LaunchPad is the flat-fee creative marketplace where working photographers, videographers, and editors get booked as a team — through our signature feature, LaunchDeck.
We're building the platform creative teams will actually want to be on.
The two dominant patterns both take 10–20% of every booking, and both treat the creative as an interchangeable vendor. That model funds the platform but creates resentment among the people the platform depends on.
A creative quoting $1,000 walks away with $800 after the take-rate, before taxes and overhead. Multiply across a year.
Clients see profiles, not people. Repeat work doesn't compound on-platform the way it does in offline creative networks.
A content shoot needs a photographer, videographer, and editor. Existing platforms make the client hire three vendors and assemble a team they don't know.
No other creative marketplace offers this mechanic. Fiverr, Upwork, Thumbtack, and the rest are built around individual bookings. LaunchDeck collapses three hires into one — and lets the marketplace develop density at the team level.
"Two-day brand shoot in Providence. Stills, motion, and a finished edit by Friday."
Picks creatives — photo, video, editor — up to five from the roster.
Each creative sees the brief, the team, the budget. Booking goes live only when every seat is in.
Shared brief, shared timeline, shared thread. The client interacts with a team — not three vendors.
Work lands in one place. Payment clears on confirmed delivery. Each creative's rate is preserved.
Marketplace density at the team level — not just the individual — is meaningfully harder for a competitor to copy than a directory of profiles. LaunchDeck creates a compounding moat: creatives who do great work together get booked together, which makes the next booking easier, which makes the team durable.
Every number on this page is queryable. Nothing here is fabricated or projected.
Transparent, tiered fees charged to the client — the creative's quote is never touched. Subscription revenue compounds with retention. Opt-in promotion sits on top. Three layered streams, and not one of them carves into what a creative earns.
Charged to the client on top of the creative's quote — the creative keeps 100% of their rate. The percentage steps down as projects grow.
Flat fee. Small jobs stay friction-free.
Charged to the client, on top of the creative's rate.
The rate steps down as projects grow — big work stays competitive.
Once-per-booking fee, on top of the transaction. Buys the client the team-as-a-unit experience: shared brief, comms, deliverable consolidation.
Once-per-booking. The coordination fee is the same whether the Deck is $500 or $5,000. Aligned with creators, not against them.
Free unlocks the marketplace. Pro unlocks the leverage — the back office and the pipeline in one subscription. Recurring revenue that compounds with creator retention.
Profile, portfolio, DMs, LaunchDeck participation as a team member. The whole core marketplace works without a credit card.
$290/yr (two months free). Invoicing & estimates. Client CRM & project management. Accounting metrics. Priority discovery placement. Multi-portfolio. The back office and the pipeline — one subscription. Replaces a $36/mo business-OS tool and a $30/mo marketplace membership.
The beta cohort and the first 100 Rhode Island Pros lock $19/mo for as long as they stay. Early believers keep the early price — a wedge into the RI creative community that compounds as we grow.
A promoted post or collection that surfaces to the right audience for a window the creator chooses. Pay a fixed price, or pay on outcome. Cancelable any time.
A short visibility window — the cheapest way to surface a fresh post to the local feed.
A week of elevated placement across the creative's home market.
A week of placement across the wider region — for creatives ready to travel for the work.
Free to start. LaunchPad takes a 15–20% fee on bookings tied to the promotion, the creator's choice. The only fee that touches a creative's payout — and only when they opt in for it. Cancelable any time.
The model captures value where it's created, never from the creative's rate. A $5,000 booking now generates roughly $400, not $30 — the client-side fee scales with the work — while the creative's economics are untouched. Layer in recurring Pro subscriptions and opt-in promotion and you get an ~88% blended gross margin business. And we still never take a cut of a creative's quote.
Modeled scenarios on the canonical revenue model — flat transaction fees, LaunchDeck coordination, Pro subscription, and opt-in performance boost. Conservative behavior, documented assumptions.
Modeled on conservative behavior: a free creative books one project every 3–4 months. A 3:1 LTV:CAC ratio is the benchmark for a healthy market — every segment here clears it by an order of magnitude. Assumptions are documented and queryable, like everything else on this page.
Pro modeled at $29/mo ($290/yr); the Founding Creative cohort locks $19/mo. Source: references/financial-model.md (model v3).
Each phase is a falsifiable bet. The next geography opens only when the prior one has demonstrated marketplace liquidity. Rhode Island is small enough that one founder can know the creative community personally — and large enough to support a real marketplace.
RISD is in our backyard. Beta cohort onboarded. First-five-clients pricing live.
Boston-led. Funded by Seed.
NYC · Philadelphia · DC. Funded by Seed.
Coast-to-coast. Funded by Series A.
Modeled, not promised. Revenue against operating expense, base case — every assumption is documented and stress-testable. Drag the sliders in the next section.
Modeled, not promised. Base case. Source: references/financial-model.md — conservative, base, and upside scenarios are documented and stress-testable in the next section.
Clearing all three is what unlocks the Seed. Conservative on purpose: better to clear the bar late than to false-positive a raise we're not ready for. Every metric below is defined precisely in references/metrics.md and queryable from Supabase.
Logged in past 30 days, ≥ 1 post on the Creative Feed, complete profile. Test accounts excluded.
Stripe payment succeeded + client confirmation (or 14-day no-dispute). LaunchDecks count as one hire, not three.
Median, on the cohort that's been on platform 60+ days. A pure speed-of-liquidity metric.
The "two consecutive months" requirement protects against a single anomalous spike — a viral post or seasonal demand — being mistaken for product-market fit. Source: Business Plan §13.
Bootstrapped to proof of concept. Capital is gated on evidence from the prior phase — not on narrative.
Funds our engineer to take payment processing live, a director of operations, and the marketing + community efforts — events, activations, giveaways — that drive RI to the liquidity milestone (left). Modeled to reach EBITDA-positive in Year 3 — this raise covers cumulative burn roughly twice over. We're raising to accelerate, not to survive.
Unlocked by the Rhode Island milestone. Funds Boston-led growth and the infrastructure for NYC · Philly · DC.
Triggered by Phase 3 East Coast density. Funds coast-to-coast marketplace, ops scale, and platform durability.
React Native + Expo + Supabase. Closed TestFlight beta shipping builds. Zero TypeScript errors. A real cohort of Rhode Island creatives using it.
LaunchDeck has no direct equivalent on Fiverr, Upwork, Thumbtack, or in any creative-network platform. The team is the unit of work — not the individual.
Working creatives openly resent the 10–20% gatekeepers. The migration to platforms aligned with creator economics is happening; we're built for it from day one.
LaunchPad is built with Claude Code as the primary engineering collaborator, paired with David's product instincts. Capital efficiency is not aspirational here — it's structural.
LaunchPad's institutional knowledge lives in a versioned operating system — Mission Control — that includes a master constitution, six specialist subagents, a complete decision log, and a slash-command library. When the team grows, that operating system is what they inherit.
Bi-vocational founder. Product instinct, brand discipline, founder-led GTM. Working three days a week on LaunchPad and shipping production builds against it. Operating in Providence with deep ties to the RI creative community.
Future Chief Operating Officer. Will own brand, content, and operations as the company scales. Mission Control's documentation discipline is purpose-built so she can step in and operate from day one.
Post-money SAFE, $1.75M cap, standard YC paperwork. Drag the assumptions — the math is yours to test. Modeled scenarios, not promised outcomes.
Post-money SAFE · $1.75M cap · standard YC paperwork. Drag the assumptions — the math is yours to test.
$250K to put payment processing live, bring on engineering and a director, and drive Rhode Island to marketplace density. If you back consumer marketplaces early — before the metrics are obvious — this is the moment to start the conversation.
