Asked what he would change about the world, Jay Swansson found an economical way out of a very large question. “Elon Musk keeps stealing my ideas,” he replied. It was 2013. Swansson was building an agency with Joe Griffin and introducing a new project called ClearVoice. The joke was expansive; the project was concerned with something quite specific. Writers were producing work across the web. Businesses needed people who could write. Between a published byline and a paid commission lay a surprisingly awkward stretch of road.
Swansson would spend the next chapter of his career helping construct a crossing. ClearVoice brought author discovery, a talent network, and content collaboration into one business. Its premise was easy to understand if you had ever tried to hire a specialist from a pile of browser tabs. A person’s work ought to make that person easier to find. Finding them ought to make working together easier, too.
A ballplayer takes the long way into marketing
Before the software, there was baseball. Butler University’s record book lists Swansson among its baseball letterwinners for 1998, 1999, 2000, and 2001. Four seasons are a pleasingly concrete entry in a biography: practices, games, and repeated selection for a team, recorded without the assistance of a corporate communications department.
He earned a bachelor’s degree at Butler and a Juris Doctor at William Mitchell College of Law. His parents were teachers, and he recalled a childhood arranged around education, sport, family, and friends. After finishing law school in 2004, he entered search marketing in sales. The legal qualification remained part of his background while his working life went in another direction.
His public professional biography would eventually range across strategy, operations, technology, company culture, and business development. That is a substantial collection of responsibilities for someone whose original training supplied a different professional destination. It also helps explain why his later accounts of company building spend so much time on the surrounding organization. A sale creates obligations for people throughout a business.
Five years before they became partners
Swansson and Griffin met in 2004 through a business relationship. Each was a client of the other. They discovered compatible ambitions and, in spring 2009, established iAcquire. Its first client arrived that July. The agency initially concentrated on link building, supported by proprietary technology called iRank, then broadened its work into content marketing and digital strategy.
By July 2013, Swansson described a company of 100 people serving more than 100 clients internationally. He said changes in search had required more sophisticated content work and a substantial expansion of the department. Search marketing had a way of revising the examination paper while its practitioners were still answering the questions.
The physical business grew alongside its services. Swansson recalled starting with four people in a 500-square-foot office. A move in 2010 provided more room; further expansion followed in Phoenix and New York. He explained the New York presence partly through access to talent. Geography offered a recruiting advantage, then presented the management bill.
He and Griffin traveled between offices. Colleagues visited other locations, and the agency brought its staff to Phoenix around the holidays for time together and planning. The details have the texture of actual management: flights, schedules, conversations, and the effort required to keep people familiar with colleagues they do not see every morning.
The coach notices the supporting cast
Griffin described Swansson as particularly effective at recruiting. Swansson’s own writing supplied a clue to how he thought about the job. In an essay on structuring a marketing department, he reached for the language of a sports team and identified a family background spanning three generations of coaches.
His model gave attention to leaders and standout performers, but also to specialists and the people who handle necessary tasks without much recognition. A roster assembled entirely from people who expect the winning photograph to feature them would be an expensive way to discover the importance of cooperation.
The coach’s responsibilities, in his account, included establishing standards, helping leaders, removing obstacles, and combining complementary abilities. Read as a management philosophy, the sports vocabulary carries a fairly demanding proposition. Hiring someone talented creates a further obligation to place that talent in conditions where it can contribute.
“it’s ok to disagree, just not to be disagreeable.”Jay Swansson, describing his team’s working rule, 2013
At ClearVoice, the office culture would be described in coffee-shop terms, with music, standing desks, and quiet rooms. Those details allow for different ways of concentrating. The quiet room is a useful concession to anyone whose most productive relationship with office music is a closed door.
What a byline could become
ClearVoice was already in beta in 2013. The company launched in 2014, with Swansson and Griffin as its founders. Its early public tools approached the content economy through authorship: discover a writer, connect that writer with published work, and give a prospective collaborator something more informative than a name.
At the July 2014 launch covered by Search Engine Journal, the search index contained more than 90,000 author profiles. Authors could claim profiles showing their work, expertise, and social interaction. A score from one to 100 incorporated publication output, publisher prominence, the variety of publishing outlets, and social reach.
That number described the index, rather than an employed writing staff. The distinction matters to the idea. ClearVoice was organizing information about a distributed population of creators. Reputation, previously scattered across publications, could become something a prospective buyer could inspect in one place.
The original launch plan also included assignment and publishing tools. Discovery was the entrance to a longer process. Once a company found a suitable writer, someone still needed to describe the job, agree on the work, and move it through production. A directory could introduce people. A working platform had to help them do something after the introduction.
The invoice belongs in the creative process
By January 2016, Swansson described ClearVoice as a combination of marketplace, project management, and tools for collaboration between internal teams and freelancers. Writers could find projects suited to their expertise, availability, and rates. Payment went through the platform, addressing the familiar independent-worker problem of finishing an assignment and then acquiring a second, unpaid occupation in collections.
He also said the company was making its platform available free to nonprofits and charities. It was a practical extension of the proposition: organizations with stories to tell could use help arranging the work of telling them. The service concerned both access to people and the mechanics of working together.
- 01 Find the writer
- 02 Organize the assignment
- 03 Create and edit
- 04 Handle payment
External investment followed. A January 2016 announcement reported $1.1 million in funding. Swansson said ClearVoice had met the product, revenue, and delivery milestones it had established, making the case for capital to accelerate growth. The planned spending included sales, marketing, development, and product talent.
His approach to outside creative relationships also appeared in his marketing advice. He urged businesses to learn about the people they approached, personalize their communication, and contribute something useful before asking for help. The principle is unromantic and durable. A message feels rather different when its sender has bothered to discover who will receive it.
A public-company day, with names attached
On February 13, 2019, Fiverr announced its acquisition of ClearVoice. The buyer presented the deal as part of its effort to serve larger businesses. ClearVoice’s customers included Intuit, Carfax, and Esurance; its combination of a content platform and creative talent network fitted that ambition.
Swansson spoke about expanding creative collaboration internationally. Fiverr planned to operate ClearVoice as a separate subsidiary. The acquisition gave a particular form of organized freelance work a place inside a larger marketplace, with a broader customer base and resources beyond those of the Phoenix company.
The founders’ accompanying message spent time on clients’ responsibilities to talent: clear communication, mutual respect, fair treatment, and timely payment. These were consequential operating details for a company depending on people who could choose whether to accept another project. The creative relationship continued past delivery of the document.
That June, Swansson and Griffin were photographed on the New York Stock Exchange trading floor as Fiverr became publicly traded. Swansson thanked the ClearVoice team, his wife, family, and friends in a celebratory post. ClearVoice had become part of a listed parent company; the occasion belonged to a larger collection of people than two founders.
Another post offers a smaller, revealing picture of how he shared a result. Discussing ClearVoice’s blog, Swansson credited Justin McKinley and 80 contributing freelancers, reporting growth from 3,000 to more than 50,000 organic monthly pageviews. The numbers made the claim legible. The names and headcount made the production legible.
Still in the company of builders
Swansson is now the former co-CEO of ClearVoice. His public LinkedIn profile places him in the San Diego metropolitan area and lists Woven Holdings. Dean Garland’s advisory roster also includes him and identifies his executive role as CEO of a venture described as Stealth. That roster reunites familiar parts of his professional world, including Griffin, now Dean Garland’s CEO.
The enduring interest running through Swansson’s career is the organization around creative ability. His own writing asks who sets the standard, who supplies a missing skill, and who handles work that attracts little applause. ClearVoice applied that interest to a wider population of writers and businesses. A byline supplied the beginning. The assignment, the collaboration, and the payment gave it somewhere to go.