensive.

 

Isn’t 10 per cent fee on freelancer a tad higher compared to other players?

 

Actually, no. If you look at a lot of the main marketplaces nowadays, they charge a high of 20, 25 to 30 per cent.

 

How has the freelancing market changed post-Covid, especially now when people are getting back to office?

 

There was a macro environment effect coming out of Covid. The big shift that's happening right now is all the freelancers are AI-powered.

 

Every space that you look at, especially white-collar jobs, there's now software that empowers you to the next level. A freelancer could have been an average copywriter before, but now, they can be an exceptional copywriter with the help of Claude.ai or ChatGPT, or any other tool.

 

You could be an average illustrator before, but now with the help of tools from Midjourney.ai, Stable Diffusion et al, you can be an exceptional illustrator.

 

What we're seeing broadly across the marketplace is that skills have gone through the roof because of AI. The delivery of work has been a lot quicker, we're seeing a lot more liquidity. For example, you can post a project on Freelancer and write a title description, and people can bid on it or have a “Contest” where people compete, and the contest goes from very small to very large.

 

What we are seeing in contests is that in the last year, there has been a 60 per cent increase in the number of entries. We get about 70,000 entries a day into our contests. The delivery of work has accelerated, liquidity is accelerated, and also the skills have accelerated.

 

What does this mean for the platform?

 

We used to kind of have the widest range, at the lowest-cost talent platform. Because you only pay for someone when you use them. Now, we've actually transformed to have the widest range at the lowest cost, with the highest skill. And India is the great winner here because it is the powerhouse and the number one demographic in terms of providing services.

 

AI has led to democratisation of technologies and skill. What we're seeing is not just that skills are being lifted, but freelancers across different skill areas up their game. Even those who used to do the most unskilled level of work, such as doing basic data entry, are now producing illustrations, they have figured out how to prompt AI. You're seeing all sorts of things happening. This also means it's becoming so much easier to start businesses as well. And I think that's going to be a massive trend.

 

What kind of impact do you see on freelancers due to the tariff wars?

 

These are very interesting times. One of the biggest Chinese e-commerce marketplaces, which has a revenue of over a trillion dollars, about a year ago came to us and said they need to find new markets and we are required to localise and culturally adapt marketing practices and their products in specific regions. They're now hiring freelancers in the country they want to enter and launch the way it’s conducive in that region.

 

Freelancer allows them to do so because of a very flexible labour force. By next week, we're about to do a whole campaign on this. If you want to pick people from any country in the world, in the skills that you want, then you are going to be coming to Freelancer.