Mylance

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  What's the Mylance vision?

  Mylance is building the "Shopify for independent consultants." Mylance will be the one-stop shop to market yourself as a consultant, manage your projects, find leads, get access to a supportive community, and additional services needed to remove the admin burden.

• What problem are you solving?

  

  Today, 48% of an independent consultant’s time is spent doing non-earning, admin activities that include 1) Lead generation and 2) Back office admin, leading to millions of wasted hours each year.

• Back office admin: includes invoicing clients to get paid, bookkeeping to correctly categorize the transactions, estimated tax calculations to pay taxes 4 times per year (yes this is required for a freelance consultant), tax filing, time tracking for clients billed hourly, and signing and maintaining mutually agreed upon client contracts.

• Lead generation: to find clients, a consultant needs to communicate their value well, network with dozens of "leads," scope out a project, negotiate a good deal, and sign an agreed upon contract. Of the 48% of non-earning hours, this takes up over half of their time.

• How big is the market?

  In 2019, US Freelancers brought in $1.2 Trillion in gross revenue from a combined 59 million US workers. Further, 45% of those are "skilled" talent. This market continues to grow every year, and as a result of COVID, 12% of the US Workforce started freelancing during 2020.

• Who's the team?

  Our team, led by CEO Bradley Jacobs and Gerardo Raiden, combines tech and independent consulting experience from Uber and payments SaaS companies where we've launched new business lines and built them up to over $1B in value. As a team, we've experienced freelance challenges first hand, we’re passionate about the independent life, and we have the grit to win in an attractive space.

• What have you built thus far?

  In our first year of business, we bootstrapped to $100k in revenue mostly through our Bootcamp product, enabling us to get close to our customer and jumpstart our community. In mid-2021, we have pivoted to build our first proprietary software, which is a turn-key website for the consultant. In under 5 minutes, a freelancer has a website that showcases their niche, testimonials, case studies, and experiences. 

  1. As we build, we'll automate the freelancer experience by taking their admin challenges off their plate like invoicing, bookkeeping, client CRM, and taxes.

• Who's Mylance's target customer?

• Tech professionals with 5-15+ years of experience who have built up successful start-ups or worked for brand name companies

• They're in a major business function including Operations, Product, Marketing, Business Development, Sales, or Strategy.

• Start-ups pursue these roles at a high rate, and these folks are currently underserved as independent consultants today, unlike Engineers and Designers.

What sets Mylance apart?

What is the Mylance product vision?

*The above slide contains forward looking projections that are not guaranteed.

What is the competition like?

There are a lot of companies in the freelance space, as expected with a $1.4 Trillion market. If we break it down to look at companies going after skilled freelancers at the top of the market, we can look at the marketplaces, freelance tools, and freelance education.

• Freelance Marketplaces: TopTal, Catalant, Graphite, Marketerhire, and Business Talent Group.
• Freelance Tools: HelloBonsai, Honeybook, Hyke / Collective, Wingspan, Catch, and KeeperTax. While there are quite a few more, these are the most notable ones to watch.
• Freelance education: Freelancing School, Consulting Club, and Practice. There are also plenty of blogs and influencers in the space, but we haven't seen a large presence helping skilled freelancers with education and development.
• There's competition in any attractive, large space. Ideas don't win, strategy and execution win. Mylance is building a different kind of business in a few respects, which we've detailed above. Further, at the end of the day, every company comes down to strategy and execution.

What makes Mylance different?

• Trusted relationship with our customers

  • Mylance isn't just a freelance bookkeeping service or freelance marketplace. We provide education and a community for our customers. This means that customers have a unique relationship with Mylance that's different than any other company in the space. To back this up, this is part of the reason that our Bootcamp customers sign-up for our bookkeeping offering, bring back projects to the community, and refer their friends to Mylance. A note we got in our Slack channel before the Holidays this year captures it best.
  • Underserved target customer
    • Most of the marketplaces and communities in the space are targeting engineers, designers, and marketers. Mylance currently targets Operations, Strategy, and Product specialists. This talented group is more of your "jack of all trades" individuals that every start-up and company needs, but is hard to find. Further, many of these specialists don't realize they can consult for themselves and struggle to communicate their niche, so we add significant value to them by bringing them into the Mylance community.
  • Uniquely positioned team
    - By investing in Mylance, you're investing in Founder Bradley Jacobs and the talented supporting team. We combine big tech experience and company scaling to well over $1B, passion for the space, and the grit to win.
    
    • Big tech experience
      At Uber, Bradley launched both Miami and Milan for UberEATS, and then went on to launch Uber Freight and built up the business to well over $1B in value within 2 years leading the Carrier Operations team. We've done it before for other companies, now we're doing it for ourselves.
      
      
    • Passion for the space
      
      • After Bradley left Uber in Oct 2018, he consulted independently for start-ups and logistics companies on how to launch, scale, and automate their businesses. He experienced both the fulfillment but also the challenges of being a freelance consultant. He saw what freelancing could provide: following a passion, spending more time with your family, or starting that business you've always wanted to. Bradley became passionate about enabling a sustainable freelance life because of the freedom and fulfillment it provides, and thus chose to bring the freelance life to millions through Mylance.
    • Grit to win
      
      • Besides the above accomplishments, nothing says grit more than bootstrapping a company from scratch to over $70k in revenue in its first nine months, mostly done without any coding experience or in-house products. We know how to stretch a dollar, bring on excellent talent, and overcome the adversity that comes with starting any company. As an anecdote, our first Bootcamp cohort in June 2020 was with 6 talented individuals. Afterwards, we collected a satisfaction survey and averaged a 6.2 / 10. While obviously not easy to digest, we took it upon ourselves to interview every customer to learn what could've been better, and in 4 short days, turned around an upgraded product for the July cohort. For the July cohort, we measured an score of 9.8. We listened, we took feedback, we iterated, and we delivered an excellent product to add value to our customers.
        
      • An additional note
        • For us, this is not an opportunity to raise money, give it our best shot, and try again if it fails. We truly believe Mylance will succeed as a company, and we'll give everything we have to make it so. We believe that in a big space with a talented, hard working team, we can be successful if we are sure that 1. We're solving a problem people genuinely have, 2. That problem is big enough, and 3. We execute well enough to provide enough value for customers to pay us.

What are Mylance customers saying?