We help you start and grow your business
Our Mission
Whether you're a agency mogul, a freelance veteran, or a recent creative grad, it's tough to get started in the "business side of your business". Safe work agreements, collecting and accepting payments, legal concerns, and establishing an online presence make it intimidating to even consider.
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STEPSTOOL solves these issues and at the same time the step based service model brings a modern take on service work and cash flow, getting you paid as you work, not after your work.
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We're proud to be the most transparent, safe, and lucrative platform that creative's trust to run their business. Free to service providers forever, there's never been a better time to step up.
Our Purpose
The founding purpose of STEPSTOOL is to provide just the right amount of support to field and run creative service projects. We don't have time sheet features and we don't believe in hourly work. Instead, we're founded in the belief that any service is best served in a pay-as-you-go model with transparency for both the client and the service provider.
Our Story
Originally created to be a graphic design work marketplace, we studied the industry and heard countless real world recounts of bad practices, bad projects, and free work being given to clients in the hope to "win" and be selected to then be paid. Rather than be another purveyor of the problem, we sensed we had a chance to make a bigger difference in the quality of life for creative designers as well as their clients if we could design and build a thoughtful, modern, and simple platform to run these projects and help the creatives collect payments as they go.
In addition to providing a modern free platform for conducting business, we wanted to combat he high take that work aggregator job board websites ask (as much of 20% of earnings). We believed that we could provide all the features any creative needs to run better projects, and simply collect a modest platform fee that is seamlessly collected from the client on payment events if/when they occur.
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STEPSTOOL provides a solution to many of the common pitfalls by introducing digital, step based deliveries in an e-commerce format with full transparency and inclusion of both the client and the service provider.