founder superside

A proper presentation can work wonders when it comes to impressing your clients. One might have some strong strategies for the growth of the company, but presenting it accurately is also a very big deal. But, the employers of a company often spend way too much time making PowerPoint presentations, proofreading, etc. Now, hiring a freelancer for the creative furnishing of these tasks is always the priority, but what if you set a deadline?

Websites like Fiverr do offer services that are needed for business projects, but you cannot get things done every time, especially in the eleventh hour. So, Fredrik Thomassen created Superside, an online creative service which ensures both quality and delivery by time. For example, if one needs a project to be done within 24 hours, Superside makes a team according to the demand of projects and availability of the freelancers, so that the project is delivered on time, ensuring the excellence as well.

Fredrik Thomassen decided to create such a company, as he went through the troubles of spending hours on a project, designing, data entry, and much more when he worked at McKinsey & Company.

Education

Fredrik attended ESSEC Business School in 2009 and went to Norwegian School of Economics straight after that. He graduated from there in 2010 with a bachelor’s degree in economics followed by graduating from London School of Economics and Political Science in 2011.

Career

After graduating with a master’s in Econometrics and Mathematical Engineering, Thomassen joined as a Journalist in Agderposten. He worked there for more than five years, and then, joined McKinsey & Company.

While working as an Associate in this company, Thomassen faced many problems related to the desk works, especially in creating project presentations in PowerPoint. According to him, it was time-consuming, and the “not-so-skilled-people” were trying their hands to give their projects a professional touch. So, instead of facing these troubles, why not hire a freelancer?

This was when the idea of creating Superside (formerly known as Konsus) started peeking in his mind. But, he already knew that platforms like Fiverr and Freelancer.com are already entertaining quite a robust number of both customers and freelancers. So, he needed to think outside the box to get his start-up running and successfully flourishing.

Founding Superside

According to the reports of Harvard Business Review, an average skilled office employee spends 40% of his time doing jobs like data entry and PowerPoint presentations. He can certainly put the efforts on core tasks, that is, for what he was actually hired, once these extra jobs get done by someone else.

Thus, to eliminate this problem for once and all, Fredrik Thomassen founded Superside in August 2015 in Oslo, Norway. Thomassen built Superside especially for the big firms whose workload gets doubled, as they needed to focus both on business and the creative presentations for clients. So, the company was built to ease the pressure for big corporations and also ensuring job security for the freelancers as well. After the company joined Y Combinator, the growth is increasing at 10% on a weekly basis.

Success of Superside

Superside has a very tough screening process to ensure the quality of work that is provided to the clients. Only a very handful of people, probably the experts at every field, are hired by Superside. So, there’s no need to worry about your project, once it has been assigned to a Superside team. Moreover, for the freelancers, it’s always a threat that they might be out of a job any time. Superside ensures a fixed number of jobs for certain freelancers who reach a given target, thus ensuring a constant source of income. Moreover, each freelancer gets paid around $15 to $20 for a single hour which is quite appealing for a freelancer.

By 2016, after joining Y Combinator, it really helped the company to reach its peak. Within a year of its launch, the company had clients from more than 500 companies coming from 60 different countries. There were over 200 vetted freelancers then, and most of them were from Eastern Europe. So, the biggest market for Superside was the U.S.

By early 2018, the company already raised $1.7 million from investors like Acequia Capital, Liquid2 Ventures and a few others.

Apart from Superside

Fredrik Thomassen has also served as the CEO and was the co-founder of Zalora Group, Zalora Indonesia. It is an e-commerce platform for fashion which is now a part of Global Fashion Group.