I’m David, one of the co-founders of Sixty (https://www.usesixty.com/partners). We're a fully-managed freelancer marketplace for SaaS companies. We give SaaS companies an experts.[domain].com that their users can go to for do-it-for-me help from specialist freelancers, whom we call "experts". We source, vet, and manage the experts. We’ve also built software to connect a user and an expert together via screenshare for on-demand sessions.
It's a common problem at SaaS companies that their users want more hands-on help than in-house support can provide, but it takes a userbase of around 1M people and an organic freelancer community to form around the software (think Google Certified Experts or Quickbooks Pro Advisors) before that can easily be provided.
We built Sixty to solve the problems we experienced during our time as Squarespace Specialists (Squarespace’s version of experts). With several years under our belt, we noticed 4 major problems around the concept of an ‘experts directory’:
1) Most SaaS users need a little bit of external help to derive the full value from more complex software – despite the software increasingly intended to be DIY. Users usually only need to get over a few small roadblocks to succeed.
2) The company’s goal of making software intuitive enough for anyone conflicts with the expert’s goal of making more money. Experts all have project minimums that presuppose them taking over the whole project.
3) Companies would need user bases of 100k+ before they would be able to even consider creating an experts community.
4) Building a community platform is fundamentally different than what SaaS companies were founded to do. It bloats the business model.
Our goal is to be a better solution in each of these 4 areas: 1) So users could get smaller scope work accomplished – helping them be more independent and successful on the platform. 2) So the experts can be a part of a better community with increased pay and more stability 3) SaaS companies with smaller user bases can take advantage of the improved activation and retention that expert communities bring, and 4) So SaaS companies can focus on what they do best – building great software.
We’d love to hear your thoughts about what we’re building with Sixty! And if you’re building a SaaS company or are particularly skilled at any startup or SMB software (Segment, Mixpanel, Zapier, Customer.io, Mailchimp, Weebly, etc.), we'd love to learn from you.