A new venture, UnderPinned, is aiming to provide everything creative freelancers need in one place. The platform has an inspiring tagline, ‘Building the Future of Freelancing Together’, and offers its features under three main elements: Magazine, Community, and Virtual Office.
The magazine
Every aspect of freelance life is covered. There are quick reads, news, reviews, features, and videos and showcases about freelancers.
Tax, freelance rights, pensions, how to handle rejection, industry-specific issues (e.g. ‘Problems Facing Web Developers’), tackling loneliness, copyright issues: the idea is to supply freelancers with a steady stream of relevant content to ensure they’re “up-to-date on freelance goings-on” and “never out of the loop.”
The community
“We Are Better Together,” the website boldly claims. The website is working on developing a network of freelancers, thinkers and leading companies, hooking freelancers up with partners they can trust, and the services and products they need.
The virtual office
The virtual office aims to be a “one-stop freelance career management portal. An easy to use cloud-based hub built to help you find work, manage your work, and get paid (on time).”
Register on the website (or ‘Level Up’ as they call it) and you have access to a dashboard. From here, you can quickly build a portfolio and, once there are clients on the platform (they’re ‘coming soon’, currently), you’ll be able to send them to clients with one click. Other features also coming soon are To Do List, Notes, Track My Work, Calendar, Projects, Files, Get Paid, Contracts, Invoicing, Expenses, Forum, UPChat and Mail features. An in-built, commission-free electronic payment system is due to launch in the coming months.
Widening the scope
Members will also have access to other more general services, including counselling 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and legal and tax helplines.
Unusually, UnderPinned isn’t just online. It also has a physical space in Hackney, East London, which is open to members as well as the public. The plan is for the space to be used for educational workshops and mentoring sessions as well as co-working.
“We talked to a huge number of freelancers, and the things they are interested in are finding work, doing work and getting paid,” says Albert Azis-Clauson, co-founder at UnderPinned.
“We’ve constructed the platform so that it focuses on these things but builds in other bits that freelancers are less interested in – like the admin, due diligence and business development.”
While there’s not a lot to see yet, the articles are well worth a read and accessible without registration, though registration is free. It’s unclear what fees, if any, may apply to which services in the future. So why not hop over to UnderPinned and take a look?
