Cahlia is a platform that introduces corporates needing specialist skills, to female consultants wanting projects that utilise their talent.

Founders Angela & Nikki are taking a lean startup approach to building the platform that will eventually be a marketplace along the lines of Expert360 but with an obvious differentiator (women specific) and some less obvious differences that will become apparent as they get closer to launch.

Phase 1 involves a lot of customer development meetings with consultants and corporates alike to nail down the value proposition, so the brief was to create a web presence that would communicate the value proposition at this stage and collect details of interested prospects for customer development meetings.

The site is WordPress, consisting of a home page that leads consultants and corporates off to respective pages with a statement outlining the founders’ understanding of the problem. Corporates can sign up to a mailing list in Mailchimp to learn more. Consultants can do the same (different list to allow targeted emails later) but they can also sign up for early access.

On the Consultants page, the ‘Get early access’ button links off to a survey hosted in Typeform that asks questions about their challenges and needs. Built into the survey are some logic jumps that cater for different branches of questions, depending on how they respond to earlier questions.

Responses to the survey are automatically passed to a Mailchimp list using Zapier, so there’s no double handling of respondent information.

As usual, there were a few tweaks needed to the website pages to make them render perfectly on smaller devices like smartphones and smaller tablets held in portrait mode.

Looking forward to the next phase of this project which is building the platform MVP on some software called Sharetribe.