Contra: Connecting Human Creativity

Almost 5 years ago, we set out to build a professional network unlike any other—one that valued individuality and empowered creators. We wanted a network that celebrated human creativity, not commoditized it. A network that was free to transact on. Today, we are closing the loop on our original vision by tying everything together with the Contra community—a new place for creatives to build their identity, connect, and collaborate!

But first, let’s talk about how we got here.

The fatal flaw of traditional marketplaces, as applied to human labor, stems from their business model: commission fees.

A marketplace that depends on commission fees requires transactions to occur within the platform to capture revenue. This leads to restrictions (a walled garden) that prevent participants from developing individuality and connecting outside the marketplace, limiting member information to the bare essentials and essentially treating members as fungible resources with labels.

However, humans are not resources. The unique qualities that make each of us special are difficult to capture with words or labels. These are abstract traits, such as our abilities to be tastemakers, visionaries, and valuable team members. While skills can be easily learned, the traits that make us unique cannot. This has always been true, but it will become even more significant in the age of AI. Consequently, the traditional model for matching supply and demand will become outdated.

Unsurprisingly, the old model is highly inefficient. Some incumbents in this space self-report churn rates as high as 40%. This makes the most capable individuals leave to start their own ventures and build direct client relationships. What's left is a marketplace catering to low-paying jobs with low success rates. This model has done so much damage that we've had to distance ourselves from terms like “freelancer,” a term synonymous with this race-to-the-bottom model.

So what's the solution?

When I met my co-founder Ben in 2020, we realized that removing the commission model would change the marketplace dynamic entirely. We envisioned a more efficient network where individuality plays a significant role. Our thesis was that, over time, supply and demand would gravitate away from cannibalistic marketplaces toward networks with greater transaction-cost efficiency, lower friction for communication, and data transparency. Paradoxically, from a business point of view, this meant that we were building a less efficient marketplace—in that we could never capture as large a percentage of the value we create compared to traditional marketplaces. To succeed, we needed to build something bigger than ever before by reducing acquisition costs and addressing user retention issues. So, we started building.

The first thing we needed to build was the marketplace mechanics, including user profiles, search, proposals, messaging, and more. Along the way, we had to balance supply and demand and learn how to detect fraud. Essentially, we had to reach parity with what is expected from a marketplace.

We jokingly describe this era of Contra as the "pain cave" due to the enormous catching up that we had to do and everything that follows—post-parity clarity.

Today, we are entering the network phase of the Contra vision.

For the most part, our instincts were right. We built something that's growing extraordinarily fast, boasting high retention and satisfaction. We are a community of 800,000+ creators and clients. We have a world-class payments infrastructure supporting Stripe, SEPA, Airwallex, and crypto rails. We built essentially everything except the actual community feature, that's at the core of growth thesis.

Today marks a special milestone. After many iterations, we held a kickoff call with a select group of Contra users who were onboarded into our community. As I write this, they've already made their first posts, replies, and upvotes. It's heartwarming to see this final piece of the puzzle complete the vision we prototyped years ago. It took time to build trust, credibility, and the right market positioning so that when we opened the community, it embodied the values we set out to create when starting the company.

As Contra is more than a typical marketplace, our community is also unique. It reflects our core belief that a person's uniqueness extends beyond skills and labels. How someone interacts within the community offers insights into their personality—their influence, their potential as tastemakers, educators, and collaborators. We've carefully considered how community participation shapes identity, helps individuals differentiate themselves, and facilitates connections, collaborations, and client acquisition. It's a space to find your voice, learn, and have fun doing it.

There's much more to do. With 8,000+ people on the waitlist and the first dozen just admitted, we have a long way to go before we can claim to be the community connecting the world's creativity—but the best is yet to come!