This episode is brought to you by Sendlane.     Betterly is all about marrying two concepts that don't traditionally live together - the marketplace and community, says Alex Bocquet, founder of Betterly, a freelance marketplace for digital marketers in the U.S. "One of my favorite things about working in an agency was the community - the camaraderie between all of the people who worked with me," Alex says. "And certainly when I started to freelance more and left my old agency job, I lost that sense because I started to distance myself not in the Slack channel anymore." The ideal customer for Betterly's services is the traditional "bread and butter" e-commerce brand that sells an actual product - a CPG brand, Alex says. "Now, that's not to say that it's the only thing they're able to do," Alex says. "I think lead generation is also a big one, whether it's directly through a funnel for your sales team to go and close or whether it's an app in-store. It's anything direct to consumer that's trackable. We can make sense of a cost from the freelancer and its marketing versus the tangible return on that investment." As for the typical revenue of a customer, Alex says it's usually between a pre-revenue startup situation to an eight-figure brand. "These are the brands that either don't want to sign up for an expensive, long-term commitment agency, or they're simply brands that are also seasonal," he says. "There are seasonal brands that come to the pipeline that just want to use a freelancer for three months without the commitment." As for trends in the freelance marketing space, Alex says he still sees many e-commerce brands that don't have an SMS funnel setup. Another trend is the proliferation in the use of TikTok. Brands seem unable to repurpose content or use influencers on TikTok effectively. In Part 2, Alex talks about: * The joy of community. * What the ideal customer is for Betterly. * Why a company would prefer a short-term freelancer to a full-time staff person. * What onboarding is like. * The current "low-hanging fruit" of the freelance marketing space. Join Ramon Vela and Alex Bocquet as they break down the inside story on The Story of a Brand. For more on Betterly, visit: https://betterly.io/ Subscribe and Listen to the podcast on all major apps. Simply search for “The Story of a Brand,” or click here to listen on your favorite podcast player: Listen now. * This episode is also brought to you by Sendlane. If all DTC companies were forced to turn off Facebook ads, they'd be dead on arrival. Why is that? They over-invest in paid acquisition and under-invest in retention. Luckily, Sendlane makes it easy to solve this problem. Sendlane is an E-Commerce Customer Experience Platform helping hundreds of DTC brands to tighten their existing customer relationships. Sendlane automates personalized customer experiences through Welcome and Abandoned Cart workflows, SMS, Deep Data Integrations with Shopify and WooCommerce, multi-store functionality, and much more. Plus, they don't stand for lazy customer support. Their San-Diego-based team has an average 1-minute response time from a live human, making sure you never get stuck in a chat queue ever again. Curious about how Sendlane can help your DTC brand grow? Schedule a demo with a Specialist. Visit https://www.sendlane.com/story