How I built a fair marketplace for freelancers

I started to freelance in the past couple of months. I found it very difficult, and at a time when I really desperately needed to pay my rent, I decided to post some gigs on some of the popular sites, and quickly became very frustrated with the pricing model and the payment strategy. Over all, it felt like I was competing for below minimum wage listing services and prices I knew should have been ten times more. I started to ask around, and it turns out many other freelancers felt the same way and had similar issues.

Namos is a fair pricing freelance market. It allows freelancers to list of services for a price they truly deserve. The primary reason why Namos is different is that we do not follow the lowballing pricing model. Many popular platforms have listing prices that are below minimum wage. It is really hard for freelancers to make a decent living or get a decent pay.

Building a no-code business

Namos was built entirely with no-code tools. I tried different solutions such as using WordPress and TypeForm. Then I tried to do a custom code solution. Then I started to use Webflow. To be honest, I think any of these solutions would have worked if I would have given it time but at this moment I was so desperate to make money to pay my rent in the next couple of days I was just wanting anything that would work right then right there.

This is where Boundless comes in. I started asking around in a couple of no-code communities. The CEO of Boundless, Nolan, immediately reached out. He and his team pretty much held my hand most of the way, giving me dedicated support and walking me through every bit of the process.

The platform is fairly new. So they wanted to really make sure that I set up everything correctly and successfully. I also got a lot of help from the Women make community and from my own community frauvis.

I needed something super quick at a time where I needed money urgently. At first I was kind of skeptical of the no-code movement. I hear so many people say it’s not worth it, that it has a learning curve, and I heard a few people talk about all the security issues behind it. My background is in IT and security so when I heard there were security issues I was immediately turned off.

This was a couple years back, and I see many of these no-code platforms have drastically improved. I find myself now becoming a strong no-code advocate. I can code and I have done front-end web development in the past, but my true heart was in IT. I love that with no-code you can validate ideas quickly and get a solution up and running in a much faster time that it would take you to code it.

A surprise launch

I actually had absolutely no plan to launch Namos. I was just going to build it and then run some ads on Facebook to find some customers. I don’t actually remember when this happened but a couple of weeks ago I posted it somewhere to ask for help, and so many people across many platforms told me that I should launch it on Product Hunt.

So many people encouraged me. For instance, the real reason I stuck with Boundless is because they have a great team and I just wanted to actually finish one no-code project. I have started a couple since joining Makerpad, but I always feel like perhaps these projects weren’t good enough. It’s funny how I actually felt that this project wasn’t good enough either. When everyone told me to launch it, the first thing I thought was wow, so many people, they must be onto something.

I honestly expected maybe ten uploads on Product Hunt, and maybe just a few people to sign up to be sellers. However so far I have three people that have inquired about the virtual assistant. Most of the feedback I got so far some minor workflow issues which I can easily sort out. But, overall, the feedback was pretty great.

I was really surprised that so many people loved the look of it because I was really stressing out about having to things such as creating a proper pricing tables. I thought that if I didn’t have a proper pricing table then people wouldn’t take it seriously and they wouldn’t buy anything. It hasn’t been a day and I haven’t made any sales but I think the three people that are interested in the virtual assistant service is pretty promising.

The last time I checked, 11 freelancers have signed up. Unfortunately, I didn’t really plan this out well so I didn’t set up Google Analytics. I wish I did. I did however see that every hour there were a minimum of 20 users simultaneously looking at the page mostly from Europe and Southeast Asia, and later in the day I started seeing people from the United States.

Looking forward

I really just thought that I was the only person that had this issue. Although Namos was originally created for myself, I really see from all of the feedback how important it is for freelancers to have proper representation and the ability to list prices are true to their actual value. Next I need to sort out how to properly distribute payments beyond freelancers in the United States.

The plan is to keep it free to low-cost, pretty much like everything else I run. I think I may just have a membership fee in the future, but again this is pretty far away, so probably something for the next version. I want to focus more on making it a great place for buyers to quickly purchase services from highly skilled freelancers. But I also want for it to be a place where freelancers feel like they can join and be valued. I will be documenting the progress, so stay tuned.

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This article was made possible by MakerPad, the platform to learn how to build powerful applications without code.