Why’s The Freelance Economy Moving Slower Than We Thought?
We'll continue linear growth at 20-30% a year, and that's a good thing.
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Why’s The Freelance Economy Moving Slower Than We Thought?
Calm the jets. Our once little space is growing 20-30% annually for the past 10 years.
BUT it’s a common question I get, especially since studies come out every 2-3 years saying things like ‘over half the workforce will be freelancers by 2027’ or 60% of C-Suite executives expect freelancers to replace full time employees.
How do I answer this question?
I start with the first principle: is there a shift to an independent contractor based freelance economy?
My answer: Yes, but like every technology, we’ve had our waves of hype cycles. The ‘gig’ economy was one. The ‘passion’ economy was one. Arguably we’re in the middle of a Web 3 one.
Beneath each buzzword hype, when the dust settles there’s been a 20-30% increase in adoption towards a remote first, freelance first world, with the supporting data being money spent on freelancers and number of freelancers.
So why does it seem like the growth isn’t aligned with the projections?
My take is that…
We’re not Uber. We won’t grow like Uber and ride sharing. Our problem statement has 100 times more variables, inconsistency, and challenges.
We’ll probably never be a winner takes all or oligopoly market.
The relationships needed are too in detail, freelancers systemically are too fragmented to be on one platform, and the technologies behind Web 3 look like they’ll decouple a need for one platform.
Freelancing in itself is an ever changing definition.
20 years ago the mass majority of clients considered freelancing ‘outsourcing’ with a focus on geographical arbitrage.
10 years ago when I told people I was a freelancer clients thought it was because it couldn’t get a job. My ‘in’ was that I was a scholarship athlete so I had to work on a project basis.
5 years ago an early majority of clients looked to freelancers for strategic projects like website development, content generation, etc, but still freelancing was looked at as a backup plan or ‘in transition’ phase
3 years ago freelancing was looked at as the ‘gig’ economy, even though the majority of freelancers today hate that term and don’t work on a short term, task basis.
Today freelancing is normal. BUT there’s still millions of terms - crowdsourcing, contingent talent, contracting - all trying to describe the shift to outcome/project based work.
And freelance leaders internally are fighting between if we need everyone to be full time freelancers or we should focus on the projects or outcomes regardless of if the person is employed full time.
What can we expect going forward?
Not to sound completely bland, but more of the same continued linear growth of 20-30% a year.
This is far from a bad thing. We might not be the 23 year old Unicorn in sweatpants.
But we can become a real, sustainable economy that works for everyone.
Over and out.
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