Guys!

I totally forgot to share something exciting with you!

About 2 weeks ago one of our members Riccardo Mimmi received his first 5-star review on The Open Mic!

What does it meant?

It means that there was a client who found and contacted Riccardo on The Open Mic, they collaborated on a project and were happy with the quality of Riccardo’s services.

Did Riccardo have to participate in job-bidding to get this job? Nope.

Did he have to pay $100+ of membership fees to get this job? Nope.

Did he have to participate in site activities so he could rank higher and be found by clients? Nope.

He just created a free profile on The Open Mic and provided as much information about himself as possible.

And when the time came he delivered a top-notch quality work and asked for a testimonial.

This is exactly how we envisioned our community aspect would work: creating equal opportunities for each and every member to be found and hired.

Sure, some of you might argue that this is just a single case and in the grand scheme of things The Open Mic wouldn’t attract that many clients.

But I’m afraid I have to disagree on this one, sorry.

We’re investing a lot of time into design and functionality to make everything work as easy as possible.

Our goal is to empower translators, allowing them to be in control of their rates and who they want to work with.

But we also want to empower clients, helping them to find the best translators in the industry.

You know, the translators who deliver great work, like Riccardo did and who care about quality.

And we already have 1,200 translators that are pretty darn good. Many of us are highly specialized and have many years of experience.

Sure we have some newcomers too, but here’s the most beautiful thing about The Open Mic: our incredible contributors help them feel welcome, learn and grow professionally.

They help them stay inspired and motivated and maybe even learn something new while they’re here.

That’s why we want to set something in motion.

We know that The Open Mic is growing at an insane pace and we already have the attention of the other members of the translation industry: project managers, translation agencies, translation technology companies and even professional associations have shown their interest in The Open Mic.

We’ve been contacted multiple times by translation agencies for example, asking whether they can create a profile on The Open Mic and start looking for translators.

So here’s what we suggest.

We want to do this very carefully, as we understand the importance of this step.

That’s why before we make this bold move we want to run another survey.

We need to understand how we can make The Open Mic accessible to other members of our industry in the most meaningful way possible and avoid the clash of interests.

If you’re a project manager, a translation agency or a translator who occasionally outsources work to colleagues please click that button bellow and answer a few short questions.

Take the survey

What does it mean for the future of The Open Mic?

We know that our most active contributors couldn’t care less about finding more work.

That’s why we know that some of you might be worried that once we allow agencies and project managers to register this might cause some issues.

So here’s what we think: if we work together, we can make it work for all parties involved.

The Open Mic was created as a place for sharing great knowledge and finding inspiration and that will always be our core feature.

The idea of adding other members of our industry to the mix is simply to give them instruments and tools to find and hire top talent.

And we’re pretty confident that we have top talent here.

Corporate clients won’t be able to publish articles here, this is the feature that was developed for us – translators and interpreters so we could share best practices and help each other out.

Adding corporate blogs would conflict with this idea.

On top of that we have pretty flexible privacy settings: you can decide who can view your profile and contact you.

In other words if you don’t want to be contacted by agencies or project managers or direct clients, you can make your profile visible only to the people you follow.

Why do we need to invite other members of translation industry?

Yes, it feels like this community was build by and belong to translators.

Would adding other members of the translation industry kill that feeling?

We believe it would not.

We believe that The Open Mic can be a place where all of us can co-exist.

We want to create something magical for our industry, a place where we all belong, where we can collaborate and make this industry a little bit better.

If you have any questions or any reservations, please, let us know in the comments or via a private message.

In the meantime, it would be awesome if you could help us share this survey with as many agencies, project managers and outsourcers as possible.

Here’s the link to our survey: https://theopenmic.co/lsp/

I’ll start with my own agency clients for example 🙂

[clickToTweet tweet=”Are you an agency or project manager? Take this survey and help us make @OpenMicXL8 awesome for you ” quote=”Are you an agency or project manager? Take this survey and help us make @OpenMicXL8 awesome for you”]