Superside 101: Our Startup Story

Launched in late 2015, Superside (formerly known as Konsus) today provides an on-demand creative service for close to 3,000 companies. After joining Y Combinator in January 2016, growth accelerated to more than 10% weekly and Superside has been growing rapidly ever since.

The Internet has made it easier than ever for companies to grow yet – until recently – tech for productivity has stalled. According to the Harvard Business Review, 40 percent of office time is spent on routine tasks such as PowerPoint, data entry and proofreading. These tasks can be time-consuming for employees, and require skill sets that cannot be automated.

Instead of wasting time and personnel on these tasks, businesses can hire an online freelancer. However, finding a qualified freelancer through traditional online platforms can be a long process, which makes meeting deadlines more difficult. In addition, the lack of accountability and quality control can lead to poor job performance, resulting in even more time wasted.

Superside founder Fredrik Thomassen experienced these difficulties firsthand.

Fredrik Thomassen is the former co-founder and CEO of Zalora Indonesia and a former consultant with McKinsey & Company. He is a graduate of the Norwegian School of Economics and London School of Economics.

Superside was originally developed for large consultancies, corporate strategy teams, investment firms and similar, with need for on-demand support on graphic design, presentation design and other creative services.

“We created Superside because we found ourselves doing a lot of stuff we weren’t good at, and finding talent on UpWork and Fiveer was time-consuming and low-quality,” explains Thomassen. “We’ve basically created a solution corporates can use, by being on-demand, guaranteeing the results and ensuring confidentiality.”

The way it works is simple: businesses submit their tasks on Superside describing the specific task or project with which they need help. A typical example is to polish a PowerPoint presentation by the following morning. The task is then automatically allocated to an experienced, and pre-qualified, Superside team.

Superside aims to bring quality and structure into the business freelancing space, similar to transportation freelance companies like Uber. However, instead of an Uber driver, Superside is set up with a team structure of a Project Manager and Creative Specialists working together to deliver the project.

The project managers immediately respond to clients and oversee the entire order handling process and quality assurance. The creative specialists are pre-vetted as the top one percent in their fields and are assigned projects based on skill and availability. Today, every month thousands of people apply for a creative job at Superside, with only a handful successfully completing the screening process.

“Coming from McKinsey, which has spent two decades fine-tuning an internal on-demand service, I was used to working in tandem with a 24/7 creative team and have experience first-hand how this increases productivity,” says Thomassen. “We know people need it, because we need it ourselves.”