Fun analogy. FLN, UPWK, FVRR and Toptal are all in the fruit...

Fun analogy. FLN, UPWK, FVRR and Toptal are all in the fruit shop, with FLN being the wrinkled stock that no-one really wants. Linkedin Marketplace is out from handing out bananas for free to advertise the rest of their business. Down the road, Tata Consulting Services and Wipro and others are supplying pallets of food to corporates and are approximately 100x bigger than the entire fruit shop put together. Deel is hanging a shingle somewhere between.

The whole BPO sector - in which Deel is a tiny player - is enormous. You don't go to them for a quickie job like you do for FLN (and its more successful competitors). It's worth remembering that this segment exists, as the scope for UPWK/FVRR/Toptal/FLN to get into more structured deals will put them directly into competition with dozens of much bigger BPO firms. But they're not competitors.

Tata Consulting Services is about 800x bigger than FLN by revenue, as it happens, and is one of many.

Forget Deel. FLN should be more worried that it's #4 in the fruit shop and that LinkedIn is giving away bananas, for a start. Then there's the prospect of everyone "growing their own" with GPT4. Even if that doesn't work out, people will give it a try for a couple quarters, something that FLN can't really afford.