How To Set Yourself Apart From The Other 500,000,000 Freelancers In The World | Part 1

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, episode 300

Welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, where our mission is to help you turn your creative passions into a stable, reliable income.

If you're in audio, video, design, photography, or really any other creative field, and you just want to learn from other successful creatives, you're in the right place.

Hello, and welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. I'm your host, Brian Hood. If this is your first time ever listening to the show, first of all, hi. Hey, hello, welcome. So glad to have you here. You're in the right place if you're a creative who offers freelance services and you want to make more money from your creative skills. If that sounds like you, you're in the right place. If this is your first show, you're probably a fan of big round numbers, because this is our 300th episode. Cute confetti, stupid sound effects, maybe a crowd cheering. Leland can put all the cool stuff on the background here to make this sound like some big celebration. Maybe we'll have some quotes from the movie 300 this episode.

I don't know. But fun fact, if you've been listening forever, and actually shout out to Mr. Steven, who just emailed me this morning, he just listened to episode 297 He said he's been listening to literally every episode of the show. He's listened to all 297, and I'm guessing that if he's listened to 297, then he's also made it to the 300th episode here. So kudos to you. But many of you have been with this a long time. The first episode we ever put out was November 6th, 2017

That was more than six years ago. Almost six and a half years ago, we put episode one out. If you've been with this for any length of time, I am so grateful to have you here. I don't have some crazy big celebratory thing happening here. It's kind of more of the same. Episode 200, I kind of had the same attitude of like, sometimes you just gotta put your damn hat down and get work done and just be consistently showing up every single day, every single week. This podcast is a testament to that. 300 episodes later, I finally feel like I can say that I've been consistently putting out episodes for years and years and years.

I have very rarely let you guys down or girls down if you listen to the show regularly, and I want to continue to do so for hundreds of episodes moving forward. I do not take this lightly that we have thousands of people, maybe even tens of thousands of people that listen to the show and trust me for whatever reason to bring you advice and topics, and sometimes guests who usually know way more than I do to help you with the freelance business. So I don't take that lightly. I take a lot of personal responsibility for this. I want to make sure that I'm always growing, learning, trying to get better at what I do and bringing you stuff every single week that will help you with the freelance business. And this episode is no different. We're actually going to start a new series this week. I just, for some reason, can't stop doing series, but there's a reason I'm doing this series. And let me back up a little bit and just say this. The freelance industry has grown significantly, especially since we started in 2017

2017, you might even feel like you relate to the game a lot back then, but back then when we started this podcast, there were people that had just started who were crushing it now. So it's never really too late. But with every single year, as the industry grows and there's more freelancers coming to the market, it's gonna get more and more competitive. And I found some stats. I'm just looking this up. I was like, is the freelance market really growing? Our market is really this muddy water area because it's really ran by solo freelancers. And solo freelancers are not the best at, first of all, doing things legitimately and reporting their income correctly and reporting even categorizing themselves correctly. So there's not a whole lot of great industry trends and statistics that are out there. And the best ones that we have actually come from marketplaces like Fiverr and Upwork and Freelancer, some of which are publicly traded companies. I believe if they're not, they're at least huge private companies.

And so they have a lot of finances and resources to put behind studies.

So some of these things came out, I'm just gonna read some studies that I found. Some of them by, again, these marketplace sites, some by third party kind of data center data companies, but they're interesting to us at least. So research by Emergent Research shows that the number of full-time freelancers in the US grew by 90% between 2020 and 2023 That's an insane amount, nearly doubled in a three-year span. And then part-time freelancing grew by over 130%. That means just between 2020 and 2023, there are like two to three times as many of you that could potentially listen to the show. McKinsey, which is another like a big consulting firm, they had an estimate that they published that said, 500 million freelancers will be working through platforms, and they just mean like marketplace platforms like Freelancer and Fiverr and Upwork by 2030 So that's 500 million of you will be working through those platforms, or have worked through those platforms by 2030, which just shows how large that market is. And then the largest platform, which is freelancer.com, has a population of over 60 million freelancers on their platform, just that one platform alone, which is insane, it's massive.