Where To Find Effective, Premium, World-Class Freelancers – An Interview With Mike Frankel

This is a recent interview I did with Mike Frankel about starting his premium and advanced world-class expert freelancers business called Liquid.Social.

Thanks for the interview, Alex!

Our goal is to make remote consulting more accessible and convenient. Experts are constantly asked for free advice from their network, and feel uncomfortable charging for their time. We provide experts with a platform where they can assign value to their skills, and seamlessly charge for consulting sessions over video chat. We also provide a marketplace where people looking for specific advice can easily find an expert or freelancer in a specific niche to consult with.

Our existing business was dedicated to helping social media influencers with large followings find different ways to monetize their time by working with advertisers. We initially built our video chat tools for our influencer network to connect with their fans on a paid basis but realized that there was a bigger opportunity to extend those services to experts and freelancers.

As a technology company, our goal is to build scalable, one-size-fits-all solutions for our customers and experts, but remote freelancers are flexible by nature. They have changing work schedules, unique methods of working with customers, and hyper-focused specialties in certain niches. Building out tools for such a diverse workforce is an exciting challenge for us.

I think businesses, large and small, will benefit from working with specialized freelancers on various projects. Often, a salaried employee in an organization has to wear many hats, and approach various challenges that spring up by learning a new skill on the fly. As the freelancing industry matures and friction in project-specific hiring declines, businesses will be able to bring on support from specialists who can supply specific skills when needed. Outsourcing to qualified freelancers is a much more efficient way for managers to innovate and approach any challenges that fall outside of their day to day activities.

5) What would you recommend to others trying to get into the freelancing business?

The emergence of remote freelancing breaks down a lot of global barriers, which floods the workforce with a much higher supply of workers. This could potentially drive down the market costs for certain skills. Focusing on a specific niche related to a skill is a great way to stand out, and maintain the premium you can charge for your services.

Fiverr and Clarity are great services. Our business is more focused on developing longer term, trusting relationships between the expert and their client. We decided to put our focus on video chat as the medium so that these connections can blossom into a deeper connections. Our long-term goal is to build out additional tools that help facilitate additional business needs beyond advice once these connections are formed.