"Remote Work" is taking on a new role as the pandemic threatened countless lives and businesses in 2020. International platforms like Fiverr and Upwork come with hefty fees and oversaturation as professionals try to land project gigs. Small business owners have difficulty re-hiring professionals they enjoyed working with, and will receive thousands of applicants for a simple project. Platforms like LinkedIn are switching over to marketplace "freelance" style work as well in preparation for the growth in the industry. A survey published by LinkedIn estimates a majority of Americans will work remote part or fulltime by 2027. While LinkedIn is an established platform, they operate internationally, allowing for the same issues to occur in other international platforms.

I spent all of 2020 designing and creating a platform specific to the U.S., and prioritizing the U.S. and military communities.

Pain Points:

• Military Spouses find it difficult to gain income with multiple PCS moves, growing families, and balancing the active duty lifestyle. They are among the top percentages in higher education, with unemployment rates estimated to be 3 times higher than civilian counterparts. Military spouses earn roughly 38% less than civilian counterparts out of a necessity to have work when re-locating, despite their access to higher educational benefits. Freelance US allows military spouses to take back control over their career, by allowing them opportunities to work from home supporting small business owners in America. Many of the small businesses they will serve on this platform come from the Military and MilSpouse community, so they come with an understanding of the unique lifestyle and needs.

• Veteran and Military Spouse Entrepreneurs have unique advantages in the small business world, but funding is often a difficult and treacherous process. Freelance US allows our entrepreneurial community to reach out and gain help from U.S. Based freelance professionals in projects like graphic design work, creative writing, programming, finance, video and audio, photo, website design, business consulting, and more at a fraction of the cost of hiring an employee. Payroll is difficult for small businesses starting out. For established businesses, the unexpected loss of an employee can cause disruption in the workplace flow. By hiring freelance professionals, business officials can 

• U.S. small business owners have a unique challenge with different resources than the military community. As a small business owner, I have used the international platforms and found it difficult, limited to professionals that lived in vastly different time zones, had a different business culture understanding, or did not speak English fluently (this is important for writing projects). I created this freelance platform to feed into our nation's professionals that work from home, and also to provide a way for our nation's small businesses to have access to quality support for their ventures.

Our goal is to become the go-to platform for the U.S. when it comes to freelance work and small business support. The platform is designed, soft-launched, and fully functional with a small, growing community. My next step is to secure funding for national expansion campaigns, partnerships with military spouse organizations, military installations, and more to grow awareness of the platform. The larger the community grows, the more opportunities abound for our small businesses in the nation, and our remote work professionals. The larger our community grows, the more people we can help.