The Problem

Existing gig marketplaces charge hefty fees to gig providers (aka freelancers). Fiverr collects 20% of the freelancer’s earnings (in addition to assessing a hefty payment processing fee to the client). BountyHive docks an unspecified majority of the bounty allocated out for a given campaign. And Upwork collects 20% of payments for low-volume freelancers.

While these platforms do a great job at matching clients with freelancers, they also try to become the exclusive middlemen for all transactions, which of course allows them to collect as much fees as possible. This is earnings that would have otherwise gone to the freelancer. For smaller jobs or for ones where the freelancer has some trust with the client, he or she would eventually prefer to transact directly to escape the fees. Existing marketplaces are well aware of this fact, which is why they all have terms and conditions with threatening legal language that prohibit direct transaction (and even communication) outside their platforms.

Our Proposal

We want to provide provide a platform built on Stellar that offers the same great match making tools as the incumbents, but one that is open and allows for direct payment (via Stellar wallets) between clients and freelancers. We will not restrict communications- users chose the best messaging tool they’re comfortable with or use the builtin one. Gig providers are free to link to their own websites. In fact, we won’t even try to be the middleman. We focus on providing the portfolio showcase, skill searching, order customization, invoicing, feedback/reviews, and mutual discovery tools for people who want to use Stellar for what it’s the best at- peer-to-peer cross-border payments with virtually no fees.

With this model we hope to create a bustling global gig economy for Stellar. It will have all the best features of Fiverr, Upwork, and BountyHive. Our project will also glue together awesome Stellar projects like AnchorUSD (for fiat payments), Keybase (for wallet, communication, and identity proofs), and the various Stellar wallets for this singular purpose of creating a gig marketplace that lets freelancer keep 100% of their earnings.

Our Ask for You

We are committed and have been developing for more than 6 months. Most of our early users have even never heard of Stellar before, and we’ll continue to bring new users to Stellar. Beyond being the first gig market place for Stellar, we’ll also create the marketplace overall that is the most fair to freelancers.

You could check the current state of our app (tentatively named Cgig) here and track our development progress on GalacticTalk. I like to think that our project is ambitious- it could have easily been 3 projects. We’re not an ICO and do not have an outside source of funding. So we have applied to the Stellar Community Fund. If you like what we do, please upvote our GalacticTalk project thread. This will help us get to one of the 7 spots (based on votes) eligible to receive community funding.

P.S. I’m the lead developer for Cgig. Feedback, comments and questions are always welcomed. Please hit me (dandalion98) up on Keybase or email support (at) cgig.app