April 2nd was a big day for the Envato team as we launched the open Beta of our new marketplace for freelance services, Microlancer. You can now freely explore the site and buy services!

Microlancer allows those interested in digital creative services like logo design or photo retouching to easily connect with freelancers who have these skills. By creating a platform which allows freelancers to operate their own virtual store-front and to spell out all of the terms of their service upfront to customers, we are taking a different approach to the model used on many other freelance marketplaces.

The focus of the site is to make everything easier for both the buyer and freelancer. A buyer knows everything that they will get upfront, things like how much a service costs and how many revisions they will get. The freelancer doesn’t have to bid for jobs or actively compete against other freelancers for the same job – instead, buyers choose who they want to work with directly based on their service offering. Collis (Envato’s CEO) explained it this way:

Freelance marketplaces are a billion dollar industry, but current sites are virtually all based on the premise of quoting for a job. It’s like going to a hairdresser and having them bid and quote on your particular hair. Some types of service work are better done with fixed price, fixed services. We’re bringing that mindset to creative / tech freelancing.

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Hello all! Jordan here to update you on where we are at with Microlancer’s development and the Service Provider Closed Beta, which we announced recently. We’ve had an overwhelming response to the announcement of the Beta and it was wonderful for us to see how many of you are interested in Microlancer. On Wednesday, we begun to invite the first batch of service providers to Microlancer. So far we’ve invited 50 authors, we have plans to rapidly invite more of those who indicated interest in using the site over the coming weeks. So if you registered and are still waiting for an invite – sit tight, there’s still plenty of time left!

At this point, the Beta is for service providers to get their profiles and services set up, as well as being an opportunity for us to get a bunch of valuable feedback on how their experience with Microlancer has been so far. Much of the site functionality is switched off and there are no buyers. So far, so good! We’ve had a bunch of top Marketplace authors submit services for review, and we’ve already gotten some great feedback!
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Today is a big day at Envato as we have a really exciting announcement to make. For the last three months, a new team has been hard at work deep in the bowels of Envato HQ (it’s actually really nice!) on our latest product. We’re really pumped to share this with you and hope you can see the possibilities it will open up within the Envato ecosystem. It’s called Microlancer, and Collis wanted to record a little message to introduce it to you.

Introducing Microlancer