Dear Reader,
Four years ago we launched Odetta as a pilot idea. We landed our first client and hired the first-ever Odettian (of many) with one mission -- to provide work to the highly educated yet underemployed talent across the Middle East and South Asia with a focus on women who experienced significant constraints to working in the traditional 9-5. It wasn't easy, especially in our second year, but today when I look back, I know we were able to thrive because what we wanted to do made sense for the world. As a result, thousands of people helped us.
When I started Odetta, I saw that most of our competitors were treating the "workforce" as units in their websites and their algorithms. They would avoid any functionality that might allow their workforce to talk to each other for fear of unionization. Immediately, I realized that we could be the union. We could be the place to facilitate the voice of the people who are underestimated and/or targeted for exploitation and show the world that there is another way. Whenever a platform gets started, the founders must decide who they are optimizing for. Most freelancing platforms have picked the client side, inherently creating race-to-the-bottom pricing that allows companies to tap into global labor at the cheapest rates. As we have seen in the news, some of these platforms go so far as to run misleading marketing ads in crisis-ridden countries to get the cheapest labor possible. Then they tighten the AI ropes and let that labor bleed, while a small collection of people get really rich.
Odetta is far from perfect, and it is not easy to keep digital workforces happy. I know that we have some Odettians who are not learning or earning as much as they want. What is most critical to our organizational health is that we listen, and we listen with intention. Our Odettians have a voice and a channel to express that voice and we are eager to collectively address underlying concerns. We have actively taken a stand to prioritize our workforce's happiness over our clients' satisfaction. Our clients back us up on this because they want a partner they can trust to treat their people well and they believe that our prioritization delivers gold standard quality that gets them better results. We have so much more we want to do to take care of our people and I am excited for the days when our model allows us to deliver on even higher pay, job security, and career progressions. Make no mistake, our ultimate goal is to make our Odettians' really rich (in more ways than one).
In our four years of working together, we are proud of our accomplishments; we have
- Expanded our global workforce of Odettians to 359 Odettians in 20+ countries
- Delivered our data workflows to more than 350 clients
- Shared inspirational content to our 19,261 social media followers and 190K unique visitors to our website in the last 12 months (up 5x year over year)
- Delivered monthly leadership content to 4,527 newsletter readers
- Interviewed over 15 women in technology for our Tech Live at Odetta Podcasts
- Recognized as Forbes Best Startup Employer two years in a row (#25 America's Best Startup Employers in 2022, #21 America's Best Startup Employers in 2021)
- Became part of Unreasonable Future, an accelerator for mission-oriented growth companies
- Delivered a mental health awareness and mindfulness series to our Odettians
- Kicked off our first-ever physical meetups in Jordan and Pakistan
Today our mission remains as strong as ever. We exist to empower talented women with career-defining opportunities in new frontiers of technology and business process in a globally distributed workflow model that provides flexible freedom to our Odettians and time zone and cost advantage benefits to our startup and enterprise clients.
Regards,
Katharine
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Monthly Spotlight: Data Labeling and Spam Annotation for Knowledge Platforms
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One of our largest teams is performing hundreds of hours daily in data labeling and spam annotation. We review and label content in our client’s platform to help our client use that information for several purposes. First, our client uses the labeled data for lead generation by offering paid services to those who want to promote their products and services on these platforms. Second, our client uses the labeled data to get rid of the spam content and limit the promotional content on their platform. Third, our client uses the labeled data to improve their SEO rankings on Google's algorithm.
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Founder Lesson Learned: Listening With Intention
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Whenever we had to figure out any sort of directional question, I would call up a bunch of people and listen. Not always for what they said, sometimes for what they didn't say. This is a skill I learned from my old boss for how to run off the record reference calls. This practice helped us figure out what use cases made sense for us to sell. This skill became our superpower as we navigated how to build a happy community of entirely remote Odettians working asynchronously. Rumors circulate like festering wounds in anonymous digital platforms and the antidote must be and is intentional listening. The most universal truth is that your team wants to be heard.
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“We really enjoy working with you. You and your team are very responsive, organized, and fast in your delivery. We also appreciate the discovery process and how you customize the searches for our needs.”
—Mina Alexander, Vice President, People of Voice.com
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“I certainly want to work more and do a lot better. And I know I have got what it takes. Unfortunately for me, I am in a setup where women like myself aren't appreciated (actually perceived as a threat). I started off with a lot of confidence and realized 3 months in that I have no family support whatsoever. So I am making the best of what I can do. I have a lot of potential, and I have a lot to give to this world and make great things happen but right now is not my time. With Odetta, at least I have hope that I am not completely wasting all those years of hard work. And sorry about the rant. It is my 2022 goal to change my situation for the better. 🤞”
—Current Odettian
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“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
—Maya Angelou
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