Freelancer Marketplace- Pick.im

I’m launching a startup, and I want to share every step with you.

Name: Pick http://www.pick.im said with a southern drawl ‘pick’em’

Tagline: Tools for Freelance

The curbside pitch: Freelancer Marketplace

Longer pitch: Freelancers are a key part of our economy, but don’t have tools to show their availability, set their price range, legal terms and accept payment from their portfolio.  For those looking for freelancers, we will provide a list of freelancers in your area to work on your project, at your price point and take care of the legal, payment systems and light project management.

Pick.im is the freelancer marketplace you will be proud to use.

Background: I was a freelancer for a few years out of college.  Freelance life is challenging.  Finding new clients, getting payment, signing the legal forms, incorporating, working alone, overdelivering and daily trying to keep my head above water.  It seemed half of my billing was for finding new work.  Half of my time was not designing.  I ended up getting burned out.

Costs: % of the payment systems, still listening as much as we can.  Freelancers can go pro for $20 a month.  Over the longrun, if freelancers use the escrow like tools we are building, they will have fewer non payments and end up making more.

Team: worked with a stellar group of freelancers including Chris Hutchins, Grant Blakeman, Matt Gist, Lindsay Dayton and the kick ass team at Flatterline. By being as open as possible, we are also trying to document every step of the process.

What you can do to help: tell every quality freelancer you know about this.  They can request an invite at http://pick.im/request/invite.  We are letting a few freelancers in this way, and then closing it to a ‘you must be invited by a member.’

We put some stats from the first 24 hours on the pick.im blog

Your thoughts?