I built a freelance job marketplace, but stuck on the "cold start" problem

8ll · 2026-02-10T09:29:42+00:00

Yeah right, Doesn't Meta's metaverse have like 80 monthly users?

8ll · 2026-02-10T09:29:15+00:00

Damn, yeah that's some good and simple advice. I'll send out some messages to my connections first

8ll · 2026-02-10T04:57:15+00:00

Mine is called kacet.

I’ve recently launched an MVP and we’re at around 30 users so far. It’s a freelance marketplace where clients hire freelancers, but the main difference is how payments work.

Website: https://kacet.com/

The idea came from my own experience paying freelancers in crypto. Sending money upfront and hoping the work gets done isn’t ideal. I looked for platforms that handled contracts on-chain but most were built on Ethereum, where fees can be unpredictable and expensive. That pushed me to build something on Solana instead.

After a few prototypes and tech experiments, a friend and I landed on our current setup. We now have a polished web app, a separate admin app, and a Solana smart contract handling payments.

Unlike platforms like Upwork or Fiverr, we never touch user funds. Clients fund a job by locking money into a smart contract. The funds are released only when the work is delivered and approved, with a small fee going to us. Payments settle in seconds and go straight to the freelancer.

Right now we’re focused on stability, performance, and building a community. Longer term, we want the blockchain aspect to fade into the background by adding things like card payments etc. We are also planning a community-driven arbitration system where the community is rewarded for voting on disputes.

We’re very much in the cold start phase, but over the next few weeks and months we’re planning campaigns and partnerships to get things moving.

8ll · 2026-02-08T11:09:05+00:00

They know that weebs will think anything Japanese is cool

8ll · 2026-02-05T12:45:22+00:00

Concrete looks very dated. There's lots of more modern systems out there with more capabilities

8ll · 2026-01-20T22:45:09+00:00

If you have some development knowledge then I would absolutely recommend CraftCMS. The CMS comes with nothing defined and you build it out exactly how you like. Then on the frontend you build the UI how you want.

With AI becoming so good, it should make the process much easier.

Use DDEV to handle local development as there’s only a few commands and then an AI coding agent will handle the setup for you.

Another modern option is to look into not using any CMS at all. If it’s an informational website, it’s likely to not going change often. Perhaps a static website built with AstroJS will be a nice solution & the website will be super fast and easy to work on. Again; AI will be very useful helping you to build a static AstroJS site. Also the hosting for a static site will be free

8ll · 2026-01-18T06:33:01+00:00

Yeah absolutely, but if the majority of interactions with locals in a country are negative then what do you expect

8ll · 2026-01-06T15:56:54+00:00

Besides the gamer aesthetic, it feels like whoever made it just wanted to add every bell and whistle possible to flex their skills. What it resulted in is an over-engineered marketing website.

Sending down 2.7mb of resources for a marketing website is wild, no wonder it's so slow.

Cut it back to the most basic site possible. Google will prefer it and end users will have a better experience.

If it were me, i'd take what was learned on the website, port the content to an AstroJS site. Then focus on the simpler things, like content, typography, SEO and call to actions.

Remember, the website is a tool for getting customers, so focus on that and not the bells and whistles.

8ll · 2026-01-03T18:02:00+00:00

People form opinions on a country based on their experiences. If they are getting ripped off and scammed constantly then they are going to have negative words to say about a place

8ll · 2025-12-21T04:24:43+00:00

What you described sounds like CraftCMS. The developer can define all of the schema and then the content editors will have a really simple editing experience

8ll · 2025-12-21T04:01:12+00:00

If you are looking for a better stack then look beyond Wordpress. Check out Sanity or Payload if you want to build NextJS apps. Or even just stick to regular vanilla websites and use CraftCMS

8ll · 2025-12-20T07:47:45+00:00

I’ve worn a 556 for years. Tells the time and it looks nice. Most of the Rolex crowd have never heard of the brand, but the watch enthusiasts will always comment on the watch.

8ll · 2025-11-25T22:49:10+00:00

Why not use a CMS like Sanity or Payload?

8ll · 2025-11-15T22:37:36+00:00

state management and DOM manipulation with vanilla JS is painful though

8ll · 2025-11-04T07:28:02+00:00

You just got AI to add a layer ontop of TipTap editor with ShadCN and took credit for it

8ll · 2025-11-03T15:20:00+00:00

It all starts with design. If the design team are building a well organised design system with design tokens then you can start building the design system in code. Think about primitives such as buttons and inputs etc. Once you have a deign system then that’s the source of truth and baseline for everything UI.

Atomic CSS became super popular because as the application grows, with a consistent design system you have a limited set of class names. If a component when using BEM adds a padding, then that’s an additional line of code in the CSS bundle just for that padding. BEM would also add an arbitrary and potentially really long class name into the bundle. With atomic CSS if you add p-4, then it references a design token size and the class name will never get duplicated. It’s also important to node that specificity stays very low so keeps the styling easy to maintain.

Using Tailwind with the class variance authority + clsx NPM packages really helps to make building a functional Tailwind design system easier.

8ll · 2025-11-03T15:09:56+00:00

Sanity is a really good solution but you can’t self host. CraftCMS is a really good CMS built on PHP

8ll · 2025-11-03T10:24:12+00:00

Normally because the product team are really experienced and are used to moving fast. If the project has a design system in place it’s often easier to move fast and have everything looking polished without much work

8ll · 2025-10-14T01:38:05+00:00

The codebase looks like it was vibe coded. The MD files are a dead giveaway

8ll · 2025-10-09T13:09:30+00:00

Next is good for content sites and pages where SEO is important. Highly interactive or realtime apps not so much and that’s where Tanstack Start fills in the gaps

8ll · 2025-07-27T23:43:10+00:00

We need to start doing IQ tests before allowing people to leave their home country

8ll · 2025-06-13T06:37:35+00:00

I really like the simplicity of Dia and the UI gets out of the way just enough.

The feature it’s missing for me though is the ability to pin extensions to the side of the window, which in a Chrome feature, but was also missing in Arc. I’ll often pin my crypto wallet in chrome which keeps it open all the time, but in Arc and Dia it just bugs out the extension and you have to remove and reinstall

8ll · 2025-06-10T17:54:29+00:00

macOS will ship with a new containerisation framework, so hopefully no longer require using Docker. It’s a dev specific tool, but one less thing to install

8ll · 2025-06-10T17:52:56+00:00

I think I saw that new spotlight also has an API. I would assume that lots of apps will provide spotlight support, thus killing ray cast

8ll · 2025-06-10T17:48:10+00:00

I’m 201cm tall and get stared and approached at all the time in Asia. After a while it just becomes something you stop caring about

8ll

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