This article was written by Ken Leaver who comes from a product & commercial background. He has founded multiple companies and held senior product positions at SEA tech companies like Lazada and Pomelo Fashion.
Ken runs his own agency that helps early stage companies execute faster and cheaper. Check out his linkedin at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenleaver/
Guest Author: Ken Leaver
Fiverr’s stock price is down from its all time high of $323 in 2021 to just $24 today.
And one interpretation is that AI is replacing a lot of what Fiverr freelancers do. For example I used to use Fiverr folks for Youtube thumbnails, and now I typically use AI for this.
But what I think is most interesting to me about this is how freelancers need to further ’embed themselves’ into client teams and processes to continue to add value above and beyond AI.
These days it will be difficult to survive just making Youtube thumbnails. But if instead you create and manage the whole channel for your client than there is still lots of things in that scope, which AI is still not good at.
And the human acts as sort of the ‘glue’ between all the AI-driven tasks.
I also think this is gonna hit Upwork more and more.
Previously they tried to be very strict that all communication with Upworkers needs to happen via their messaging system.
But if I’m embedding 20-30 Upworkers into my company in various processes, of course I am going to want to add them to my Clickup, Slack, etc.
And if Upwork tried to enforce this strictly, i’d react by just saying ‘sayonara’ and finding my own freelancers somewhere else.
Rather Upwork and companies like them need to encourage their freelancers to embed themselves into clients, and then remain loyal to their ‘platform’ in other ways.
As this is what allows them to continue to survive in this new AI-driven world where a higher and higher percentage of people are freelancers rather then employees.
