Solvate

» see solvate.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Solvate's bet was that the open freelance marketplaces of the time were bad at the only part that mattered. On Elance or oDesk you posted a job and received forty bids, most of them from people who had not read it. Solvate kept a curated network of creative and marketing professionals instead, and pushed the matching work onto itself. You described what you needed, Solvate proposed someone from its bench, and the company sat in the middle of the payment so the freelancer got paid and the client got one invoice.

It launched in 2009 out of New York with money from Gotham Ventures and RRE Ventures. By 2011 the positioning had narrowed toward web design and development work specifically, which is usually the sign of a marketplace looking for the vertical where its matching actually pays for itself.

The total raised was $6.3 million, including a $4 million Series B roughly a year before the shutdown. That is a real amount of money for a company that never got out of the introductions business.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the arithmetic of curation ~

A curated marketplace has a cost per match that an open one does not. Somebody has to interview the talent, read the brief, and decide who fits. That work does not get cheaper when volume doubles unless you automate the judgment, at which point you are running the bid-spam marketplace again under a different name.

Solvate's own wording for this was mild and exact. Effective March 1st we are shutting down this service, the email read, and ultimately we couldn't scale it in its current configuration. There was no pivot announcement attached to it and no acquisition in the footer.

~ the last few weeks ~

New signups were closed in February 2012 and existing members got the notice by email, which TechCrunch published on 19 February. The archive shows solvate.com serving a shrunken homepage on 17 February with the phone number and the words "Find and Hire Proven Freelancers" still on it, then a redirect by 10 March. The pitch stayed up almost to the day the lights went out.

~ who it was for ~

This was a service for American companies with a budget line for contract creative work, which is a category I have never been on either side of. By 2012 I was an engineer with a salary in Ankara, and the freelance platforms that mattered to people around me were the ones with no vetting at all, because the entire point for a developer outside the US was to get access to the client without a gatekeeper deciding whether you fit the bench. Solvate's whole product was the gatekeeper.

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