SolidGigs – Premium Freelance Job Curation for Professionals

SolidGigs is a premium freelance job curation service founded by Preston Lee, who also created the popular freelance community Millo. The company’s mission is straightforward yet powerful: to save freelancers time by doing the heavy lifting of job searching for them.

At its core, SolidGigs offers a simple but valuable service. Their team manually sifts through thousands of freelance job postings across various platforms each week, carefully selecting only the top 1-2% of opportunities based on quality, compensation, and potential for ongoing work. These curated job leads are then delivered directly to subscribers’ inboxes, typically once per week.

Beyond job curation, SolidGigs differentiates itself by providing additional resources to help freelancers grow their businesses. Subscribers gain access to a library of courses, templates, scripts, and interviews with successful freelancers. These resources cover essential topics like client acquisition, pricing strategies, proposal writing, and business management—creating a holistic support system for freelance professionals.

This combination of time-saving job curation and business growth resources positions SolidGigs as more than just a job board alternative; it’s a comprehensive solution designed to address the unique challenges freelancers face in building sustainable careers.

SolidGigs operates on a straightforward subscription-based revenue model. Users pay a monthly or annual fee to access the curated job listings and educational resources. This recurring revenue approach provides the company with predictable income while delivering continuous value to subscribers.

The value proposition that drives this model is multifaceted:

• Time efficiency: By processing thousands of job postings to identify the top 1-2%, SolidGigs saves freelancers what could amount to 10+ hours of weekly job searching.
• Quality assurance: Their curation process filters out low-paying gigs, scams, and opportunities that don’t meet quality standards.
• Convenient delivery: Job opportunities are delivered directly to subscribers’ inboxes, eliminating the need to monitor multiple platforms.
• Professional development: The included library of courses and resources helps freelancers improve their business skills and earning potential.

The genius of this model lies in its alignment with freelancers’ needs. By charging a reasonable subscription fee (typically around $19-39 per month), SolidGigs positions itself as an investment that pays for itself with a single successful job placement. This pricing strategy makes the service accessible while ensuring it attracts serious professionals who value their time and are committed to their freelance careers.

Additionally, SolidGigs likely benefits from partnerships with other freelance-focused tools and services, creating potential secondary revenue streams through affiliate relationships, though their primary focus remains the subscription model.

SolidGigs has strategically positioned itself to serve a specific segment of the freelance market. Their ideal customers are not beginners testing the waters of freelancing, but rather established professionals who recognize the value of their time and are willing to invest in services that help them operate more efficiently.

The primary customer segments include:

• Established freelancers who understand that time spent searching for jobs is time not spent on billable work. These professionals typically have experience and portfolios but face the ongoing challenge of maintaining a consistent client pipeline.
• Specialized professionals in fields like writing, design, development, marketing, and consulting who command higher rates and seek quality clients rather than volume.
• Freelancers looking to scale their businesses who value not just job leads but also the educational resources to improve their processes, pricing, and client relationships.
• Full-time freelancers who rely entirely on their independent work for income and cannot afford gaps in their project pipeline.

What’s particularly effective about SolidGigs’ customer targeting is that they focus on freelancers who can calculate the ROI of their subscription. When a professional who charges $50-100+ per hour saves 10 hours of job searching monthly, the service essentially pays for itself many times over, even if it only leads to one new client acquisition.

This careful customer segmentation allows SolidGigs to tailor both their curation process and educational content to serve professionals who are serious about their freelance careers, rather than trying to be everything to everyone in the vast gig economy landscape.

Behind SolidGigs’ seemingly simple service lies a sophisticated operational structure designed to deliver consistent value. The company’s core operations revolve around three key processes:

Job Curation Process: SolidGigs employs a team of curators who methodically search through numerous freelance job platforms, company career pages, social media channels, and other sources to identify potential opportunities. Each job posting undergoes a rigorous vetting process examining factors like compensation, project scope, client reputation, and potential for long-term relationships. This human-powered selection process—rather than algorithmic curation—ensures that only truly valuable opportunities reach subscribers.

Content Development: Alongside job curation, SolidGigs maintains and expands its library of educational resources. This likely involves working with successful freelancers to create courses, templates, and guides while conducting interviews to generate actionable insights for subscribers.

Customer Acquisition: SolidGigs leverages several channels to acquire new subscribers:

• Content marketing through their blog and the associated Millo community
• Email marketing campaigns targeting freelancers
• Strategic partnerships with other freelance-focused platforms and tools
• Word-of-mouth referrals from satisfied subscribers
• Trials and promotional offers to reduce signup friction

The technology behind SolidGigs likely includes a robust CRM system for managing subscriber information, automated email delivery systems for job alerts, a content management system for their educational resources, and analytics tools to track engagement and optimize their offerings. By combining human expertise with appropriate technology, SolidGigs maintains quality while scaling their service effectively.

The freelance job market is saturated with platforms—from giants like Upwork and Fiverr to niche job boards and aggregators. Yet SolidGigs has carved out a distinctive position through several key differentiators:

Human-powered curation vs. algorithmic matching: Unlike larger platforms that use algorithms to match freelancers with jobs, SolidGigs employs human judgment to evaluate opportunities. This results in higher-quality selections that algorithms might miss, especially when it comes to assessing factors like client communication style and project potential.

Focus on quality over quantity: While most job boards pride themselves on the volume of listings, SolidGigs deliberately limits its offerings to only the top 1-2% of opportunities. This exclusivity means subscribers aren’t overwhelmed by options but can focus on applying to genuinely promising prospects.

No bidding wars or platform fees: Traditional freelance marketplaces typically involve competitive bidding and take a percentage of freelancers’ earnings. SolidGigs simply connects freelancers directly with clients, allowing them to negotiate their full rates without platform commissions.

Educational component: Most job platforms focus solely on connecting freelancers with work. SolidGigs combines job opportunities with business education, creating a more holistic offering that helps freelancers improve their overall business operation.

Community connection: Through its relationship with Millo, SolidGigs benefits from an established community of freelancers, creating network effects and credibility that newer competitors would struggle to replicate.

These differentiators create significant barriers to entry for potential competitors. The manual curation process requires expertise and cannot be easily automated, while the educational content library represents a substantial investment that would take time for competitors to duplicate. Perhaps most importantly, SolidGigs has earned trust in a market where freelancers are understandably wary of services promising to help their careers.

SolidGigs’ sustained growth in the competitive freelance services space can be attributed to several key success factors that work together to create a compelling value proposition:

Measurable ROI for subscribers: The service’s primary success metric likely revolves around subscriber acquisition and retention rates. For this to be positive, freelancers must see tangible results—landing clients through the platform. Even one successful job placement can justify several months of subscription fees, creating a clear return on investment that drives retention.

Quality of curation: The cornerstone of SolidGigs’ value is their ability to consistently identify and deliver genuinely valuable opportunities. This requires maintaining rigorous curation standards and continuously refining their vetting process based on subscriber feedback and success rates.

Alignment with freelancer pain points: SolidGigs directly addresses one of the most universal challenges freelancers face—the time-consuming nature of finding quality clients. By focusing on this specific pain point rather than trying to solve every freelance challenge, they’ve created a targeted solution that resonates strongly with their market.

Scalable business model: While the curation process requires human judgment, the delivery mechanism is scalable. Once jobs are selected, the marginal cost of serving additional subscribers is minimal, allowing for profitable growth.

However, SolidGigs does face potential risks:

• Quality control challenges as they scale their curation team
• Competition from larger platforms that might introduce similar curation services
• Economic downturns that reduce the overall number of freelance opportunities available
• Changes in how companies hire freelancers that could disrupt their sourcing methods

Their ability to navigate these challenges while maintaining their core value proposition will determine their long-term success in this evolving market.

SolidGigs’ business approach offers valuable lessons for entrepreneurs looking to create successful ventures in crowded markets:

Curation as a business model: In an age of information overload, there’s significant value in filtering and organizing existing resources rather than creating new ones. Entrepreneurs should consider how they might apply this curation model to other industries overwhelmed by choices—from investment opportunities to health information to learning resources.

Time-saving as value proposition: SolidGigs demonstrates that people will pay for services that save them time, especially when they can calculate a clear ROI. This principle applies across numerous markets where professionals’ time has quantifiable value.

Vertical integration of services: By combining job opportunities with educational resources, SolidGigs creates a more comprehensive solution and multiple value streams. Entrepreneurs should consider how complementary offerings can enhance their core product and increase customer lifetime value.

Human expertise at scale: While many startups focus on automation and AI, SolidGigs shows the value of human judgment applied at scale. This hybrid approach—using people for critical quality decisions and technology for delivery and operations—creates offerings that pure technology solutions cannot easily replicate.

Community-based growth: SolidGigs’ connection to the Millo community likely provided initial traction and ongoing customer acquisition advantages. Entrepreneurs should consider how existing communities might serve as launching pads for new ventures.

Subscription pricing psychology: By pricing their service so that a single successful job placement can cover months of subscription costs, SolidGigs creates an easy purchasing decision. This principle of setting prices relative to the value created, rather than production costs, is applicable across many business models.

These insights can be applied to various industries where professionals face similar challenges of opportunity identification, skill development, and effective time allocation.

SolidGigs exemplifies how a focused solution addressing a specific pain point can create significant value in a crowded marketplace. By targeting the time-consuming nature of freelance job hunting, they’ve built a service that delivers tangible benefits to subscribers while establishing a sustainable business model.

The key takeaways from their approach include:

• Specialization can be more powerful than generalization when it addresses a universal pain point
• Human expertise remains valuable even in increasingly automated markets
• Time-saving services create compelling value propositions for busy professionals
• Curation itself is a valuable service worth paying for in information-saturated environments
• Bundling complementary offerings (job leads + education) creates multiple value streams

For SolidGigs to maintain its growth trajectory, they’ll need to continuously refine their curation process, expand their educational offerings, and potentially explore additional services that address adjacent freelancer challenges. Areas that warrant further exploration include how they might leverage data from successful placements to improve job matching, potential geographic expansion to serve international freelancers, and possibilities for more personalized curation based on individual freelancer profiles.

Ultimately, SolidGigs demonstrates that in the digital economy, helping people filter through noise to find signal is itself a valuable business. As information continues to proliferate across industries, similar curation-based models will likely find success by saving customers time while delivering consistently high-quality results.