The idea came from a simple frustration: even when you know what kind of person you want to work with—hiring contractors is still slow. You write a job post, message people one by one, negotiate scope and pricing, and hope they reply.

Outpost flips that.

You describe what you need. We scope the work, price it, and match you with the right expert. If they’re already on the platform, you chat instantly. If not, we reach out with a scoped offer and money in escrow. No friction, no ghosting, no guesswork.

We’re starting with 10,000+ professionals from companies like Google, Stripe, Figma, and Airbnb—people who don’t respond to DMs but will take a $500–$2K scoped gig if it’s well-defined and ready to go. Or quick feedback for $10 a message.

Start chatting with Outpost immediately. No login required. Just describe your need and we’ll scope it for you.

Outpost generates real offers based on your request—clear deliverables, pricing, and format. You can pay per message or buy a full service.

If the expert is already on Outpost, we start the conversation immediately. If not, we contact them with everything they need to say yes: scope, price, and escrowed payment.

Everything happens in one thread. Easy for the person requesting help. Even easier for the person delivering it.

If you’re curious, want early access, or just want to jam on workflows like this, reply to this email or DM me. I’d love to connect with you!

Try it yourself at outpost.chat!

AI Bot Upgrades

• Objective refinement: Our AI now guides users through goal clarification before suggesting a service or expert.

• Service matching overhaul: Users are now matched to the right service, not just the right expert.

• “Why this pro?”: Users can now ask why a specific professional was recommended.

UX Improvements

• New homepage: Rebuilt to drive user intent and fast-thread creation.

• Updated login + list views: Cleaner, faster UX for returning users.

• New service cards + transfer screens: Improve clarity and conversion before payment.

Supply Growth

• 1,000 new experts onboarding over the next few weeks to expand availability across engineering, design, growth, and operations.

Outpost gives high-skilled tech professionals faster access to meaningful work and gives companies access to vetted professionals for projects up to $20,000.

Outpost will make finding the right person to execute a project 100x faster than today. Our goal is to eliminate endless hiring loops and make work instantly available to qualified professionals who are actively online.

How It Works

Professionals

Imagine you're an ex-Google product designer and want to make some money. Just like an Uber driver opens the app, sets their ride preferences, and starts driving immediately, Outpost works similarly.

Because you’re already vetted based on your past work, portfolio, and job history, there’s no bidding, no waiting. You just open the app and start working.

Requests are priced dynamically based on skills and demand, and scope is shared prior to accepting a gig.

You accept a $100 request and spend 15 minutes reviewing a landing page for a small business, and send back a quick video to share your feedback.

Then, you move onto an $2,000 mini design project, where Outpost pairs you with a software engineer to complete the work. Outpost starts a secure group chat where files are uploaded and you discuss and submit work directly through the chat.

When you’re done, Outpost reviews the work against original request. If anything is missing, you get prompted to adjust before it’s sent to the client.

Companies

Most purchasers start on Outpost because they know a professional who uses it. They might need a quick consultation, feedback on a project, or a small task done—typically in the $20–$200 range. Over time, these small requests turn into larger engagements.

With a low-cost entry point, the risk of hiring is low. Instead of a lengthy process to bring on contractors or full-time employees, companies allocate and pre-load budgets for their employees to hire directly on Outpost. Employees, in turn, spend the money on professionals they trust—often friends or former colleagues. Since every professional has a profile URL showcasing their work, it’s easy to assess credibility without sifting through endless resumes or portfolios.

Everything happens through Outpost’s chat-based interface where users can send messages, upload files, and attach audio or video to communicate clearly. Outpost’s AI determines payment per project—without long-term commitments.

Outpost handles scoping, estimating, and pricing deliverables. It also suggests additional professionals based on the project scope, making it easy to test new talent and build the right team. Ratings, reviews, and reliability data helps maintain Outpost’s high quality.

Why We’re Building

We’ve felt the pain firsthand. Michael has a Ph.D. in AI and if he wants to leverage his skillset, it’d take months of building a personal consulting brand or finding a full-time job.

Dean has personally hired 100s of people. He has spent months and thousands of dollars interviewing—often with business needs changing midway through hiring cycles.

Existing tools don’t solve this problem: Upwork incentivizes workers to cyclicly underbid each other, LinkedIn Jobs creates immense friction with months-long interview loops, and Intro provides guidance but stops short of hands-on implementation.

With lower friction and cost, we offer a low stakes alternative to these platforms. Outpost lets vetted professionals monetize instantly—redefining what it means to deliver high-quality, consistent work.

We’ve secured $126.5K toward our $500K pre-seed and are moving fast. If this vision resonates, let’s talk. Schedule a 20-Minute Call

Read more

1. New profile page that focuses more on customer expectations, builds trust around the problems pros can solve, and highlights accomplishments earlier in the funnel.

2. Ability to request a video allows customers to request, either on the profile or within the payment flow, a video message reply from the professionals. This was highly requested and some professionals have said it might even be easier for them to upload a video.

3. Alternate purchasing flow enables customers to request services directly from a professional’s profile — when professionals add their Outpost link to their LinkedIn bio, this enables quick purchasing without the AI chat.

4. Chat experience without signing up was one of our biggest requests from our ProductHunt launch—enabling customers to begin building trust with Outpost, without offering their email or phone number.

5. Draft first message capabilities allow us to add more context when starting a chat with a professional. We will be adding a “Write something for me” feature that takes the previous AI context and drafts a relevant first message.

6. Email alerting we switched our authentication provider to use email as the primary method and integrated Resend, which allows us to understand more about user preferences, build drip marketing campaigns for all signups, and let users know when message responses are received.

   

   

   

Read more

Transcript

1. We are Outpost, and we’re redesigning the gig economy for technology professionals.

2. Michael has 10 years of professional experience in artificial intelligence research and software development.

3. His inbox is flooded with people around the world who want to connect with him.

4. He wants to make money off of these skills, and quickly.

5. If he wants to use his AI experience…

6. It might be months before finding a job, building a business, or making even $1. There’s huge friction in finding fast work in tech. If he really wants money quickly,

7. What’s he gonna do? Start driving Uber?

8. But then, Michael discovers an in mail from Outpost, a marketplace for asking experts anything

9. He clicks on the link: he already has $50 waiting for him.

10. His profile is automatically imported from LinkedIn.

11. Outpost helps Michael build his online presence, and auto-shares with his network.

12. From there, we navigate Michael to his inbox.

13. Behind the scenes, Outpost has matched Michael with users who are demanding his ML skills.

14. He clicks into the first message and sees that someone is looking for advice on their data science model, and attached a snippet of their code.

15. Michael sends back an audio message as feedback and earns $20.

16. Meanwhile, the user can select to continue the conversation depending on their purchase.

17. So far, 50 experts like Michael have been onboarded to Outpost. We have made $500. We launched 1 month ago.

18. Pros charge $20 for a guaranteed video reply, or $10 for a message. And we take 50%.

19. On competition, on the left, unvetted gig platforms. On the right expert networks. But there’s no middle ground.

20. We expect customers will spend on average $200 in a given year

21. And will spend $250 per year once we roll out subscriptions.

22. And by 2028, we’ll be focused on gig work for SMBs.

23. Our professionals market themselves on social media…

24. …attracting users who struggle with common challenges.

25. Our team is myself,

26. Don Scott,

27. and Michael Green.

28. We’re redesigning the gig economy for technology professionals.

29. Thank you for your time.

Questions (video omitted)

• Bianca Veltri asked about the $50 professionals earned after onboarding. Customers pay to send inquiries to public profiles (built using publicly available LinkedIn data). Professionals claim their profile to access incoming requests. Once onboarded, they can respond to messages and earn cash.

• Jacqui Deegan asked about competition and differentiation. Platforms today tend to fall into two categories:

  • Gig platforms (e.g. Fiverr, Upwork) provide access to a broad talent pool but lack vetting and involve slow, often cumbersome bid-and-contract processes.

  • Expert networks (e.g. GLG, Intro) feature vetted professionals but focus exclusively on advisement, not execution.

  • Outpost sits between the two, offering instant access to vetted professionals and an overhauled bid-and-contract process leveraging AI.

2 weeks after this pitch, we were offered $25,000 to invest from LAUNCH. If you’re interested in Outpost, please reach out to us at invest@outpost.chat.

We’ve spent time developing an experience for professionals. Most professionals hear from us directly. For others, we can build public profiles for not-yet-onboarded professionals, using publicly available LinkedIn data and LLM-based scraping tactics, which those pros can then “claim” as their own. We use ScrapIn to pull LinkedIn URLs, BAML to abstract the data into a readable format, and convert it to Postgres queries run as part of our data seeding migrations.

We can convert professionals by InMailing them when a user pays to start a thread with them on Outpost. Here is how:

1. User messages public profile on Outpost.

   

2. Outpost will message that professional on LinkedIn via an InMail.

3. Pro clicks into link and sees how much they’ve earned from these messages.

4. We auto-import the pro’s LinkedIn profile and allow them to complete a few final steps:

5. Pros can share AI-written messages with their network before replying to messages.

Once a pro is done with onboarding, their profile is no longer “claimable”, and they can reply to messages to earn the money available in their account.

Product Hunt Launch

We received dozens of InMails from LinkedIn, messages on X, and text messages from professionals. The biggest learning is always in the value of launching — of getting thousands of eyes on something you’ve spent weeks developing. Here are some of our favorite screenshots:

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