Krawd turns the ad agency into a marketplace

Meet Krawd, a French startup that wants to rethink the way advertising agencies work. Like in other industries, Krawd thinks that it’s more efficient to build a marketplace than build a centralized, traditional company. Krawd is all about connecting the right freelancers with the right clients in this specific industry.

The French startup is quite new, as the platform has been live for only a few months. But there’s already some excitement around the project as a few clients have relied on Krawd multiple times for various projects. So how does it work exactly?

First, it starts with a community of freelancers. Instead of working with thousands of freelancers, Krawd carefully reviews each application and only adds a tiny percentage of them. Right now there are a few dozen freelancers specialized around different areas of work, such as video, photography, web design, artwork, brand identity, etc. Krawd is looking to create a community of dedicated freelancers that clients can trust. That’s the main differentiating point with the other freelancer websites out there.

If you look a bit further, you can see that many of these freelancers used to work in advertising agencies themselves. But people usually don’t stick around in the world of advertising. There’s a lot of work, a lot of turnover, and the pay isn’t great. Moreover, these creative people don’t understand how advertising contracts can cost so much given that they can see how many people worked on a project. That’s why many of them end up doing freelancing jobs.

Second, Krawd handles all the boring parts of advertising work. The startup tries to automate project management as much as possible, and it starts with educating the customers. Instead of showing a gigantic list of freelancers, Krawd has a smart onboarding process. Instead of writing a description of what you want, the website guides you through a bunch of questions with sample work so that you can find out what you want. It also gives you an approximate quote.

At the end of this process, the platform suggests a few freelancers who would be a good fit for your work. You can scroll through a portfolio of their work and contact them. And of course, Krawd takes care of the contract and payment so you don’t have to.

Krawd had managed 30 projects so far. These projects cost $4,000 on average (so a lot less than your average advertising job). The company has raised an undisclosed amount from Google EMEA president Carlo D’asaro Biondo. Here’s what some of these projects look like:

[gallery ids="1361107,1361108,1361109,1361110,1361111,1361112,1361113,1361114,1361115"]

But remember, it’s still the early days of Krawd. In the future, the startup wants to automate more tasks. For instance, if a client says “I want something more modern,” Krawd would detect this word and ask the client to pick an example of what they mean by “modern,” as it can mean many different things. And you can imagine that the startup could let you print stuff in just a few clicks, for instance.

As a business, Krawd is just starting. But as a product, I think it’s going in the right direction. So let’s keep an eye on this one.

[gallery ids="1361099,1361278,1361101,1361102,1361103,1361104,1361105"]