I love attending the annual Startup Open House in Toronto. Having been quite active in the Toronto Startup Community, I’ve always wondered why the agency world is not as collaborative. I think it will be a great idea to conduct a similar open house event geared specifically towards agencies.
This idea is still on the cards, for 2017!

I got into web design, much like many others, by making wordpress websites. Over the years, I’ve created custom wordpress themes, designed over 200+ small business websites and even MVPs for startups using wordpress.
I conducted a few workshops at Miami Ad School Toronto, teaching small business owners how to build their own website using wordpress. I wanted to build a DIY WordPress Website course, mainly through automated email campaigns. Like always, life got in the way.

In late 2015, I had a few friends with full-time jobs reach out to me if I knew of any consulting opportunities for them to make some extra $$. I came up with the idea to offer curated, pre-vetted freelance talent to local startups. I spinned up a quick landing page over the weekend and began the validation phase.

There was quite some friction between spiking the customer’s interest and actually resulting in a paid project for the talent. There were already quite a few agencies (traditional recruitment agencies & new startups like Crew, Hired) that were focussing on a similar target market. I still feel, the agencies do charge quite a bit for talent identification and there is an opportunity to offer a much better experience for short term gigs.

While attending a business course at Humber and freelancing on the side, I came up with the idea of ClassPitch. Much like every marketplace, I had to solve the demand-supply problem. Raising projects from clients was not that big of a challenge as I was providing a cost-effective option to them.

I realized early on, that the supply side of talent (i.e. school students) was not as excited to put in the required extra work in return for experience. Also, part-time jobs, school directed internship programs and travel + work options offered a good competition to my idea.