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Set Your Rate is a service that allows individuals to market their skills to the public. You offer up your services, “set your rate,” and businesses and others can hire you out.

Luke Aviet, one of the creative minds behind this product, was kind enough to take some time to talk to us about Set Your Rate as well as give us a bit of insight into what it’s like to be a digital entrepreneur.

Luke Aviet

I was born in a small town 50km north of London, England. I studied economics and social history at the University of Leicester before starting my career working for an IT training company. I realised this wasn’t the career for me and so I decided to sell pretty much everything I owned to go backpacking around the world for a year.

On my return I had numerous interviews in London and was drawn to a strange sounding Swedish company, TradeDoubler. My decision to join the web start up proved a pivotal moment for me. The company grew to become one of the largest European-based internet businesses over the 5 years I worked there. TradeDoubler publicly listed in 2005 and the stock rose rapidly to reach a market capitalisation of $1billion in 2007. Needless to say, the period provided valuable insight, experiences and contacts which have proved invaluable in setting up SetYourRate.com last year.

What is SetYourRate.com?

SetYourRate.com is a platform allowing anyone to advertise their skills and services directly to the public. It offers a business utility enabling individuals and businesses to market themselves to potential customers.

Each provider has a profile page for their service offerings which includes their description about themselves, their service, indicative prices and the availability of their offering.

When someone searches SetYourRate.com for services the results will contain a unique blend of individuals and small business offerings. The public can view all the relevant service profiles and access reviews left by former customers. They can then contact the most relevant service providers via the site’s secure email facility. At that stage SetYourRate.com’s job is done; the buyer and seller discuss the specific requirements and agree timescales and costs for the service. Payment and the finer details is a matter for the two parties only.

Because SetYourRate.com is open to private individuals as well as small businesses it attracts a truly unique selection of service providers. Many folks will already have full time jobs but want to take advantage of their skills and spare time to earn a secondary income while others such as students and retirees will offer services that fit around their lifestyle requirements.

Furthermore, since SetYourRate.com allows for virtually any service offering, the site is set to become home to a truly unique selection of services. Within a month of launching, SetYourRate.com had attracted a diverse spread of services ranging from flat pack furniture builders to home poker dealers as well as the conventional mainstream offerings like accountancy and marketing.

Why did we start SetYourRate.com?

We believe everyone can offer a service; it’s simply a matter of determining an acceptable price, time and location.

People use the web today to express themselves in a multitude of ways. The mainstream emergence of social networking and web 2.0 has meant people are now engaging with the web in a fundamentally different way to even a few years ago. So we believe the time is right to provide a platform which incorporates these ‘new’ trends and apply them to individuals wanting to promote their own services.

Closer to home, our family and friends became our assurance that the time was right to launch SetYourRate.com. They all had services to offer and it turned out that many were now prepared to promote themselves through a platform like SetYourRate.com.

In a similar way to how eBay uncovered an entirely new industry for the trading of goods, we believe there is now a mainstream demand for a platform allowing individuals and small business to trade their services.

Monetization

When we came up with the SetYourRate.com concept we just wanted to get it out there as soon as possible for people to use. We didn’t want to be tied to a monetisation strategy: we wanted to listen and understand our users’ requirements and then work out how to add value and generate revenue in due course. Too many companies, particularly in Europe, start the other way around which perhaps partly explains why there are relatively few European-based truly global internet properties.

So now we are live and have had feedback from our users we intend to develop a number of optional features that we believe some people will pay for in order to enhance their service profiles. We are in the early stages of developing these features but we hope to release them sometime in the spring.

Fundamentally however, SetYourRate.com was created to be free and accessible to everybody therefore it will always remain free to join.

Web 2.0 Roundup

I just wanted to thank Luke again for taking to time to talk to us. If you are an entrepreneur with a story to tell, drop me a line.

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