Hey everyone! Today, I share the mic with Matt Barrie, founder and CEO of Freelancer, a global online freelancing and crowdsourcing marketplace.
Tune in to hear Matt’s approach to business in general and how he grew Freelancer to $50 million in revenue last year, how to deal with people who aren’t so receptive to feedback, and why he likes owning 100% of a company.
Time-Stamped Show Notes:
Before we jump into today’s interview, please rate, review, and subscribe to the Growth Everywhere Podcast!
[00:40] Before we jump into today’s interview, please rate, review, and subscribe to the Growth Everywhere Podcast!
[01:56] There are about 35 million people using Freelancer across the globe.
[02:40] Freelancer is also associated with Escrow, a global payments business (sort of like PayPal).
[03:03] Escrow helps people buy things that are unique and expensive.
[03:18] Escrow is taking deposits for the first commercial space flight.
[04:35] Freelancer’s revenue for 2018 was $50 million.
[05:02] Matt thinks at his age, he is unemployable and it would therefore be better to create his own work.
[09:22] They have acquired 23 or 24 other companies.
[10:20] Matt started small and slowly increased the scope of Freelancer over time.
[11:48] They got a lot of their customers from luck and timing.
[12:22] In 1999, he acquired a payments business and had to hire 60 people, split his management team, and rebuild the technical stack.
[13:48] It’s easier to buy a competitor than to buy a completely separate business.
[14:30] Matt doesn’t like getting involved in businesses that have VCs involved.
[18:03] If your revenue growth is growing at 40% year over year, you would typically get a 10x valuation.
[19:46] Matt has put out a bunch of articles and videos on LinkedIn and YouTube. He says all the knowledge you need is on the Internet.
[20:20] Matt likes producing content, because it’s a great way to meet interesting people and learn new things in return.
[23:06] Matt has made some venture investments, but he considers them philanthropy and doesn’t necessarily expect a huge return.
[25:25] Matt prefers to own 100% of a business.
[25:40] To be able to consolidate revenue, you need to own 100% of the business.
[26:07] eBay went market by market around the world and would find local partners.
[26:30] They would split the business 50/50, but this meant that years later, they had to spend a lot to buy out their partners.
[29:45] When it comes to feedback, it’s either Matt or management delivering the news.
[30:10] While people are often receptive to feedback, there are times when it is received poorly and people become resentful.
[30:50] One new tool Matt thinks has added value to his life is F45, which is a computer-run Crossfit program.
[31:45] Matt recommends the book Propaganda .
[33:20] Matt also likes the podcast “Macro Voices”.
Quick post today to show you how to outrank your competitors fast with SEO.
But first and foremost, in a recent Growth Everywhere podcast I interview the cofounder of Crush Empire, Bryce Welker. He talks about how he acquired 80 million customers (50% through conferences and 15% through cold calls) or got them to take an action, and you should definitely check it out.
For one of the projects that I have, we ended up buying another website. We went around searching for sites that looked like they were kind of dead by using Ahrefs. Some people were looking for millions of dollars for their sites, but we were able to get one fairly cheap.
A lot of sites in this niche are fairly outdated so we looked at what keywords they were ranking for and basically all we did is just redirect traffic. And, quite frankly, traffic is really up.
Just look for expiring domains in a target niche and look at what tends to rank well and what hasn’t been updated in a long time. Reach out to the webmasters and see if they’re interested in getting rid of it.
In this case, the webmaster was simply not interested anymore. He wanted to go pursue other things. As they say, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Once you have the site, you can either take it or you can redirect the traffic. We opted for the latter.
If you want a quick fix, and an SEO booster shot, this is one way to go about it. After we used Escrow to complete the transaction, it was smooth sailing.
