Twine, an online marketplace for creative freelancers in design, music and film, recently launched a new initiative designed to bring quality to the gig economy: They’ll be manually curating the right creatives for each task in order to efficiently pair high-quality jobs with high-quality workers. I chatted with the founder and CEO of the company in order to learn more about just what Twine brings to the freelance table.
Lack of Quality Scares People Away From the Gig Economy
Twine’s approach is to review every freelancer’s pitch before sending it to the company who posted the project’s original brief. It keeps the companies happy, since they’ll only see the worthwhile pitches, and it keeps the freelancers satisfied, since Twine will give them “active feedback” on each rejected pitch.
But Can Manual Curation Scale?
One issue faced by those who attempt to manually curate online bids is the difficulty of scaling the process. Manual labor can’t scale at the pace that the tech community often pushes for. But Logan isn’t concerned. We deeply care about the creative industry. For example, creatives can post “collaboration briefs” to find other likeminded freelancers to work with and build their skills. Also, when someone publishes their completed project they credit the people that contributed to it. The project is then automatically added to everyone’s portfolio – giving everyone the recognition they deserve. The credit where credit is due. We really want to support the creative industry rather than take advantage of it.” In the future, he added, Twine may well incorporate automation in addition to the manual curation: Investor seem happy with the process: Twine has just closed a $500k fundraising round from angel investors Chris Mairs, Jeremy Silver, Stephen Pankhurst and Greater Manchester Combined Authority. It has raised $1.1m to date. The platform boasts 195k registered users from 179 countries, who have posted more than 10,000 creative project briefs. By focusing on the artist niche, Twine can presumably focus on serving their specific audience well.
