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As the country squabbles over the power and potential of the freelance economy, one Chicago startup is quietly corralling freelance designers the world over to ensure it has a stake in the economy of tomorrow.
Meet ConceptDrop, a startup that offers companies large and small a marketplace to source graphic design work for marketing collateral like powerpoint presentations, newsletters, and infographics.
From investor decks for startups to one pagers for clients like Parton, JP Morgan, or Pepsi, ConceptDrop hopes to give today’s office workers the ability to spend more time cultivating content and messaging and less time on presentation design.
Using ConceptDrop, a company simply uploads an outline of their project to the company’s website and fills out a quick, online consultation about the project’s design requirements. Then, the website’s matchmaking algorithm pairs the project with whatever available designer best fits the company's creative needs. Quotes are given upfront.
And, because many of the vetted freelancers within the company’s network live and work outside the US, ConceptDrop can hastily expedite projects—often in under 24 hours.
“If you look at the labor market, there’s a clear trend where everything is moving towards a freelance economy,” said Phil Alexander, CEO and co-founder of ConceptDrop. “We’ve been building out this network of freelancers … and we found that the talent is equally distributed everywhere. But opportunities aren’t created as equally. We found that there are some designers in faraway places that have the same skill set as a designer that’s based here in Chicago.”
Alexander said ConceptDrop tries to give preference to local designers, adding that the company has recruited locally, even approaching schools like Northwestern and University of Chicago to see how to get involved in their design programs.
Since the beginning of their search for designers, they’ve sifted through more than 300 designer applications—from over 30 countries. Alexander said that — in an age of anxiety about automated technology replacing entire professions —freelancing models like ConceptDrop actually help create jobs.
“ConceptDrop and a lot of these other marketplaces are building an infrastructure that allows people in different places to actually connect with work opportunities and potential clients that they might never have seen otherwise,” he said.
Currently located in 1871, the company was founded in 2013 after graduating from LaunchHouse, an accelerator in Cleveland. Since then, they said they have already worked with over 100 brands.
The company has raised $300,000 and is currently preparing for a subsequent round of funding.
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