I have an online service with a set of tools for 360-degree content, and I was thinking to expand it with job board / marketplace functionality similar to freelancer.com or fiverr.com, but dedicated to virtual tours and other 360-degree content related work. Where people would post what they can do or what they need to be done, discuss projects, bid, get paid, etc. But I am not sure if anyone would be interested, and that is a big project to create something like this just for fun
I personally sometimes need a freelancer to do some work, but couldn’t find a good place to post it. Tried to contact 360cities, but didn’t get any response. Found few related topics here on this forum, but there’s not much information and no updates since March, so I guess it didn’t get traction.
And so I created a poll on my website to get some feedback and thought it won’t hurt to ask it here as well. What do you guys think? Do you need a service like this? If yes, can you describe briefly what kind of projects or services you would post there? Or maybe there is already a marketplace like this?
I think a project like this would take a lot of nurturing. Possibly focusing on people offering jobs might make it more “real.” Having people list their willingness to take jobs is okay, but I think you might get listings without connecting to jobs very often. This is just my personal opinion.
I think this is a critical mass problem (over a certain size and it starts to work) but I don’t have the secret ingredients.
A search on fiverr.com for “360 virtual tour” comes up with 322 services available. More than I expected, actually. Do you envision something different from what fiverr.com offers?
What’s the poll on your website indicating so far?
I’ve been running the poll for 2 days only and got 5 responses so far. I’ll run it for couple weeks and provide an update then. Maybe also probably send an email to all my subscribers to get more data.
As for unique features that would make it different, it really depends on kind of projects people would want to post there. Maybe if someone offers photo retouching I could give them a nice before/after tool to display their work. Or a 360 player. fiverr and freelancer lack those things. Unlike general marketplaces I think I already have motivated users that focus on 360 content, just need to see how much motivated and if there is enough demand.
@eGene, I just filled in the poll. At theta360.guide, we would be interested in working with people to keep theta360.guide/app updated and useful. So someone with a THETA would test out one of the apps, write up their experience, give tips and suggestions for using the app.
About 1000 subscribers received an email where I asked them to participate, approximately 4000 visitors saw the poll or link to the poll, and almost 100 decided to answer. On the screenshot you can see what the answers were.
@eGene Thanks for posting the results! 100 responses seems like a legitimate sample size. Interesting that it’s a bigger percentage of people looking than providing. If there’s enough demand, that seems like it would be key to building a sustainable marketplace.
I am going to research the options, maybe I could utilize existing solutions and adopt them to 360 content. Building this kind of platform from scratch looks like a huge work.
I haven’t looked into it, but maybe an existing job board has an API for search and post, basically allowing you to have an interface that shows only the 360 photographer jobs on your own site using the third-party job board as a form of cloud infrastructure.
