Envato Reveals Microlancer, Freelance Service

Can you tell how excited Collis Ta’eed is to announce his new little startup project within the confines of Envato? Yeah, it’s pretty obvious.

This new initiative, Microlancer, is still very much underwraps for the time being but they’ve made the big announcement so as to get feedback as well as other excited individuals to sign up for the beta.

What is the service? It doesn’t take a genius to guess:

Microlancer is going to be a new way for freelancers to connect with buyers who are interested in getting small-scale creative jobs done simply, transparently, safely and quickly.

We have built a platform which allows buyers to easily explore a world of different services they can buy, such as logo customisation, photo retouching and many more.

We want to create a virtual shopfront for small creative services. Buyers will choose a service they want from a service provider they like.

They’ll be able to see upfront everything from price to turnaround time to number of revisions to work samples. They’ll know exactly what they’re getting, no surprises. When they’re happy to proceed, we’ll facilitate the transaction from start to finish.

My first reaction was comparing it to a small-project sized oDesk for the Envato community. Sure, you can do small projects via oDesk with great levels of transparency (seeing productivity logs, etc) but this one would be targeted for the freelancing community around their already existing properties.

Hear it from Collis’ own lips here:

This move makes complete sense of the growing company and their fast-growing community of designers, developers, and small time (and big time) service providers.

But if you’re a small business that wants to buy one of the many themes on ThemeForest but don’t have the technical chops to get it customized you can now get a bit of help with that customization that you’ve always wanted.

You can sign up for the beta here if you’re already an existing service provider.

Some critics might think that this may take away from the creators own source of freelancing business but I doubt that will be much of an impact – in fact, it may be a boon for many creators as they can now point their customers’ consulting and tweaking needs to Microlancer. In the form of a nice partnership it could work very well.

Is this something that you’ll be looking to participate in?