GTM Deep Dive: Freelance developer marketplaces
Toptal's digital marketing excellence is hard to beat
Note: I originally started writing this back in December of 2021. After checking on the latest stats from Turing.com, it’s clear this post it outdated, but outdated in a useful way. I will update with the progress Turing.com has made in SEO.
Software developers are in high demand with short supply. Traditional placement firms charge 20% of salaries, meaning placing a software developer could be worth $40k. 200k software developers are hired a year (and growing 20% a year). The TAM on placement alone is $1B a year. A handful of companies have raised nearly half a billion dollars trying to solve the problem of how to find software developers.
The high market demand and large contract sizes means companies that solve the problem of finding developers can scale quickly, reaching tens of millions of dollars in Gross Service Volume in a couple of years. The company that is the most successful at traditional digital market execution has also raised the least amount of money.
The business models vary from placement fees, to traditional staffing, to marketplace fees. Most, but not all, are practicing a form of geographic arbitrage, finding developers in markets where developer salaries are cheaper than the US.
The basics of going-to-market include digital channels with a mix of traditional candidate outreach seen at typical placement firms.
One company stands out when comparing revenue growth and capital efficiency.
TopTal raised a $1.4M seed round and no other funding. TopTal’s revenue are over $200M with 40% year-on-year growth (self reported). A key differentiator compared to other marketplaces is how effectively they execute on the basics of digital acquisition, noticing the details and making sure everything works.
Companies compared:
Toptal: $1.4M raised with reported revenues of $200M
Andela: $381M raised
Turing.com: $155M raised
Braintrust: $124M raised ($100M investment in BTRST; $24M equity)
TripleByte: $48M raised
Laskie: $6M raised
JetBridge: Self-financed
Every player has a niche where they do well; TopTal just owns more niches
Toptal, who has been in market the longest, does the best at organic and paid search. Turing.com has developed a strong Youtube presence, makes good use of display, and participates in Reddit. Braintrust and JetBridge carve out unique talent acquisition differentiators with web3 and angel investing. While Laskie pursues referrals and matches traditional candidate acquisition with a technology enabled service.
Everyone uses LinkedIn. All in the same way.
Toptal is the clear SEO leader
A comparison of worldwide desktop organic search by site - source Similarweb.com
Toptal has twice the traffic This makes sense given that TopTal executes well on all of the SEO inputs.
Toptal’s leadership in SEO comes from:
Creating more content, which shows up in pages indexed
Better use of technical SEO, including XML sitemaps and Meta titles
More useful landing pages that show more details and social proof
Toptal has the most pages indexed
A simple breakdown compares the number of pages in the index by site:
Toptal.com: 20,900 pages indexed
Andela.com: 14,400 pages indexed
TripleByte.com: 10,600
Turing.com: 3,680
UseBraintrust.com: 1,070
Toptal uses XML sitemaps to aid bots in finding SEO pages
Not every site has an xml sitemap and ‘clean’ sitemaps are even less common. Here’s an example of how not to handle XML sitemaps.
Example empty content page in a sitemap file, yes, this is the whole page
Toptal has put more work into the landing page experience and thought about the display of the content in Google’s SERP.
A comparison of meta title tags (what shows in the SERPs) demonstrates that Toptal notices the details. Look at the focus on specificity, displaying the number of available developers and how quickly those developers can be hired.
Toptal meta title tag: “11 Best Freelance PowerBuilder Developers [Hire in 48 Hours] | Toptal®”. This emphasizes a small number of developers, who are the best, and that’s possible to hire in 48 hours.
Turing.com title tag: “Hire Remote CSS Developers Near San Francisco”.
The landing experience for Toptal is the best as well. It showcases strong value propositions, calls-to-action, social proof (reviews and logos), and lets people browse the talent. Clicking on a developer profile takes potential employers to a good resume. The next best site, Turing.com, has similar elements, but misses some key pieces.
Toptal landing page with clear value proposition, social proof, reviews, and calls-to-action.
Turing.com landing page with a call-to-action and some developers, but not much else.
The other sites don’t have the same directed calls-to-action. Instead they use editorial content pages to cover similar topics.
Toptal develops SEO tool pages to build SEO
Toptal also does well by building useful SEO tool pages, like a javascript minifier. These types of pages build traffic, awareness, and provide utility.
Strength in organic search often sets the foundation for a strong paid search program.
Toptal and Turing make the best use of paid search as well
Two areas stand out to help Toptal lead in paid search:
Organic landing pages serve as destination pages for paid ads.
Toptal’s ads also have clear, specific value propositions.
Ads that state, “hire now” miss the opportunity to describe the service in more detail. Turing.com uses the text ad to describe the benefits of their process (to build trust?) while Toptal describes the benefit to the potential user of the service.
Toptal looks to have built out the widest groups of ads and keywords, as well.
A comparison of some of the ads below. Toptal promotes speed, Turing cost, TripleByte active developers, and Andela quality.
Turing.com and Toptal leading the way on Facebook
TopTal and Turing are the only companies focused on using Facebook Ads. TopTal has freelancer targeted ads with clear benefits and easy to read text. TopTal is targeted multiple personas and trying out a variety of ad formats.
Turing.com focuses on promoting awareness of their company and employer oriented ads.
My guess is that TopTal’s ads perform better.
LinkedIn universally used
LinkedIn is used by basically every company. Ads focus on benefits to developers and companies. Nothing stands out here.
YouTube & Video
YouTube is tepidly used by a few companies, but Turing.com regularly posts YouTube videos. Turing posts multiple videos a week, while the other companies post infrequently, if it all. If a company wants to developer YouTube, consistency helps.
Unique approaches that stand out
Laskie combines traditional candidate outreach techniques with a software enabled staffing firm. Laskie has a set of talent acquisition roles that recruit in potential candidates. You can learn more by listening to this podcast episode with RecTech.
Braintrust is a freelance marketplace that provides developers with web3 tokens called ‘BTRST’. BTRST tokens allow members to participate in the governance of the community. People that refer in developers also get BTRST tokens. The best overview of BrainTrust is here.
JetBridge attracts top talent by providing top developers with capital to invest in startups! Developers that work with JetBridge will get to source and invest in startups, providing a rich experience.
Market demand and go-to-market execution
This is a hot market and companies can grow quickly. Braintrust went from ~$10M in cumulative gross service volume to $70M in gross service volume within 12 months. A variety of tactics work to help grow companies within the space, but the digital marketing basics can take a company far. TopTal executes well on the basics of digital marketing and would be a unicorn after raising only $1.4M.
As a follow up, I’ll look at the improvements Turing.com has made in their own search program.