Competitive Analysis
Direct Competition
​
Fiverr
Fiverr is an online marketplace for freelancers. Interested buyers can purchase services for as low as $5 in categories such as programming, graphic design, video editing, and many others. The company claims to be the "world's largest marketplace for digital services."
Strengths
Fiverr is excellent for getting freelance gigs and connecting with buyers looking for low-budget creative work. There is a variety of services fulfilled by a diverse crowd of creatives. Fiverr has a large consumer base and can handle traffic at a national level. Best known for jobs that take less than 3 hours, are easily reproduced and require minimum communication.
Key Weakness
Fiverr provides too much variety for clients and has not developed good filters for quality, and accumulates high search costs when looking for the best fit. Additionally, client freelancer communication is inconsistent, making it difficult to handle complex projects.
Moreover, with its low pricing and a small entry barrier, the platform undersells creative value, sacrificing quality for quantity. Fiverr carries a negative connotation within the freelance community as more novice creatives flood the platform.
Due to Fiverr's success in the quick 'one-off' gigs, their reputation for advanced projects will diminish compared to Upwork's.
Upwork
Upwork is an online marketplace that matches freelancers with businesses that seek on-demand work. The company facilitates jobs in the field of accounting, data science, web development, customer support, and many more.
Upwork is an industry leader in freelancing and a merger between the two previously largest freelancing companies at the time, the Elance-oDesk merger. Upwork is focused on connecting highly skilled freelancers to a professional consumer-base and is a viable solution to a full-time client stream for established freelancers.
Upwork is an excellent solution for clients at market price. However, it requires many customer jobs, including going through a complete hiring process reviewing many proposals within the platform. It is difficult to find a freelancer that offers multiple types of services, making team forming and diversifying services difficult.
Upwork is also a bad fit for freelancers starting their creative careers because of the platform reputation-based filtering, financial requirements to apply to jobs, and hyper-competitive nature. This filtering ultimately directs most of its clients to the platform's top creatives and makes it hard for freelancers.
Upwork connects clients to the top freelancers in their respective fields. However, team or time-based projects are not their specialties. The platform doesn't support long-term client relationships or novice freelancers.
Pentagram
Our structure is unique. We are the only major design studio where the owners of the business are the creators of the work and serve as the primary contact for every client. This reflects our conviction that great design cannot happen without passion, intelligence, and — above all — personal commitment, and is demonstrated by a portfolio that spans five decades, many industries, and clients of every size.
Pentagram is one of the most renowned independent design firms in the world. They service a company's full design needs and are likely the most sought-after firm for creative work.
For clients, there is a very high barrier to entry due to the reputation of the firm. As a result, Pentagram is the most expensive firm serving only the top companies due to its small size.
Pentagram is focused on staying small and serving the top one percent of businesses and dominating the high-end design market.
Indirect Competition
Our indirect competition includes hiring creatives as employees and searching for creative services locally or on the web. Hiring an in-house creative team is a massive financial burden as these positions average $57k each. It would take 14 different employees to create a fully functioning unit capable of developing marketing content, advertisements, branding, and content creation.
Additionally, these employees would be on salary, acquiring unnecessary labor costs, including training and team building. The financial burden and long-term commitments create inconveniences and extra jobs for business owners who lack the experience to distinguish skilled creatives.
When hiring a freelancer online, one finds they typically offer 1-3 services, with no guarantee for return service. Additionally, hiring multiple freelancers to handle a project doesn't create a synergetic team. Usually, ending up requiring new hires or replacements within a year.


