The Freelance Marketplace Problem Nobody's Talking About: Why Enterprises Are Ditching Traditional Platforms

If you’ve ever tried to hire a freelancer through a traditional marketplace, you know the drill: endless profiles to sift through, quality inconsistencies, communication friction, and the constant feeling that you’re making do with a solution that wasn’t really built for your needs.

Now imagine that problem, but scaled to a multinational enterprise managing hundreds of projects across dozens of countries. That’s the gap Danny Gal saw—and it’s the gap Proteams is filling.

The Problem With Traditional Freelance Marketplaces

Here’s what most people don’t realize: platforms like Upwork and Fiverr were built for a different customer entirely. They optimize for individual freelancers and small businesses looking for one-off projects. But when you’re a Fortune 500 company’s procurement officer trying to build a cohesive external workforce strategy, these platforms fall apart.

“We work a lot with procurement teams in large global enterprises,” Danny explains. “What I want every chief procurement officer to understand is that they need a strategy for external workforce—and that means using the right supplier for the right type of work.”

The traditional marketplace model doesn’t account for enterprise complexity. You’ve got:

• Quality control requirements that generic platforms can’t guarantee
• Compliance and security concerns that matter at scale
• Dedicated team dynamics where you need continuity, not a revolving door of contractors
• Global coordination across multiple regions and time zones
• Managed delivery where someone’s accountable for outcomes, not just task completion

This is where Proteams enters the picture—and it’s a fundamentally different approach.

Building the “Airbnb of People”

Danny likes to call Proteams “the Airbnb of people,” and the comparison is apt. Just like Airbnb solved the problem of finding reliable accommodations by creating a curated, trust-based platform, Proteams solves the problem of finding reliable talent at scale.

But unlike traditional marketplaces, Proteams operates in two distinct ways:

1. Dedicated teams: Enterprises get access to dedicated contractors and experts who work exclusively with them
2. Managed projects: Proteams brings in experts as part of their own project team and delivers end-to-end solutions—more like a consultancy model

This flexibility is crucial. Different projects need different approaches, and enterprises need a partner who can adapt.

From Corporate Burnout to Profitable Startup

Danny’s path to founding Proteams is interesting because it wasn’t driven by venture capital ambitions or growth-at-all-costs thinking. His background was corporate—big companies, scaling operations, solving complex problems. But he hit a wall: he was teaching people how to scale, but he couldn’t scale himself.

“My challenge was always the scalability,” he says. “I was consulting with people on how to scale, but I wasn’t scaling myself. I was still a one-person show.”

So he started exploring the idea with his co-founder. Initially, Danny admits, he was skeptical. “I said, look, this sounds a bit like recruitment, and that’s not really me. My background is in tech and fast-moving businesses.” But when they started validating the idea with procurement teams at large corporations, something clicked.

“They said, we need this. And it happened a few times in a row. I was like, there must be something here.”

The MVP That Actually Mattered

When building the initial product, Danny and his team focused on what would actually solve the problem: an invite-only platform that matched senior-quality freelancers with corporate clients.

“Initially, I tried to find people from pharmaceuticals and big pharma companies,” Danny explains. “There was a large part of it around being much more focused on specific industries and attracting specific perspectives.”

But here’s where the hard decisions came in. Early on, Proteams was working with clients across procurement, IT, marketing, R&D, consulting, and social services. They had small projects and massive ones. Requests ranged from niche specialist work to broad capability needs.

The big question became: What do we want to be?

This is the tension every startup faces—the pressure to be everything to everyone versus the discipline of focus. Danny’s approach was to be focused and broad simultaneously. By leveraging external talent, they could serve diverse needs, but they needed to be intentional about their positioning and how they served different customer segments.

Building the Roadmap Without VC Pressure

Here’s something unusual about Proteams: they’ve never taken external funding. They’ve been profitable from day one and grown organically. This changes everything about how you think about product development.

Without investors pushing for hypergrowth, Danny can be ruthlessly customer-focused. “The biggest thing is our customers telling us what they need,” he says. “What are they frustrated with? What do they need to get done? How do we make their life easier?”

Their roadmap balances three things:

• What competitors are doing (because it indicates market needs)
• What customers are explicitly asking for
• How to deliver it (both through platform technology and service delivery)

The last point is crucial: Danny doesn’t just think about building features. He thinks about how Proteams delivers value through both technology and service. Sometimes that means improving the platform. Sometimes it means improving their project management, their talent curation, their communication—the human side of the business.

The People Philosophy

When you’re building a team without external funding, you can’t afford to hire wrong. But you also can’t afford to be paralyzed by perfectionism.

Danny’s approach is to hire curious, hardworking, dedicated people—including young talent fresh out of university. He’s transparent about the fact that not every hire works out. But by mixing junior talent with experienced people, they’ve built something special.

“The team here is extremely good,” he says. “We’ve been pretty ruthless on our team and our people, but in the right way. We can’t keep people who aren’t performing or aren’t working in the right way.”

What Danny’s most proud of, though, isn’t the revenue or the scale. It’s watching young people develop. “Seeing young people from not knowing much come into the business, some recently graduated, and then watch them develop, see them grow, see them promote, earn more money, get bigger jobs—that’s success for me.”

Scaling Without Losing Your Way

As Proteams has scaled, they’ve had to think carefully about what scale means. They’re moving from startup to scale-up, and the challenges are multiplying: more clients, growing client needs, expanding from regional to global requirements, building bigger teams across talent, client management, sales, marketing, and project delivery.

Danny’s philosophy is refreshingly grounded: don’t try to predict three years out. Focus on the next 18 months because your business will be completely different by then anyway.

“What’s good for our business is going to be very different 18 months from now than it was 18 months ago,” he explains. “I’m very much focused on what do we need to execute this month, next month, next quarter, and then the future—12 to 18 months away.”

The mantra? “We need to be 1% better every single day.”

The Bigger Picture

What Proteams is really solving is a structural problem in how enterprises think about external talent. Right now, most large companies treat freelancers, contractors, agencies, and consultancies as separate buckets. They don’t have a cohesive strategy.

Danny’s vision is different: enterprises should have a deliberate strategy for external workforce that matches the right supplier to the right type of work. That might be a freelancer for a specific task, a dedicated team for ongoing work, or a consultancy for end-to-end projects.

Proteams is building the platform and service model that makes that vision possible.

Want to hear more about how Danny built Proteams from validating the idea to scaling profitably without external funding? Listen to the full episode of Code Story to dive deeper into his journey, the hard decisions he made along the way, and what he’s learned about building teams and managing growth in the fractional talent space.