Startups and corporations alike are conducting employee surveys to create ‘return to work’ strategies. Teams are evolving due to post-pandemic realities, and hiring trends are shifting quickly to keep up with market demands and employee needs.
And one Atlanta-based team is building a platform to help streamline how teams find top talent in this new world of hiring.
Wripple serves as a two-sided platform for finding experts and on-demand teams for digital projects.
Clients can find talent for upcoming projects and get real-time project price estimates. Designers, digital marketers, content strategists, and tech experts are vetted and join the platform as independent contractors.
Ray Samuels, Wripple’s co-founder, sees Wripple as a platform that “provides brands and talent with an alternative way to get work done. It is in no way kind of replacing the agency world…it’s more about enhancing a client’s experience.” Clients can even field entire freelance teams on the platform.
On the talent side, Wripple helps freelancers and other talent grow a career or work on a project-by-project basis. “We saw an opportunity to really tap into the freelance talent we saw leaving the agency world and give them access to great opportunities as well, similar to the kinds of brands they worked with, while they were at an agency,” added Samuels. “But obviously, they are getting more of a flexible lifestyle to support their freelance choice.”
Those on the platform are typically former agency professionals and former consultants with upwards of eight years of experience.
Agencies, who are beginning to ramp up hiring as COVID lockdowns have started to lift, are actually one of Wripple’s main clients. Samuels said agencies are “trying to strike a balance hiring full-time versus part-time.” Additionally, corporate marketing teams use the platform to find talent for smaller projects. “They’re coming to us as kind of an alternative partner to get some digital projects done at a good price point, and at the speed they’re looking for.”
The company was founded in late 2018 and launched its talent profile management app in the summer of 2020. The client-side of the platform was released in the fall of 2020, followed by the release of the talent-side portion of the platform in March 2021.
Samuels told Hypepotamus that the startup was born after seeing the pain points experienced during hiring in the agency world. Samuels, along with co-founders Shannon Denton and Bonny Davis Block, all worked at Razorfish prior to diving into the entrepreneurial space.
The team brought on Atlanta-based Silicon Road Ventures as an investor last November as part of Silicon Road’s first fund. “They’ve been there to provide guidance — from thinking of new client opportunities to operational aspects of the business — they’ve been very much invested in our success. We’re also working with them to expand our retail and eCommerce offerings and partnerships.
The team is currently the three co-founders, but they lean on several members already on the platform for additional work on the site. “So they get me client work through us and they are also helping us build the business,” said Samuels.
For Samuels, the pandemic has expedited freelance trends that the Wripple platform has been tackling for the past several years. “The notion of enterprise freelance teams is something that’s been written about frequently in the last year. And we kind of really built Wripple with that in mind when we started two years ago. It’s exciting to see that kind of come to fruition.”
Photo by Scott Graham on Unsplash
