Motivations behind the "PeopleWords free invitations"

I have just recently upgraded PeopleWords.com (online platform for the translation business). Among various small fixes and improvements, PeopleWords now provides free invitations for the translators. If you’re not familiar with the “invitation feature” of PeopleWords (it happens that some people are not), then just have a look at our white paper ). In this post, I will explain the (commercial) motivations underlying this feature.

I have already explained (see my previous post that there is a strong imbalance of risks in freelance translation jobs. The risk is way much stronger on the customer side rather than on the translator side (well, at least the “perceived” risk, because, in my experience, the risk is low anyway). Indeed, the translators “feel” intuitively that there is little risk for them to multiply their job sources (it does not really matter to know where the job comes from). On the contrary, customers are seeking stable and reliable translators and customers are quite reluctant to send their offers “in the wild”.

As a direct consequence of this perception, there is a huge imbalance between the number of registered translators and the number of registered customers on PeopleWords. Basically, the number of registered translators is more than one order of magnitude greater than the number of registered customers. In my opinion, it’s a really bad situation because it means that, on average, rather than relying on a dedicated platform (such as PeopleWords), customers rely on e-mail based processes to get their documents translated. As a customer, my experience indicates that managing freelancers by e-mail is just hell.

Did I say that to the Russian translator? or maybe it was the e-mail for the Spanish translator? Did I not pay already the Polish guy? Or maybe it was just the previous Polish job? How many Japanese documents do I have left untranslated? What was the price agreed initially for the Chinese translation? Was it consistent with the previous translation job that has been terminated last week?

Therefore, I have the feeling that there are many benefits for the translators to use a platform (as opposed to e-mails) even for their own personal customers. Yet, in such case, PeopleWords was taking a 10% fee that would have been considered unacceptable. The (free) invitations have been designed so that a translator can invite his own customers and leverages the PeopleWords platform without having to pay the regular 10% fee.

From the viewpoint of PeopleWords, why should I provide such a free service? If translators starts using PeopleWords for free, how am I going to buy the coffee that I need every morning? The immediate (but wrong) answer would be: Once the customer is registered on PeopleWords, he will start posting offers to see if he can get lower prices (thus quitting the translator that brought him to PeopleWords). This situation is very unlikely because of the risk imbalance mentioned here. Once the customer knows a good translator, he is not going to change to spare a few buckets, especially if it’s the money of the company anyway.

But a more probable situation is: Once the customer is registered on PeopleWords, one day or another, he will need translations in languages that the original translator is not able to provide. In such cases, posting an offer on PeopleWords is the most straightforward option for the customer; and thanks to the 10% fee, I am able to buy some coffee the next day.