How did the go-to-market strategy for the supply side of Upwork's platform evolve and inform product strategy over time?

In the early days, on the supply side, what we were looking for—given the type of service we are providing—was as much unpaid organic acquisition as we could handle. That meant a tremendous amount of investment in SEO, and making the unpaid organic acquisition work for us. There’s a virtuous loop here, because the more jobs we got, the more content there was for SEO. The more profiles we got, the more content there was for SEO. The more data that we could generate about the market, like hourly rates and salaries, and trends and skills, the more content there was for SEO. 

We followed it very, very consistently, like how do we generate data that is interesting for our marketplace participants, but also interesting, therefore, for the search engine? For example, making the profile and the job get as much new content as possible, whether it's samples or updates or response times, and basically keeping it alive. There's a really nice virtuous cycle here, where you increase the number of jobs and you get more people showing up, increase the number of profiles, you get more people showing up. More people showing up in turn increases the number of jobs and profiles. 

We saw the share of organic really expand a lot, I'm talking a few years back, when we were starting out. That was a huge advantage in terms of cost of acquisition, especially when you compare with the cost of a traditional agency. 

Viral acquisition was hard to make work here with the users being competitive with each other. At the same time, of course, you want to invest in paid, and take advantage of new online channels, and the traditional performance-marketing stuff.  And then there's earned content, earned media. A marketplace obviously has a lot of insight on the market, the salaries, the trends and the skills, what's up and what's down, and that generates a lot of interest. 

All the growth that happened and all the acquisition was without any sales people, like zero, so it was 100 percent digital. I'm talking about the early days. Even now, the supply-side acquisition is predominantly digital, and so in that sense, product-led.