Building India's First Trust Layer for Freelancing

Two years ago I stuck "huzl.in" on my wall using yellow sticky notes and a green marker.

No UI/UX experience. No tech team. No clear roadmap. Just a problem I couldn't stop thinking about.

Freelancing in India has a trust problem. Not a supply problem. Not a demand problem. A trust problem.

The moment a freelancer and a hirer agree on a project, everything that follows is held together by WhatsApp messages and good faith. No contract. No milestone structure. No payment protection. The entire transaction runs on hope.

We decided to build the infrastructure that was missing.

We taught ourselves UI/UX from scratch. Built a tech team. Shipped the platform. Went through more iterations and pivots than I can count. Some of them were the right call. Some of them cost us months. All of them sharpened our understanding of the actual problem.

Here is what we know now that we did not know when we started:

The problem is not the product. The problem is the behaviour that happens before the product. Freelancers in India take on projects without contracts because they don't have accessible contract templates. They get underpaid because they have no reliable pricing benchmarks. They get burned on payments because there is no milestone system in place before work starts. Hirers post vague briefs because nobody taught them how to scope. They overpay or underpay because they have no reference point for what fair looks like.

Both sides are operating without infrastructure. A product alone does not fix that. You need to change the behaviour first.

So while we rebuild the Huzl product experience, we are doing something we should have done earlier. We are building the community layer first and letting the product follow.

We have started a WhatsApp community for Indian freelancers and hirers. The goal is to manually run every system we are building into the product: contract creation, milestone structuring, pricing guidance, portfolio building, deal flow, and post-project reviews.

Every friction point that comes up in the community is a validated product feature. Every template we build manually is a future product flow. Every conversation between a freelancer and a hirer is signal we would never get from a survey.

This is our version of doing things that do not scale before we scale them.

If you are building in the freelance, creator, or gig economy space, or if you are an Indian freelancer or work with them, I would genuinely like you in this community. DM me "HUZL" and I will send you the link.

Still building. Still learning. That sticky note is still on the wall.