Chapter 4

Joining the Crowdforce

In This Chapter

Working out whether crowdwork is for you

Deciding which type of crowdsourcing you want to do

Joining a crowdmarket

Considering mistakes and intellectual property

Bidding successfully for microtasks

Doing the job and getting feedback

All the crowdsourcing websites out there encourage visitors to join the crowd. ‘Click here to become a worker!’ they say. ‘Find a job here!’ ‘Learn about our opportunities!’ ‘Become part of the workplace of the future!’ These invitations are so enticing, but they don’t always tell you what you need to know about being a crowdworker.

You may become a crowdworker for many different reasons, and you can find many different kinds of careers as a crowdworker. Some are full-time careers that will support you and your family; others are part-time jobs that will supplement your income or allow you to develop your skills. Some are little activities that might not have been called a career ten years ago but could be an important part of your life.

Perhaps the most common form of career in the crowd is that of a macrotasker. If you choose this kind of career, you’ll find that you’re working with a crowdmarket to find jobs that match your skills. Some people pursue careers in crowdcontests, looking for new contests that they might enter and win. Microtasking offers another kind of career to crowdworkers, although microtasking is often a supplemental career where workers do a couple of microtasks instead of playing a game on their computer or chatting online. Following a career in self-organised crowds is often an opportunity to be part of a bigger world. You might be working as part of an innovation team trying to bring a new idea to the market, or working on a disaster relief project and trying to help other people.

And if you look for a career in crowdfunding, you’ll probably be looking to help people identify good projects and convince the crowd to provide contributions for these projects. The happiest crowdworkers are those who manage their careers, who think about the things that they want from crowdwork, who know how to find the best opportunities for their skills and who know what to realistically expect out of crowdwork.

This chapter is here to help you understand what kind of career opportunities you might find in the crowd and how you can follow one of those careers.

Deciding to Join the Crowdforce

Many people start thinking about their careers by discussing the amount of money they want to earn. That approach is usually not the best way to make good career decisions, although, of course, anyone who makes a career plan without thinking about money at some point will get what they deserve.

A better approach is to start your discussion by asking ‘What things do I want to do with my life?’ and ‘What skills do I want to use in my career?’ When you’ve answered those questions, ask ‘Is crowdwork the best way to achieve my goals?’ To help you answer that question, consider whether any of these four circumstances sound like your own, in which case crowdwork may be a good career for you:

You can’t work a conventional schedule outside your home. Many successful crowdworkers are people who have to stay at home. You might be a young mother, for example, who has to stay with your children, or be caring for relatives. In such cases, crowdsourcing can provide a good career.

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You have skills that you can’t use in your neighbourhood. You might be a graphic designer living in the highlands of Scotland, or a Java programmer with a home in Wyoming’s Wind River Mountains. In both cases, you may be able to find some local jobs to employ your skills, but you’ll find many more opportunities as a crowdworker.

You have skills that won’t find you a full-time career anywhere. Programmers often find themselves in this situation. They know the deep inner workings of some esoteric piece of software. Some companies need their skill once in a while, but no company needs anyone to work on that software full time.

You love the excitement and variety of working for yourself and learning new tasks. Crowdwork has many, many opportunities for people who like to work in this kind of environment.

Crowdsourcing can also work for you if you like to move to your own rhythm. Unlike many other forms of work, crowdwork allows you to start you career at your own pace. You can try crowdwork while you hold down another job or are acquiring skills, and you can take on as many tasks as you can handle. When you feel ready, you can do it full time. However, if you need to start a crowdwork career at a moment’s notice, you can. Just go to a crowdsourcing site, register as a worker, and – hey presto! – you’re ready to go.

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Most importantly, crowdwork gives you a tremendous ability to plan your own career. You can learn about the career as you work, and adjust it day by day. If you have any concerns about your ability to do certain tasks or to earn a living from crowdwork, you don’t have to commit to that kind of career until you get answers.

Money remains an important consideration, though. Whether you can earn your living as a crowdworker depends on your abilities and on the field in which you work. Many people earn their living as crowdworkers, and some do very well. However, not all crowd careers provide all workers with an income that fully supports their lives. If you’re a PHP programmer, for example, you can find enough work in the crowd to give you an income good enough to support you in most parts of the world. If, however, you want to spend your days doing nothing but transcribing business cards, you probably can’t.

Considering Your Options

If you’re considering a career as a crowdworker, you can easily start it by taking a look at microtasking, macrotasking or crowdcontests. For these three forms of crowdsourcing, you can go to a website that specialises in these kinds of work, register and be ready to go.

If you’re interested in crowdfunding or self-organised crowds, you should be able to build a career in either field, but you may not be able to just go to a website and register for a new career. You have to be a little clever.

Looking at microtasks

For the crowdworker, microtasks offer the simplest introduction to crowdsourcing. The crowdsourcer has taken a large job and broken it into smaller tasks, and you take on one or several of these small tasks.

Microtasking is a good way to find out about crowdsourcing, even if you don’t intend to do microtasking for long. You can find out about the markets, about getting paid, about dealing with problems. Microtasks generally don’t require you to have special skills or take any special tests, and because they’re small, they rarely lead you into trouble.

You can easily register to be a microtask worker. Just go to the crowdmarket, choose a job and demonstrate your ability to do the work.

A commonly used crowdmarket for microtasks is Amazon's Mechanical Turk. To become a microtask worker at Mechanical Turk, you simply go to the website (www.mturk.com), register and follow the instructions. When you've registered, go to Mechanical Turk's task market and start selecting tasks. Many tasks require you to take a test to qualify yourself. When you've qualified for a task that you want, you're ready to work.

You can become a worker at other microtasking sites through a similar series of steps. Other sites include:

CrowdFlower (www.crowdflower.com)

Trada (www.trada.com)

tagasauris (www.tagasauris.com)

You can find more microtask sites at www.crowdsourcing.org.

Of all the forms of crowdsourcing, microtasking is probably the most flexible. You can choose jobs at a moment’s notice and do as many as you like. If you get bored with one set of tasks, you can move to another. You can work in the night. You can work in the day. You can manage your time as you see fit.

At the same time, microtasking is probably the most isolated form of crowdsourcing. You have no contact with other crowdworkers and little, if any, with the organisations that are offering jobs. However, although you work by yourself as a microtasker, you're part of a community. All the major microtask markets have community forums that allow workers to talk, share ideas and discuss crowdsourcing. Workers at Amazon's Mechanical Turk use the forum TurkerNation (http://turkernation.com) to express ideas, discuss different kinds of tasks, and even offer tips and tools that make microtasking easier. TurkerNation also provides subforums for organisations that place jobs on Mechanical Turk.

For more information on microtasking, head to Chapter 8.

Competing for the contest

Crowdcontests, in which you compete to have the winning entry, require more specific skills than microtasks. You need to demonstrate that you’ve mastered graphic design, statistical analysis or whatever skill is required by the contest. Usually, your accomplishments are more important than your academic credentials. If you can create something that’s capable of winning the contest, you have sufficient qualifications for the work.

In crowdcontests, you’re likely to have more contact with the contest organiser than microtask workers have with the crowdsourcers of their jobs. The contest organisers can offer feedback on your entries, suggest changes and encourage you to develop your design in certain ways. When the contest is over, however, you’re unlikely to have further contact with that organiser. You move to a new round of contests.

In crowdcontests, you have little contact with other members of the crowd, because you often compete against them. However, most crowdcontest markets have forums that allow crowdworkers to talk with each other and share ideas. For example, you can find the forum for the graphic design crowd marketplace 99designs at http://99designforum.com.

Workers often consider crowdcontests to be an easy way of finding out about crowdsourcing, for those with the right skills. You can enter them easily and build a portfolio of work. Many workers, however, don’t consider them to be a permanent form of work, and they quickly move on to macrotasking.

For details on crowdcontests from the organiser’s point of view, take a look at Chapter 5.

Lining up for macrotasks

All macrotasks require you to have specific skills and to be able to demonstrate those skills. The nature of macrotasking is that the crowdsourcer puts a large job on the crowd market and seeks one individual or one team to do the work.

Macrotasking also offers you the opportunity have more contact with the organisers of the tasks and even with other crowdworkers. You’re likely to have regular meetings with the person who hired you for the job. You may also have contact with other crowdworkers.

To get started in macrotasking, you first need to identify a skill that you intend to use. That skill may be something you’ve developed through formal education, such as programming or accounting, or something you’ve learned on your own, such as office organisation or copy editing. When you’ve identified this skill, you need to find a market that offers tasks that require this skill, and register. Some popular macrotask markets are:

oDesk (www.oDesk.com) – a general purpose macrotask market

Elance (www.elance.com) – a general purpose macrotask market

TopCoder (www.topcoder.com) – a specialist macrotask site for computer programmers

You can find more macrotask sites at crowdsourcing.org.

Registering at a macrotasking website is easy. Just go to the site, find the registration button and provide the information required, including tax identification numbers, which allows you to work. As soon as you’re registered, you’re ready to work. However, at most macrotasking sites, you’ll be best able to win jobs if you have a portfolio that shows what you can do. You can learn more about portfolios in the Building your portfolio section later in this chapter.

Many individuals use macrotasking to expand their skills. They register at a macrotask market with one skill and then start working to develop a new skill so that they can take tasks that are more interesting to them or offer higher pay. For example, you might start as a web developer who knows only HTML, but start to build skills with PHP programming or animation and look for tasks that require those skills.

You can learn more about macrotask work by joining one of the various online macrotask discussion forums. There, you can get tips from other workers and learn what you need to do to be a success. Most of the big macrotask markets have forums for their workers. The forums for the markets Elance and oDesk are at https://www.elance.com/q/forum and http://oDesk.com/community.

Wading into self-organised crowds

Self-organised crowds offer a couple of opportunities for potential crowdworkers. You can find tasks to do in innovation crowdsourcing (see Chapter 18) and crowdsourcing that gathers news or responds to natural disasters (see Chapter 17).

In innovation crowdsourcing, the most common opportunity is similar to a crowdcontest. In these situations, an individual or organisation is looking for a new idea and is offering a prize for the individual or team that can create that new idea. The crowdsourcer posts the description of what’s required and the prize at a crowdmarket. As an individual worker, you go to the market, review the contests and look for teams that may need your skills.

You can learn more about opportunities in innovation crowdsourcing on websites such as:

Innocentive (www.innocentive.com)

Chaordix (www.chaordix.com)

The jobs for crowds that respond to natural disasters are useful opportunities, although they're rarely careers that would support an individual. Still, these jobs are opportunities to contribute to the welfare of other people. You can often find news about organisations that are trying to develop such crowds at the Daily Crowdsource (www.dailycrowdsource.com). The Ushahidi Foundation (www.ushahidi.com) has lists of such projects that use its software.

Searching for careers in crowdfunding

Can you find a career in crowdfunding? Almost certainly. People and organisations often need help planning and executing crowdfunding campaigns. But can you find a job in crowdfunding by registering at a crowdfunding site? No; at least, not at the moment.

The way to start a career in crowdfunding is by being good at crowdfunding and by using the tools of social media. To be a little more specific, I’m talking here about careers in charitable crowdfunding (or other forms of crowdfunding that don’t involve selling stocks or raising equity). If you want to carve out a career in this field, your first step is to run a successful campaign – a crowdfunding campaign that meets it target. If you haven’t done this before, then start simple. Join someone else’s campaigns by going to one of the crowdfunding sites and volunteering for a campaign. Rally all your friends in your social network and help bring the campaign to the attention of other donors.

When you’ve helped with someone else’s campaign, your next step is to run one of your own, helping a friend, a neighbourhood project, a small business or a local charity. Crowdfunding platforms love to keep news of successful campaigns on their sites for a long time, so if your campaign is a success you can take advantage of this and use that campaign to promote your skills. Post links to the news from your social media sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Identify yourself as a successful crowdfunder and let people see that you know how to raise funds and that you can be of benefit to them. Sign up as a worker on the big macrotasking sites and identify yourself as a crowdfunder.

If you’re looking for a career in crowdfunding, you have to be a pioneer and cut a new path through the forest. You’ll get that career by showing the world what you’ve done – not what degree you have or what training you’ve had. You’ll spread the news of your accomplishments through your social media and get it to people who need help with crowdfunding.

Getting Up and Running on a Macrotask Crowdmarket

When you’re ready to become a crowdworker, you generally have to complete four steps before you can work. You choose a market, register at the market, identify and demonstrate your skills, and finally build a portfolio.

Choosing a market

You’re not restricted to a single crowdmarket. You can register at as many as you like. However, you may not want to be registered at a market that has no use for your skills. For example, you don’t want to be a graphic designer on a site that specialises in computer programming, or a bookkeeper trying to sell your services on a website that offers creative skills.

When you look at crowdmarkets, consider:

The kind of work they offer. Make sure that other people who have skills similar to yours are registered. While you may feel that these individuals are competing with you, they’re really the sign that you’re joining an active market and that organisations are placing tasks that you can do. No self-respecting crowdsourcer would place a task on a website that offers only a single person who is able to do the job.

The typical payments that specific jobs offer. Some macrotask websites get you higher payments than others. Generally, the sites that have a reputation for offering the best workers get you the best-paid jobs.

Policies for crowdworkers. Some macrotasking sites have policies that guarantee that you’re paid for every hour you work. Some sites let the crowdsourcer decide which hours will be compensated and which won’t. Be sure to read the workers’ policies before you agree to take any task.

When you join most crowdmarkets, you agree to let the site arbitrate in any disputes between you and any individual who offers a job. If a crowdmarket has a reputation of settling disputes in favour of the individuals who offered the job, you may want to look elsewhere.

Setting yourself up on the market

Registering at a crowdmarket is much like registering on any commercial website. You give your name, address and email. Unlike most commercial sites, you have to give your tax ID in case you need to pay taxes on your earnings.

After you register, you have to identify your skills. Most sites give you three ways of showing your skills. You can:

Identify your skills on a profile.

Upload a portfolio of work.

Take a test to demonstrate your skills.

Figure 4-1 shows the profile page for Elance, one of the major macrotasking markets. It requires workers to identify their skills with standard keywords that the market has defined. When Elance presents you on its web page, it wants to do so in a way that’s well understood by both workers and potential employers.

Like most macrotask markets, Elance allows you to post your own résumé, give details of your education, and add a portfolio of your work. It also allows you to take tests on some of your skills. Figure 4-2 shows the test results for one set of skills.

When you register on a macrotask market, you generally give a range for the hourly wage that you’ll accept. Scan the records of workers with similar skills and backgrounds to see what values they post.

Reproduced with permission from Elance.

Figure 4-1: Identifying skills in a macrotask market.

Reproduced with permission from Elance.

Figure 4-2: Test results.

Building your portfolio

In macrotasking, you benefit if you have a strong portfolio and profile. As you work, you want to collect your best work and add it to the portfolio. You also want to collect recommendations and comments from employers who have been satisfied with your work.

The portfolio allows you to expand your abilities beyond your formal training. When you start macrotasking, you start with your best skills and adjust your payment requirements so that you start to get jobs. As you complete more and more work, you start adding the best pieces to your portfolio and start to increase your payment requests.

You can also use your portfolio to expand your work into new fields. If you see a job that appeals to you but requires new skills, you can bid for it by pointing to work that’s similar. When you start to get such new jobs, you can add the results to your portfolio and use them to help demonstrate your new skill.

Protecting Yourself as a Macrotasker

As a macrotasker, you want to be protected from the consequences of bad jobs as much as possible. You also want to control the material that you produce:

Protecting your assets: Risk is the big issue. When you’re a crowdworker, you’re considered to be an independent contractor. You don’t work for the market, be that market oDesk, Elance, 99designs or Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. The market merely connects you to someone who wants to purchase your services. Because you’re a contractor, you’re responsible for your mistakes. If you make a mistake in a microtask or macrotask, you risk not getting paid for the work. If you knowingly make a mistake, you may be liable for any damage that the mistake causes. If you regularly work on large, complicated jobs, you may want to consider professional liability insurance to limit your financial risk. You could get such insurance from an insurance company.

Holding intellectual property: Many crowdmarkets have policies that transfer all intellectual property rights from the worker to the employer when the job is finished and the payment is made. (These policies differ from market to market.) For many kinds of job, such policies present no trouble to you.

However, if you’ve a certain kind of intellectual property that’s associated with you, you may need to check the policies. You may have a certain graphic style, a way of dealing with accounting problems, or even a unique way of editing reports. You don’t want to find that your signature approach has been transferred to a single employer.

Even though you don’t work for the crowdmarket, you agree to certain things when you register for the market and ask to take work. You usually agree that any disagreement between yourself and an employer will be handled by a process that the crowdmarket oversees. Generally, these processes try to balance the rights of workers with those of employers. The crowdmarket, not the employer, holds the payment until it has reviewed the case and decided whether the worker should get the money or the employer can withhold payment.

The policies of crowdmarkets are written in a way to protects the interest of the market itself, not the employer or the worker. Furthermore, no two crowdmarkets have the same policies. Read the polices carefully before you take work.

If you have questions about policies, contact the site. If have any concerns about legal issues, contact a lawyer.

Making the Bid in Macrotasking

In general, only macrotasking requires you to place a formal bid. In crowdcontests and in microtasking, you just take the assignments and do the work. In macrotasking, you have to tell potential employers that you want their job and how you intend to do that job. You use the proposal, the covering letter and your résumé to convey the crucial messages.

The proposal

The proposal is a short document that responds to the job description. In it you:

State that you can do the job.

Show who you’ll do the job for.

Estimate the time and effort.

State the cost of the job.

Occasionally, the proposal responds to the original job description and modifies it. If you can see a faster or more efficient way of doing the task, you should suggest a modification in your proposal. However, if you prepare a proposal with a modified job, you should probably prepare a proposal for the original job as well.

In the proposal, you can state your qualifications to do the work and try to convince the employer to hire you. However, most people keep the proposal simple and don’t try to sell themselves in it. They make their pitch for the job in the covering letter (see the next section). Figure 4-3 gives a sample proposal and shows how simple a proposal can be.

The covering letter

Your covering letter should send one simple message: if you choose me, I’ll do a great job. You use the covering letter to sell your services and make the case that you’re the best person to do the job.

The covering letter should be simple and straightforward. Start with a formal greeting. You’re never wrong to start a letter ‘Dear Mr’ or ‘Dear Ms’. But if you start it ‘Hey, Employer’ you may offend someone who may be able to offer you a job.

Summarise your proposal in one or two sentences. Then write a paragraph explaining why you’re a good choice for the job. You’ll make a good case for yourself if you can point to jobs that you’ve already done and to employers who are satisfied with your work.

Figure 4-4 shows a simple covering letter. Like the proposal, it need not be long and complicated. Get to the point, but explain that you’re the best.

End the letter with a second quick summary of your proposal and then state that you’ll do a good professional job on the task that will satisfy the potential employer.

Figure 4-3: A sample proposal.

Figure 4-4: A sample covering letter.

The résumé

You have a profile on the crowdmarket, but consider including a résumé in your bid to help show why you’re the right person for the job. Don’t include a full résumé unless the employer asks for it. Just prepare a short résumé that describes the experiences that are relevant to the job you’re seeking.

The résumé should demonstrate two things: skills and maturity. Show that you’ve developed the skills to do the work and that you have the experience to complete the job on time, on budget, and without needless conflict. List the jobs that are most relevant to the project that you’re hoping to undertake. Then summarise other jobs. After giving the details of three or four recent jobs that you’ve completed, you can add, for example: ‘In addition, I’ve done 44 other debugging jobs on platforms ranging in size from handhelds to servers.’

You can put awards on your résumé, because they show recognition of your work. You can also describe your educational background. In crowdsourcing, however, educational history is less important than in traditional résumés. In traditional résumés, your education communicates the kind of community to which you belong and hence the kind of values or skills you may have. In crowdsourcing, people are more interested in what you can do than in what school you attended. Hence you can often reduce the amount of space you give to your education. Eventually, you have just a few lines:

Principia High School, 1993; college prep program, pre-science

University College Dublin, 1998; BSc Cum Laude Mathematics, Computer Science

Harvard University, 2006; Certificate, Higher Education Administration

An inconsistent résumé that does not seem to make sense is a big problem. Lying is bad too. Nothing ends the opportunity of getting a job faster than a résumé that’s inconsistent or false. Potential employers ask ‘What isn’t right in this résumé?’ but don’t spend time finding the answer. They just move on to the next one.

Setting the price

At first, one of the hardest things to do is to set the price. You often don’t know what you’re worth as a crowdworker and don’t understand the competition. You need to set your price based on the market. You can’t get top fees if everyone in the market’s offering their services at half price. At the same time, don’t feel that you always need to underbid. If you’re offering high-quality work, you can expect a higher price.

Crowdsourcing involves markets. You always have to monitor the markets to make sure that you’re offering the right prices. As you explore the market, check to see what others are asking for similar jobs. At the start, you may need to underbid other workers to get your first jobs. After you’ve done a few jobs, you may want to start raising your prices.

Crowdmarkets don’t always reward the lowest bidder. Some employers conclude that a worker who’s offering a low price isn’t a good worker. As soon as you can point to successful projects in your portfolio, you want to raise your prices.

Learning from the process

You won’t win every job you bid on. It’s not personal. It’s a market. Whenever you lose a job, try to see whether you can read the winning proposal. Sometimes you find that the winner offered a lower price. However, you may also find that the winner was offering more work for the money or had a more impressive portfolio. Look at what the winner has done and see whether you can adjust your future bids.

Completing the Macrotask

You always put yourself in a strong position if you complete the work well, however much you may feel tired or inclined to rush towards the end of it. At the very least, doing a good job earns you a stronger recommendation from the employer. The following sections are here to help you impress the crowdsourcer.

Remembering the goal

When you start crowdsourcing, you see how easy it is to forget the original goal. You spend two or five or ten weeks on a project, and you discover that you’re doing something quite different from the original statement of work. Such a drift can cause problems between crowdworkers and employers. To avoid it, you need to keep the goal in front of you. Regularly ask ‘Am I still making progress?’ or ‘Am I getting closer to my goal?’

As you work with your employer, regularly review the goals of the project and check that you’re making progress. Because you aren’t part of a permanent team, you miss some of the discussions that keep projects focused: the conversations in the office, lunches with other workers, and those short little discussions at the end of the day.

You may be asked to do some additional work, and you have to make a choice. If the work is just more of the work that you’ve already been doing, you may take the assignment and not worry about it. If the work takes you into a new project, you may want to ask the employer for a new statement of work. (For more on statements of work, head to Chapter 11.)

You’re a crowdworker and are reviewed by your accomplishments. If you’re distracted from the original goal, you can find you’ve worked a large number of hours and are still far from completing the original project.

Communicate, communicate, communicate

If your employers don’t communicate with you, you should communicate with them. You don’t need to communicate a lot. An email in the morning. An email at the end of the day. An email in the middle if that seems good. Because you’re working at a distance, you need to be sure that you’re doing the work that the employer wants. If the employer isn’t telling you, you need to ask.

If your employer isn’t giving you much information, you may need to resort to the technique of asking repeated questions. Ask three nearly identical questions:

Is this the right thing to do today?

Am I making progress towards the goal?

Is this going to be satisfactory to you?

If the answer to all three questions is similar, then you can be reasonably sure that you’re getting a consistent message from the employer.

Most macrotask crowdmarkets use some kind of technology to track the number of hours you work. However, your employer usually needs more information than just the number of hours you worked. Keep the employer aware of the tasks that are hard, the tasks that are easy, and the progress you’re making.

Working across cultures

Crowdsourcing is a global activity. You can easily find yourself working with an employer from another culture. The barrier between the two cultures may make it difficult for you to understand what you need to do. The employer may not be able to explain the task completely. You may not be able to understand what needs to be done.

If you’re working with an employer from a different culture, you need to be sure that you’re getting the right information. Sometimes, the best way to ensure that you’re fully communicating with your employer is to ask multiple questions. Use the strategy I lay out in the preceding section of asking the same question in multiple ways. If the answers are consistent, then you can be pretty certain that you have the right information.

Never take a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ as the final direction you receive. Ask for clarification. ‘Do you mean “Yes, you’re doing the right job” or “Yes, you need to change your approach to the work.”?’

Keeping good records

Keep good records. The crowdmarket also keeps records of the job and your employer. You may need to contact the employer if you need a recommendation. You may need to defend yourself from the claim that you’ve not been working on the right project. You’ll always find it useful to have your own set of records.

In general, you should keep records of the job, the proposal, the hours that you work, and your contact in the organisation. This material not only helps you understand what you’ve done, but also helps you prepare more proposals for other clients.

Getting an extra recommendation

As the job comes to an end, ask for an extra recommendation. Most crowdmarkets solicit one from the employer, but I recommend asking for an independent letter. Your value as a crowdworker comes from your reputation. You can build that reputation with outside letters that the employer did not have to write.

You can also use outside letters at other crowdmarkets. Your reputation can’t be easily moved from market to market. If you move into a new market, you’re starting with no reputation. If you have a letter, you have at least some part of your reputation that can move with you.