Coming so soon 👀
In less than 2 weeks, we’re making a major overhaul to The Starters platform. This overhaul will be make or break for the business. Here’s what’s coming out, why I’m doing it, and why it’s so risky ⬇️ If you’ve been following along with our story for a while, you know that we’ve been trying to build out in-platform messaging, contracts, and payments functionality for a very long time. Seems like standard functionality for a freelancer marketplace, right? But I chose to launch without it. I always have felt as though our competitive advantage will be the quality of talent in the e-commerce space… and if we launched with great talent, we would be successful. And I was right— over the last year and a half, we’ve facilitated 1K+ successful freelance engagements with hundreds of e-commerce brands. Our freelancer & brand community have been incredibly happy with the platform, and that’s been so validating to see. But we need to continue to reinvent ourselves as we grow and strengthen our value proposition to our community. So, 8 months ago, I decided to embark on a journey to double down on in-platform features to make the process of finding, hiring, and paying freelancers completely frictionless. That journey, which I thought would take just 2-3 months, will end up taking 9 months in total. I’ve been so distracted by all the issues the buildout of these features have caused, that I’ve barely had any time to grow the business itself. But in about 2 weeks time, our brands will be able to: - Directly message freelancers on-platform - Originate contracts for any project with a few clicks - Pay freelancers, easily and quickly And, for the first time, freelancers will get: - A full-fledged dashboard to manage all their projects - The ability to manage their own profile on-platform - Get paid with lower transaction fees than almost anywhere else (we take no cut) Anytime you embark on a major platform overhaul, you run the risk of bugs destroying the rollout and impacting the customer experience. Since we have no engineering team and I’m the only full-time person on staff, dealing with major issues will be incredibly difficult, to say the least. So it’s an incredibly risky move, but once it’s rolled out we’ll finally reach technology parity with some of the other platforms out there while maintaining our massive competitive advantage in quality of talent. After that, I’ll be heads down on all things growth. Excited to get this out, and please shoot me a DM if you want an early sneak peak!