Assist 2 Develop (A2D) A New Freelance Marketplace for Entrepreneurs looking for work
Stats from the U.S. Department of Labor indicate that up to 8.7 million jobs were lost during the Great Recession that started December 2007 running through to June 2009. The U.S. unemployment rate rose from 4.7 percent in November, 2007 to a peak of 10 percent in October, 2009.
One of the key observations made during that period is that a lot of American companies started outsourcing work to freelance workers. Even though the USA economy has undergone a considerable improvement since the Great Recession, the country’s GDP and job growth rate are still erratic and uneven. As of September, 2014, the unemployment rate stood at 5.9% which is still quite high as by the American standards.
However, it still remains true that more American companies are still outsourcing their work to freelance workers. There is also a growing community of freelance workers and the culture of working throughout your career-life employed in a certain organization is slowly dying. Freelance working is slowly but surely becoming more popular.
But there is one major hurdle in freelancing, preventing most freelancers from achieving their full potential. Most freelance workers get the vast majority of their works through the word of mouth, even among the most successful freelance workers. When it comes to the manufacturing industry, we all know engineers are not the most social or talkative bunch. Thus, freelance market in manufacturing industry takes an even greater toll as far as connecting businesses looking to hire freelance engineers on word of mouth is concerned.
To mitigate this, a team of engineers have created a new platform that easily connects manufacturing companies with freelance engineers. Dubbed Assist 2 Develop (A2D), this freelance marketplace connects entrepreneurs, freelancers and small businesses in the products manufacturing industry. The platform was founded by Bassanio Peters.
Peters came up with the idea after working as a freelancer himself and saw some of the inefficiency in the system with regards to getting hire for contracts. He came up with an innovative product to solve these inefficiencies. That is when he decided to create Assist 2 Develop freelance marketplace. It is a platform where freelance engineers create their full profiles: qualifications, experience and contacts. Then employers can browse through the profiles and hire the freelancers who fit their requirement.
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The platform also offers other convenient features such as live chat, video chat among other effective ways for the clients and freelancers to communicate and coordinate their operations. However, the platform is still in private beta/alpha stage and the developers are working to have it fully ready by Q1 2015.
The developers are currently running a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo with a goal of raising $40,000 by December 31, 2014. For more details on Assist 2 Develop head on to Indiegogo by following this link.
