Small startup jobs are too important for a backlog and too awkward for an agency

Every startup backlog has the same middle layer: work that matters, that is too small to justify a full-time hire, and too specific to hand to an agency. A landing page for a new market. A research pass before a pricing change. A script that automates a weekly report. A design for a flow you will demo next month.

The usual options each fail in a different way. A general freelance marketplace buries you in proposals, many of them off the brief. An open competition asks more people to do unpaid work than you want. An agency adds overhead for a scope that was one afternoon of founder time. So the work gets done badly, done late, or not at all, and the person who knows the context best does it by hand.

Two ways to post the same kind of work

FoundersBid is a marketplace for exactly that middle layer. You post a clearly scoped piece of work, set the budget and the deadline, and find people who want to do it. There are two ways to post it, and the difference is deliberate.

Bounty: when several people can try

A bounty is a bounded, judgeable outcome. You write the brief so that someone can produce a submission you can compare: a landing page concept, a research write-up, a small development task, a design, an analysis. You set the reward, the deadline, and a cap on how many people take part. Each participant submits their best attempt. You review the submissions and pick the winner.

A bounty suits work where competition improves the result. When several approaches are plausible, seeing them side by side is the point. A name for the product. A hook for a launch email. A first pass at a dashboard layout.

Project: when you choose the person first

A project is for work where guessing is expensive. The provider writes a proposal before doing any deliverable work: their approach, evidence of relevant experience, a quote, a timeline, and a milestone plan. You review the proposals and pick one. The selected provider is funded before the work begins, and delivery runs through the published milestones, each paid when you approve it.

Not every job should be a contest. A payment pipeline for your users is not a contest. One provider, one quote, one set of milestones.

The one-line test: if three or more reasonable people could produce a result you can judge in an afternoon, post a bounty. If you need to trust one person for weeks, post a project.

The rules you see before the work starts

The budget is fixed and public on the work page. The advertised reward is exactly what the winner receives; the platform fee is charged to you, the sponsor, on top of the reward. It is never deducted from the pool.

You set the participant cap. Applications close on a date. Submissions close on a date. Selection is yours, against the brief you published. The IP terms are written on the work: the default is that the winning deliverable transfers to you once the reward is settled, and non-winning submissions stay with their authors unless the brief says otherwise.

What we are building, and what we are not

FoundersBid is not a job board, not an employment platform, and not a design contest site. It is paid work with published rules, posted by people who will fund it. The graveyard side of the site exists for a different problem: abandoned projects that a founder would rather hand on than delete.