How Growth Collective Helps Hire Vetted Marketing Experts At Low Cost (In Minutes): Q/A with CEO Dan Minahan

Website Planet interviewed Dan Minahan, CEO of Growth Collective, a premium freelance marketplace that enables leading brands, high growth start-ups and agencies to hire some of the world’s best fractional marketing talent.

We looked at how this new approach helps Growth Collective’s clients get matched in few minutes to marketing experts from Coca Cola, Facebook, Google and all the world’s top brands (at a cost lower than one full-time hire!)

What problems are you solving with your products and services?

Growth Collective helps companies grow faster and more affordably by tapping into fractional marketing specialists rather than hiring full-time marketing generalists or traditional agencies.

As marketing has evolved, there are more and more channels companies can tap into to grow, and finding full-time hires that know how to tap into those many channels is impossible. Instead, our customers find that a better approach is to hire fractional marketing specialists across a variety of channels. By doing so, our customers are able to hire multiple marketing specialists for less than it costs to hire a full-time generalist.

This approach also tends to work better (and cheaper) than hiring a traditional marketing agency, because our customers get to work directly with the marketing talent to avoid any agency markup.

To save even more, one should hire on generalist freelance platforms where freelancers are not vetted, ratings are often gamed, and it takes too much time to wade through endless freelancer profiles to find the best ones for a particular role. Our technology plus in-house matchers help our customers save them time by providing stronger, pre-vetted talents that have the right skillset to help them grow.

For example, an ambitious marketing leader could outfit the entire marketing team with a fractional split such as:

• Fractional CMO (25 hours per week)
• Fractional Email marketer (15 hours per week)
• Fractional Paid Search expert (15 hours per week)
• Fractional Organic Search expert (15 hours per week)
• Fractional Content Marketing expert (20 hours per week)

This saves time and money, while avoiding the potential headache of hiring the wrong person into a full-time position.

Moreover, we recently launched a new platform to make it easier than ever to hire some of the world’s best freelance marketers.

Which types of companies benefit the most from your services?

Growth Collective clients include high-growth startups, mature technology firms, marketing agencies, e-commerce businesses, Venture Capital portfolios, and more. We work with company founders, executives, marketing leaders, and hiring managers. Our clients come to Growth Collective because of our community of freelancers, our white glove matching service, and our commitment to growth for our clients.

What makes them eventually choose you over your competitors?

Clients choose Growth Collective because we match them with the best freelance marketers for their needs.

Our competitors are not able to give the same level of personalized support, and they take higher markups, so clients end up paying more for less. Growth Collective has streamlined fractional hiring, and our clients clearly see the benefits:

• “Growth Collective is way easier than using an agency. It’s really quick to go from finding Growth Collective to hiring and having this growth marketer on our team. Payments were incredibly easy, and we didn’t have to deal with 1099s.”
• “We needed an expert to devise a strategy for paid channels. GC connected us with the right marketer the day we signed up. There is no better solution for startups who are looking to move fast!”
• “We’re constantly pulling in Growth Collective experts to test and scale new acquisition channels. They seem to have a specialist for everything!”
• “Growth Collective sent us a digital marketing expert who has really helped us scale and double our revenue. Working with Growth Collective to find the perfect match was easy, from sourcing great talent to helping you choose the right one for you and your business.”

How do you handle customer support?

We handle customer support mostly via email and form submissions from inside our platform. We try to respond as quickly as possible and have a usual response time of no more than two business days. Our team is composed of a customer support agent, a billing support specialist, and a customer success representative.

Depending on the support issue and the attention required, we work as a team to address customer issues, whether on the client or freelancer side of our marketplace, and for identifying and prioritizing issues, we use various methods. As regular users of our platform, we identify many priorities ourselves, but we also regularly look across our support queues to see if there are any common threads and make sure that we address high-priority items as quickly as possible.

We have received positive feedback from our customers’ experience with our support team. One Freelancer said recently, “Thank you for reaching out. In a world increasingly dominated by impersonal tech platforms, it’s genuinely refreshing and quite surprising (in the best way possible) to see the personal care and attention that Growth Collective extends to its customers and freelancers. It’s a remarkable and much-appreciated approach.”

A client added, “I must say that I have tried many other platforms, but Growth Collective truly showed the best customer service and the most personalized experience.”

How are you doing today and what’s in the roadmap for the future?

As a company, we have taken limited funding and yet have enjoyed strong growth since our founding in 2019, but we measure ourselves by how we are serving both our customers and our freelancers. If we serve them well, our company will continue to grow.

We currently work with some amazing companies and brands and some of the world’s best marketing freelancers choose to work with us. While the current economy is creating challenges for a lot of companies, now is an even better time to consider hiring fractional marketing talent. We are currently riding the success of our new technology platform that we launched in September 2023. It’s a big step forward in freelance marketing talent recruitment, matching, and collaboration, empowering high growth companies and agencies to scale more quickly, efficiently and effectively.

Fractional hiring is the future of work and is especially relevant for marketing teams. We are perfectly suited to support this forward trend.

In the short term, Growth Collective will continue to expand our footprint with start-ups, marketing agencies, Venture Capital portfolios, and e-commerce companies. In the longer term, we are considering expansion into international markets as we see emerging needs for fractional hiring there.

Are you offering any partnership opportunities at the moment?

We are very interested in partnerships with a variety of different companies and organizations. We are looking to partner with additional venture capital firms to help them to better serve their portfolio companies. We are also working more closely with companies that offer marketing tools and platforms to help their customers be more successful. And, we are very interested in building partnerships with companies that can help to bring services and perks to our freelance community.