Launch Day! The Superpath Marketplace Now Runs on SaaS

We have a cool announcement to share today. The Superpath Marketplace is now a SaaS product ready to help more companies find and work with great freelance content marketers. We're on pace to pay freelancers $1 million in our first 12 months, and this product has been in beta until now. 🥳 You can get a demo here.

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Here's the deal. Finding great freelancers is hard, but that’s just the beginning of it. Once you do, you have to deal with invoices, AR/AP, contracts, NDAs, sending 1099s, etc. Nearly every content team lead I’ve ever talked to describes this process as a constant headache.

I went through a simple thought exercise to help clarify our value proposition. I landed on two things: **volume + variety**. When companies need freelance writers, they typically need them to increase output, or to fill subject matter expertise gaps. These two things exist on a spectrum, hence the 2x2 chart.

We're already serving customers in each of these four quadrants. Each needed freelance writers, but for slightly different reasons. For small companies, they mostly want to move fast and reduce headaches. For larger companies, a more efficient accounts payable process and compliance are more important.

Some things I've heard on sales calls:

• "It's really hard to find freelancers. We spend a lot of time/energy building and maintaining our freelance team."
• "Our back office is a mess. It's a pain to keep track of invoices, approve each and then make sure AP pays them."
• "We would love to be able to source new writers as needed for different types of projects."

A marketplace solves this—especially when the pool of writers is big enough to satisfy just about every possible content need. So far, we've found a sitting state senator to write about lobbying, a former people ops manager to write about performance reviews, and a data scientist to write about SaaS analytics

Superpath has been quietly building a solution to this. 👀

Until recently, our marketplace has been a mix of Airtable, Zapier and _yours truly_ working behind the scenes to make the experience feel easy for customers. Finding and vetting writers, matching them with customers, getting people onboarded and paid, etc. It all worked but it was inefficient—exactly the kind of thing that software dreams are made of.

Starting today, our customers finally have a proper logged-in experience. It’s basic, but it’s a huge step for us and our customers. Our marketplace customers can now:

• Create a project and get matched with a vetted writer
• Run ongoing content projects (even for multiple clients) in one place
• Run their freelance payroll (no invoices needed, we automate it)

We want to connect companies to talented writers who can bring their company’s voice to life, unearth internal subject expertise, report on industry trends and so much more. Nearly every company needs at least some support from freelancers and we’re here to make it easy.

Our content marketplace is rooted in three core principles:

• Fix market fragmentation: create one place where companies and writers can find one another
• Reliably great matches: we pair vetted writers with interesting content projects
• No headaches: we handle the back-office work so both parties can focus on great content

And one more thing. This isn't another low-cost marketplace looking to commoditize writers and push down rates. There are enough of those already. We're working with a small (for now) group of talented writers and ensuring fair rates for their work. We're bringing on customers who are eager to work with these folks. I don't care if that limits our ability to scale—we're taking the high ground and we're sticking to it.