Guru Brand Guidelines: A2Zmoonlighter, eMoonlighter & the Guru.com Name Since 2004

A Pittsburgh moonlighting site and a San Francisco name.

Guru.com is a freelance marketplace run from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but its name was born elsewhere. Two businesses started in 1998. In Pittsburgh, a site called A2Zmoonlighter set out to link businesses with professionals looking for work on the side; the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported in January 2004 that it was started by Inder Guglani, an accountant who had studied at Carnegie Mellon University’s business school, together with his former professor Kannan Srinivasan. English Wikipedia names Guglani as founder. In San Francisco, the brothers Jon and James Slavet founded Guru Inc.

Wired described the Slavets’ plan in August 1999: a website for “officeless independent professionals,” whom the site called “Gurus,” offering information about jobs, deals on office supplies and advice on working alone, with a growing database of talent that companies might pay to search. English Wikipedia says Guru Inc. went on to raise venture funding from firms including Greylock Partners and August Capital, and the Post-Gazette recalled its fliers as a sign of its marketing reach.

The Pittsburgh firm took a slower route. The Post-Gazette said it stretched its first angel funding over three years, kept a very small team, focused on the businesses doing the hiring rather than on the freelancers, and paid for online marketing only when people clicked through, rather than buying banner advertising. When the technology bubble burst, the paper said, the business took off, as laid-off freelancers and moonlighters competed for work and the firm could offer companies a deeper pool of talent. It changed its name from A2Zmoonlighter to eMoonlighter, and by 2003 it worked across four fields: information technology, business consulting, creative design and office administration.

Unicru, a domain sale and a new name.

The two companies met through a sale. In December 2002, English Wikipedia says, Guru Inc. was bought by Unicru, a human-resources software company in Portland, Oregon, which kept the technology and staff but chose not to continue the freelance marketplace. In June 2003 eMoonlighter bought the Guru.com domain name, logo and related assets and merged them into its own platform. The Post-Gazette reported the deal as made for an undisclosed amount, after Guru.com had begun looking for a way out of the business in May 2003.

The new name followed. eMoonlighter said it would become Guru.com in February 2004, and English Wikipedia records that change. A company marketing manager told the Post-Gazette that the firm had been “held back” by its moonlighting image, which suggested part-time side jobs rather than full-time freelancing. The paper also reported plans to add staff in New Delhi as demand for outsourcing from India grew.

Today the company says it has worked “since 1998” from offices in Pittsburgh and Noida, India, dating itself from the Pittsburgh start rather than from the Slavets’ site. English Wikipedia names the operator as Websoft, Inc., headquartered in Pittsburgh. Guru states its mission as bringing employers and freelancers together from around the globe to get work done, and describes a community built on merit.

The category.

Freelance and creative-talent marketplaces describe themselves in a small set of words. DesignCrowd’s about page calls it an online creative marketplace that connects businesses with a global network of designers; English Wikipedia describes Crowdspring as a marketplace for crowdsourced creative services. Category names on these sites are practical rather than poetic: logo and identity, web, print, product and merchandise, art and illustration, with designer directories sorted by type, country and city.

The client’s first screen is usually a brief. When Slate tested Crowdspring in May 2011, posting a job meant filling in a “creative brief” form with set questions about what a logo should communicate. Contest sites then add their own rules on top of the brief. DesignCrowd’s how-it-works page lets a client choose a three-, five- or ten-day deadline, keeps designers from seeing one another’s entries and passes full copyright in the winning files to the client.

Showcase work is presented plainly, as entries and finished projects rather than as campaigns. Slate found that anyone could browse other people’s projects and, in many cases, their submissions, and that the site prompted clients to rate entries on a five-star scale and send feedback. Forbes reported in 2009 that Crowdspring offered larger buyers a Pro option that hid submissions from public view, and that its own logo came through its marketplace.

Corporate pages fill in the rest. DesignCrowd’s about section names its founder and chief executive and has a separate board and investors page listing its venture backers, while dated press releases record new country sites and new brands. This guide sets out what can be checked about each marketplace — who founded it, who owns it and how its interface works — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Quotes, Agreements, WorkRooms and SafePay.

The platform is built around a sequence of named steps. Employers post a job and receive Quotes, or search freelancer profiles and invite quotes; Guru says those profiles show performance data, feedback, portfolios and earnings statistics. Hiring is done through an Agreement on scope of work, payment terms and timeline, and work then runs in WorkRooms, where files, team members, messages and payments sit together and the time of hourly freelancers is tracked. Payments run through a system the company calls SafePay.

Joining is free, Guru says, and an employer can expect Quotes within a few hours of posting; a job can be upgraded to a Featured Job to draw more of them, and freelancers an employer likes can be saved to a My Favorites list for later hiring. The company notes that it shares information about freelancers but that the choice of whom to hire stays with the employer.

English Wikipedia describes the same flow from the other side: freelancers build profiles listing their skills, services, portfolios and rates, bid on open postings and agree terms once hired. It lists four payment models: fixed-price, hourly, task-based and recurring. The company also markets enterprise, agency and purchase-order versions of the service, and lets an employer hire several freelancers for one job, each in a separate WorkRoom.

Some of the early thinking survives in the name. Wired reported in 1999 that the Slavets called the independent professionals they wanted to serve “Gurus,” and the word now labels a marketplace covering information technology, design, consulting and administration. The Pittsburgh side brought its own habit: in 2004 Guglani told the Post-Gazette that his subscribers knew the employer, not the freelancer, was the customer.

For a design guide, Guru shows how a bought name can carry a different company: a Pittsburgh marketplace that took over a San Francisco brand in 2003 and still trades under it. Compare Upwork and PeoplePerHour, two other freelance marketplaces. For this guide we use a deep teal, a sand tone and a warm white with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Guru’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.