How do you squeeze more value out of your product and find partnerships to help scale and distribute it? Upwork did just that, and tells us how…

Partnerships That Scale: Lessons from Upwork

Partnerships aren’t just a department—they’re a strategy that can accelerate any business function. Upwork shows us how it discovered, developed, and executed a series of partnerships using its first-party data and skills marketplace.

Speakers

Nicholas Cosgrove, UpWork

Key Takeaways

• Sometimes scaling your product is a matter of getting creative with what you have.
• Upwork realized that its first-party skills marketplace has potential beyond its own domain.
• Specifically, it saw that all that talent could add value to a range of third-party apps and marketplaces.
• For example, software platforms can lower adoption barriers by connecting buyers to vetted developers.
• This is especially true where there are ecosystems with dedicated skillsets (think: Salesforce or WordPress)
• Front-end developers in these worlds have cultivated and built careers around platform-specific skills.
• But those developers are a fragmented universe of far-flung individuals.
• Upwork’s lightbulb moment was that it had a structured network and taxonomy around these pros.
• So it sought to enable software companies the ability to offer vetted developers alongside their products.
• The result, again, is lowering adoption barriers for buyers as it lessens their implementation challenges.
• Software developers and resellers like this because it can boost their sales and lower buying friction.
• Upwork benefits because it can scale its skills marketplace beyond its own four walls.
• The latter can happen in a few tiers, including APIs and plugins that embed its marketplace directly.
• Altogether it’s a lesson in getting creative and realizing value propositions for new partnerships.
• Then executing means lots of rigor and market education, given that it’s often a new concept.
• Next up for Upwork will be to model all of the above around AI… where there’s ample need for dev skills.