I am excited about this! I have bought 3 codes from Saastronautics' deals and I am getting ready to buy more.
- Grooming
- Health
- Fitness
- Religion
- Relationships
And many more
When people are asking how to do these things we will be able to help. That is a win/win/win for everyone. Thanks, KIWI!!!
I'm tentatively giving this five stars, because of its potential. This platform is very different from all of the other freelancing gig sites.
I've been wanting to get onto Fiverr and some of the others, but I wasn't looking forward to playing the SEO game. On those platforms, you have to create a bunch of different listings and figure out a bunch of keywords, etc. Then you have to lowball your prices to hope to find someone willing to hire you. Then you have to exchange emails several times to get the details on what the client wants. That's a lot of work upfront that you don't get paid for. If you do get repeat business, it's all done through that platform at the low rates you advertised. It's hard to build your business outside of that platform.
Kiwi's approach is better. You don't create ads. You don't game the SEO. You just sign in to the platform and wait for a popup to inform you that somebody is interested in hiring you. At that point, you hop onto a Zoom call with the client. The first three minutes are unpaid. That's when the client is briefly interviewing you to see if you're the [wo]man for the job, and you briefly interview the client to see what the client wants to be done. If you like each other, the call moves into the paid session.
In the paid session, the client stays live with you on the Zoom call as you do the job. You get the client's feedback as you go. It keeps you on track, and it gets your questions answered without having to do an email exchange. These jobs that you do on Zoom are intended to be short gigs under an hour.
Now here's the part that sold me. For gigs that will take longer than an hour, Kiwi encourages you to take it outside of their platform. You negotiate with the client privately. You can quote whatever rate you feel is reasonable. You can build a real relationship with a potential repeat client and build your offline business. You aren't trapped in the lowball gig economy. Look at your time on Kiwi as doing low-priced short intro jobs, knowing that you will probably convert a few of them to repeat, higher-paying future jobs.
The big negative with Kiwi is that it's an extremely new platform. I've been online for roughly six hours each on two days and haven't had any gigs yet (I just work on other stuff while I'm waiting). The Kiwi team is mostly hammering down the last of the infrastructure right now and squashing bugs. Imran says that they will start advertising Kiwi in earnest in January. That's when we should start seeing more traffic.
They didn't make it clear in the write-up above, but you really will want to buy multiple codes. When you sign up and pick the service that you want to offer to clients, it's a very narrow sub-specialty. The theory is that nobody can be an expert at an entire program (like Photoshop or Premiere), but you are probably extremely good at parts of it. If you have multiple codes, then you can use one code for each of the several sub-specialties that you're good at.
No matter what the current price of the codes is (it's slowly going up), it's a bargain. Grab several now. I bought ten codes. I redeemed one now for Adobe Premiere. When they allow us to redeem the multiples in a few months, I will redeem my codes for several more sub-specialties within Premiere. I will probably also redeem a few codes for sub-specialties within Photoshop.
If you haven't yet, watch the Saastronautics webinar about Kiwi on the Saastronautics YouTube channel (I don't see it linked above).
A friend mentioned KIWI - a new freelancing platform promising a fresh perspective on how clients and freelancers can work.
I purchased a code for $9 at around 1:00PM, set up my expertise, and surprisingly, within 12 hours I got a job and made $12.5 covering all my investment. It was really refreshing.
As far as, how the platform goes, it seems to be at the very early stages. Payout are only possible via Paypal which would be an issue for the freelancers who have no access to Paypal in their countries (Note: I had a chance to talk with the owner of KIWI and he mentioned their Payoneer integration will be live in a week or two)
Currently, you can't change your per-hour charges, cannot add multiple skills. Setting up single expertise is also unique in the way that you are shown few videos of certain tasks and you specify if you can help with similar tasks. It gives clients a broad view of what the freelancer can offer and then the platform encourages the freelancer to talk to the client outside of the app/platform to understand their requirements in detail and discuss what can be achieved realistically.
As it is at its earliest stages, there is room for a lot of improvement - both from a UI/UX perspective and from how to further facilitate communication between the clients and the freelancers. But what I can see from the concept, everyone will love the platform in the coming days.
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