Listen to this articleBelow is our recent interview with Sam Wilcoxon, CEO and Co-Founder of Lorem:
Q: Tell us how you founded the company, and what made you decide to jump in and create Lorem?
A: My co-founder Charlie Fogarty and I founded Lorem in 2017. We came up with the idea for Lorem based on our own struggles as freelancers, combined with our experience seeing our clients constantly struggle to solve technical problems related to running their businesses online.
The modern business owner is juggling 15-20 different SaaS and “do-it-yourself” tools to run their business and needs a lot of help to setup & customize each one and keep them running smoothly.
On the other hand, freelancing is being heralded as the “future of work”, with 35% of the US workforce already doing it in some capacity. This trend will continue, but freelancing is still too hard for most people, since over 50% of your time is spent trying to find new work, rather than working and getting paid.
Traditional freelance marketplaces are intimidating for customers trying to find the needle in the haystack of 1000’s of low-quality profiles and unrewarding for freelancers who constantly under-bid in a “price race to the bottom.”
Charlie and I were driven to solve these problems for ourselves and the millions of entrepreneurial business owners and freelancers who face these challenges around the world.
Recommended: Q: Is there anything that sets Lorem apart from similar companies?
A: Lorem is the only on-demand freelance marketplace that rigorously vets the experts on our platform, and provides instant, human help to match each project to a freelancer according to the business requirements.
We’ve built an on-demand network of pre-vetted freelancers around the world, available 24/7. This enables us to automatically connect you with the best expert for the job, typically in less than 10 minutes. For freelancers, that means a constant stream of “jobs falling in your lap,” without ever having to compete on price with another freelancer. Finally, Lorem is embedded inside Shopify, WordPress, and hundreds of other tools related to running your business online.
Q: You’ve recently managed to raise $2,5M, could you tell us more about it?
A: We raised an additional $2.5 million, led by Flybridge, with participation from HubSpot and other angel investors. Our total raised to date is $3.6 million. We plan to use the funds to aggressively hire top talent dedicated to expanding our on-demand freelance marketplace.
Recommended: Anti-Money Laundering Platform Hummingbird Raises $3 Million In A Funding Round Led By Homebrew
Q: What’s next?
A: Ultimately, our mission is to empower entrepreneurship. A digital assistant for every business owner to get instant, affordable help and a global expert network of freelancers embracing the future of work.
Our vision is to empower the entrepreneurial business owner and become the “human layer” sitting on top of countless SaaS and DIY tools that they use everyday.
Last Updated on June 2, 2019
