How two freelancers built Singapore’s leading talent-matching platform

In one line, what do you do and what is your most significant achievement?

How we built Singapore's leading creative and digital talent-matching platform

Who are you and what business did you start?

I am Han Yang the CIO of Glance.sg. Starting my coding journey at 15 I have become an experienced lead software engineer, managing my company's tech and product team. Our business is a talent-matching platform that enables companies to hire and engage local talents through our various one-stop solutions, at a Glance! We remove the many unnecessary administrative burdens companies have to go through when hiring freelancers. In addition, our freelancers are secured in their transactions with our escrow-like service which ensures timely payment by holding funds and disbursing them once milestones in the project have been completed.

What's your backstory?

We were initially freelancers who noticed a lot of issues ranging from the lack of oversight to exploitation within the freelance industry. Our goal was to improve the safeguards present for freelancers and improve the ease of hiring freelancers for businesses. So we built our talent matching platform to connect our curated talent with our verified companies. Helping companies with sourcing, interviewing and managing the freelancers for their projects.

What should be the first steps to take to enter your industry?

I would say to be prepared for a challenging road and try to find a pain point businesses in the industry face. Singapore being a global hub has led to a very large HR industry taking root. This makes getting talent-matching projects here difficult for new companies as there are already many established names that have built year-long relationships with many companies. However, the HR industry is also rather traditional, being slow to move and smaller projects generally dismissed. It is the gaps established names in the HR industry have that new companies tend to fix. However, the nature of these projects being smaller and having to develop innovative solutions makes it difficult for new companies to keep their business running until they build their clientele to a sustainable point.

How did you spend your First 100 Days of launching your business?

Glance.sg initially started as a telegram group chat. Which is still up today at 2,700+ users. In the beginning, as students with limited experience, we were not sure where to take our business. We just started building and tried to figure out things as we went. We learned from mistakes along the way and took notes from experts wherever we could. We just had an idea and we wanted to build it. In hindsight, we should have done more planning but that is the nature of startups sometimes.

Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain partnerships/customers?

What has worked for us is our personal touch and quick response rate. We have continuously maintained a large number of highly engaged freelancers which allows us to quickly fill our clients' openings. This led to us receiving a lot of returning customers from these companies.

What has taken you from 0 to 100?

For us, it was receiving the Enterprise Singapore Startup SG Founder grant. This was what gave us the initial validation and runway we needed. From then on everything became a little easier. Companies were more open to work as we were no longer seen as a student project but as a company with a great idea.

The projects we received from them helped us gain experience and connections. Leveraging this we were subsequently able to generate more business from return customers, recommendations, invites to networking events and grants. Leading to us building solid users and customers as well as a talented internal team.

What is one underrated thing in your industry that business owners should start doing/using?

Business owners in general should start to embrace the benefits of freelancers in the workplace. It allows for projects to move faster as your workforce is now more flexible and malleable to your needs, at the same time lowering the liabilities for business.

What was one failure you had to go through that others in your industry should look out for?

I think this applies to all industries when it comes to tech and coming from the point of a software engineer. I feel that establishing what you want to do with your business and how you want your tech to interact with it is important. One of our biggest failures was choosing the wrong technology for our platform.

Understanding the tech we use and what their purpose is will help you pick the most suitable one. This makes your final product more sustainable for your business needs. We had to scrap the first edition of our website because it wasn't scalable to the level we need. Throwing half a year worth of work down the drain to start afresh.

What platform/tools do you use for your business?

We are like most other tech companies. Using GitHub as our collaborative version control tool. Notion for our task management and project tracking. Figma for UI/UX design. Where we may differ is our dev ops, we use Laravel Forge as our backend is built using the Laravel framework.

How are you doing today and what does the future look like?

We are improving our site's portfolio page, and adding more functionality to this part of our site. Our hope is to be a one-stop shop for freelancers. Allowing them to build their portfolio, monitor the progress of their project, receive payment safeguards and find gainful work all on our platform.