Overview 🧭
I built SquareBoard as a side project while working on my startup treadapp.co. SquareBoard was a freelance services marketplace for college students and budding freelancers to get a new gig from early-stage startups easily.
- Built the platform over a weekend using no-code tools like Airtable, Instapages, Typeform and Zapier.
- Deployed it as a web app quickly, thanks to Netlify and used Hotjar to track page views.
- Tested and validated it with a bunch of freelancer friends I knew.
Results 📊
18
Freelance Projects posted within the first two weeks.
11
Student freelancers got their first ever gig.
142
Page views within 2 days of launch.
28
User interviews with students and startup founders.
Key Takeaways 🗒️
- Breaking into freelancing is hard for college students especially for those with very little work experience.
- Many freelancers don't get paid fairly when they start out and most of their payments don't happen on time.
- It's easy to validate a product idea by just hacking a landing page or an MVP using no-code tools.
Problem 😓
- While building our startups treadapp.co, we realized that it was tough for very early-stage startups with no financial resources to hire developers/designers.
- Having graduated from NIT Trichy just 6 months before, we knew that there is a lot of untapped potential in college students.
- Existing freelancing platforms like Upwork and Fiverr are saturated with lots of experienced freelancers and it's very tough for a student to break into those platforms and get a good project.
