Why I’m building Q’DContent on trust and a shoestring

Being a technology journalist is an amazing profession in many ways. Hell, being any sort of journalist usually opens you up to opportunities and situations that you just might never have encountered otherwise.

Sure, that work trip is mostly boring — but you did still get to go to those amazing places and talk to those interesting people, even if what you mostly saw was a hotel and conference hall.

But being a technology journalist that’s spent time talking to founders and startups has meant that I’ve interviewed people about business models, go-to-market strategies, investments taken and missed, pitfalls, shortcuts… a whole lot of things relevant to running a business.

It’s a theoretical understanding of a process I’ve never been through before, and one that’s already been immensely valuable to me as a journalist.

One thing I learned long ago from many of those chats with founders is don’t take money if you don’t really need it.

So what we’ve built is a bare-bones (but feature-rich!) version of the platform that won’t destroy anyone financially if it flops. If it succeeds, it can be rebuilt to make it better for everyone.

Anti-social

In discussions about Q’DContent over the last few weeks, many, many, people have asked how I’ll stop users meeting on the platform and arranging work outside of it, thereby ‘cutting out the middleman’.

The simple answer is, I’m not going to even try.

Everything that’s been built puts ease of communication at its core — expanding the reach of the individual freelancer is half of the point. Putting up artificial barriers to that isn’t something I’d ever want. I am a freelancer, I know how annoying that would be.

So, instead, Q’DContent is being built on trust.

Trust that there’s enough value there to make it worth the ‘cost’ (it’s actually designed to be impossible to cost freelancers money without having made you some first!), and trust that there’s enough value to offer buyers and publishers the peace of mind required for a marketplace like Q’DContent to thrive.

If it doesn’t provide that, we all lose.

So, in true startup fashion, we’re doing this together on trust and a shoestring.

(ps. if you pre-registered interest as a writer and responded to an email sent on 26 Sept, your signup application details are already waiting in your inbox. If you’d like to pre-register interest still, drop an email to contact@qdcontent.com indicating whether you’re a writer or a publisher/buyer)