Ravenry is evolving.
We started our business two years ago because we want to help more high-skilled freelancers in Southeast Asia find better opportunities.
We believe that high-skilled freelancers will become more important in the future of work. Talents increasingly prefer more flexible ways of working, while organisations need talents with more specialised expertise.
Ravenry wants to empower these talents to grow their business and capabilities.
Expanding into a new vertical
We started in a specific segment in the beginning: the research vertical. Since we started, we have connected our network of freelance analysts and research professionals with more than 1,600 projects globally.
As we built that business, we found that our clients often use our research insights to create marketing content in the forms of white papers and blog posts.
They found that research-backed content is more engaging as they provide more value to the readers.
However, generating these content and weaving them into stories are not easy tasks, even when our clients already have the key insights from our research.
The key ingredients to creating great content are great content and also great writers, and while we have been providing the former many of our clients still struggle to find the right writers.
We thought this was a great opportunity for us to expand our offerings.
In these two years, we have built capabilities in recruiting, vetting, and managing our network of analysts and researchers. Why not leverage our platform and capabilities to help writers too?
That is why we are moving into the content writing vertical today!
Focusing on one key value proposition
While we are making a lateral move into a new vertical, our team decided this was the right opportunity to reimagine our value proposition as a company.
When we started our business, we thought that the open freelancing marketplace is not a very efficient model for both freelancers and clients to meet one another.
(Don’t get us wrong. We still thought they have significantly improved the client-freelancer discovery process by aggregating all the service providers.)
We hypothesised that a managed freelancing platform, where clients only need to interact with one party i.e. Ravenry rather than many freelancers, is more convenient and provides a superior experience.
Similarly, for the freelancers, Ravenry acts as an intermediary that helps them negotiate fees, standardise scope, and collect payment from the clients. That way freelancers can just focus on doing what they do best, which in our case was to provide research services.
However, we found out that there is huge value in connecting the freelancers directly to the clients.
Clients are able to build longer term relationships with talents, and talents can deepen their understanding of the clients’ needs and in turn provide even more superior services.
We realised that the greatest value we provide our clients and freelancers is actually in the matchmaking process.
For the clients:
- Ravenry helps them source for the right talents quickly
- Ravenry scopes their requirements and manages expectations on possible output
- Ravenry simplifies the administrative and payment processes
For the freelancers:
- Ravenry helps them find new clients
- Ravenry clarifies the scope of the projects and their budget upfront
- Ravenry simplifies the administrative and payment processes
With that realisation, we decided to focus our energy on only the matchmaking process.
Ravenry will focus on curating and deepening our understanding of our freelancers’ skills and capabilities. We will also focus on developing great matching experience for clients who are looking for specific talents.
This way, we can make sure great freelance talents can find interesting and sustainable work that fit their strengths. And at the same time, clients can use their time more productively and enjoy greater writing output.
Ravenry moving forward
Our mission is to help more freelancers do meaningful work in a sustainable way.
As we explore a new business model and expand into a new vertical, we hope to understand our freelancers more deeply to figure out what other value we can add.
We are really passionate about talents in the Southeast Asian region. We believe that this is a growth region, and that talents in this region need more help finding the right opportunities and building the right capabilities.
We are eyeing several exciting areas to grow into, but we really want to commit to making this new change successful first.
You will see many changes coming up in the next few months at Ravenry.
We have enjoyed an undeserved magnitude of support from all of our freelancers and clients thus far.
We hope that the evolution in our business will only serve to add more value to you.
