Solving for an Unfair Ecosystem

When Sollective decided to build and release Keiraku in 2022, and then SeiQ earlier this year, we were simply responding to two pressing needs we saw in the freelance market. First was to help freelancers solve their most pressing problems at the time. Second, was to support our community of the best freelancers in Japan.

We believe that by providing value and the tools that freelancers need to succeed, so will Sollective.

So far, we estimate that we’ve provided freelancers operating their business in Japan over 50,000,000 Yen in economic benefit from the time and cost savings our tools provide.

Over the last year we’ve made updates, fixed bugs, and released new features for Keiraku and SeiQ based on feedback from our community and users.

As we listen to positive reviews (and sometimes complaints), what we’ve consistently noticed is that our members’ workflows and processes are all incredibly different – to an unprecedented degree. The tools freelancers are currently using range from incredibly basic (notepads), to somewhat modern (Excel), to extremely complex (automations, inventive usage of github).

We realized a potential cause of this jumble of tools and processes:

Thus far in Japan, business tools have been developed not for the sake of freelancers’ but for the sake of large corporations. There is an incredible gap between the business tools available to individual business owners (freelancers) in the rest of the world and Japan.

We want to fix this market imbalance.by creating  the first tool in Japan that can manage the entire freelance back office process: a “Freelance Operating System” aka FreelanceOS™.

What about Keiraku and SeiQ?

These features are NOT going away but rather integrated into the FreelanceOS umbrella as part of our unified vision for a tool that integrates into each freelancers’ workflow.

The FreelanceOS Vision

Our vision for an end-to-end tool for freelancers is a journey that will demand significant dedication and perseverance to fully realize.

Our goal with FreelanceOS is to provide a home or “repository” for freelancers to track and manage the clients and projects they work on.

During the freelancing process, many “work artifacts” such as contracts, invoices, timesheets, briefing documents, and many others are scattered in different locations. By automating this process and utilizing the data present in each artifact will make freelancing more efficient, and remove the burden of managing a business.

What makes Sollective perfectly suited for this endeavor? We already have experience bridging the gap between Contract and Invoice in our SeiQ feature: Our features allow users to quickly generate invoices based on previously created contracts.

Since many of these documents are intended to be shared with clients, we can bridge the gap in secure document delivery, and directly integrate in your clients’ business management systems and processes.

Some other things that’re on the concept table currently: How can we leverage our learnings in AI and LLMs while building AutoProfile(powered by GPT-4), to improve data automation in FreelanceOS?

Our philosophy for designing and developing FreelanceOS:

Opinionated – Like Keiraku, where we worked hand-in-hand with legal experts to craft a contract safe and fair enough for both freelancers and clients alike, we want to build a better standard for project management and how freelancers interact with clients.

Light – We’re not aiming to replace freelancers’ favorite tools if they already have them. We want to build the essentials for raising the bar for management software.

Integratable – Smart software does not operate on its own; we want to build interconnected systems that save users’ time.

Release Schedule

We plan on dropping new features for FreelanceOS in phases. Each phase will be released roughly every 2-3 months. Between releases, we want to involve members of our private community (accessible to all approved freelancers on Sollective) to help us define the definition of the product.

The first 3 planned phases and themes are:

P1 – Foundation We’re introducing the basic structure of FreelanceOS and upgrading existing systems to work with our new one-platform model.

P2 – Time & Money Deeper Time Management tools and the ability to start to visualize your overall business with a single glance.

P3 – Unification Improving integration of FreelanceOS, Keiraku, SeiQ as well as our classic freelance public profiles and matching systems

Today’s Release: Foundation

Today we’re launching several new features that make it possible for users to already track their projects, clients, and basic milestones and to-dos for projects.

Core functionality you’ll be able to use now:

Project Dashboard Visualize a timeline of your projects, whether you have 1 client or 10.

Improved Client Management We’ve re-engineered the client management systems introduced with SeiQ to be more robust. It’s easier than ever to find and interact with clients on Sollective or that synced to another service like Freee or even manually recorded yourself.

Project Management View View, Create, and Upload documents like Contracts and Invoices from this screen. Keiraku Contracts and SeiQ Invoices can be created from this view as well. Manage your deadlines and to-dos.

Build With Us: Joining our Beta and Providing Feedback

How to Access FreelanceOS Phase 1 of FreelanceOS (Foundation) is available to ALL users, but due to the nature of this update bringing so many core changes to the Sollective platform, users will need to opt-in to participate in this beta.

We encourage all our users to participate if they are able to share feedback about the tool.

To enable Sollective beta features: 1 Go to your Account Settings Page 2 At the bottom of the page, you’ll see an beta opt-in section 3 Please read the description and enable beta access 4 Click [Save]

To access FreelanceOS Dashboard 1 On the top navigation, go to the FreelanceOS section 2 Click Dashboard

Feedback and Discussion in our Private Community All approved members of Sollective can submit feedback, feature requests, and bug reports from within a channel in our private Slack community.

If you have not submitted your profile for approval, please do so, and you’ll be able to meet other top freelancers in our private community.

We’re building these tools for the benefit of the freelance community so we hope that you’ll participate in building a tool you’ll love to use. We’re looking forward to sharing future updates with you soon.

※We made the following changes to the naming of Sollective’s services in March 2024:

💡Related article: New: Timesheets & Time Tracking for FreelanceOS