The situation

Contra had built strong adoption among independent professionals, and the next growth opportunity was on the client side of the marketplace: helping companies understand when to use independent talent instead of adding headcount. Against a backdrop of hiring freezes and tighter budgets, I was brought in to lead the strategy, methodology, messaging, and go-to-market planning for what began as an ROI calculator and became the Project Cost Calculator, an interactive tool showing decision-makers the cost and time tradeoff between a project and a full-time hire.

The decision

The original concept risked becoming one more contractor-cost calculator, useful and undifferentiated. I reframed it around an actual decision companies make: add headcount for this need, or treat it as a project and bring in a specialist. That reframe changed the audience from independents pricing themselves to the business leaders who own budgets and resourcing, and it turned a utility into a business case for project-based work. Contra had its own product strategy for that operating model; my job was to make the calculator and its report educate a user into it.

Before · the brief

A freelancer-rate calculator

For independents pricing themselves. Useful, undifferentiated.

After · the reframe

A business case for project-based work

For the leaders who own budgets and resourcing: hire, or project?

The harder problem was underneath, and it ran backwards from the usual order. What should the decision-maker see? What variables produce that answer? Which of Contra’s data supports them, and where does it need external benchmarks? What happens when a category is sparse or the output is plainly wrong? The calculator had to support a real claim — that companies could save both money and time — and there was no clean dataset to model it. Contra’s marketplace data had useful signal but optional fields, uneven categorization and thin samples in some project types; the third-party benchmarks were collected for related questions rather than this one. So I designed a methodology that combined the two and set rules for imperfect data, substituting broader averages where a project type had too few data points to behave sensibly. Contra supplied and pulled the underlying marketplace data; I designed and operationalized the model on top of it, QA’d it across project type, seniority and geography, and flagged the categories where the story didn’t hold rather than paper over them.

Show the working, not just the answer.

02 · The methodology · working prototype

Every output traced to a source

TypeMarketingSkillCopywritingSenioritySeniorLocationUS-based
OutputExampleWhere it comes from
Project duration233 hrsContra's network data
Independent hourly rate$85Average rate for the skill, seniority and location
Independent cost$19,784Hourly rate × project duration
Full-time salary$120,405Pave, by job title and seniority, adjusted for inflation
Cost-per-hire$4,683SHRM industry standards
Annual employee cost$155,804Salary plus ~29.4% in employer costs, per the BLS
Full-time cost for the project$22,136Annual cost prorated over 2,080 hours, plus cost-per-hire
Cost savings$2,352Full-time cost minus independent cost
Independent time to impact9.6 daysContra benchmarks, past 90 days
Employee time to impact40 daysLinkedIn Workforce Report, matched to role
Time saved30.4 daysEmployee time minus independent time
Rebuilt from the Project Cost Calc. prototype sheet · Senior copywriting, US-based · prototype figures, before the live tool's final model

Then the answer had somewhere to go. A user who got their two numbers could download a report — how to adopt project-based work at their own company — that turned one calculation into a workforce strategy: short-term against long-term needs, a preferred-independent directory, centralized onboarding and payments, and where the sourcing gaps were. The calculator was the top of a product-led content funnel, not the end of one.

Strategy to go-to-market

Full scope

The decision above carries the argument. Everything below ran inside the same engagement, catalogued.

8
workstreams
1
public, linked
2
tracks

01Model & product

4 workstreams · 1 live

Calculation methodologyData model

Designed and QA’d on Contra’s data plus third-party benchmarks.

Working prototypeQA sheet

A sheet mimicking the calculator, to QA permutations before development.

Calculator UX copyProduct copyLive

Across the core calculator journey.

View it live →
Personalised reportDownloadable report

Moved a user from calculation to education to a broader workforce strategy.

02Positioning & GTM

4 workstreams · none public

Reframed project briefPositioning

From a rate calculator to a business case for project-based work.

Competitive & SEO landscapeResearch

Toptal and the recruitment-ROI calculators, read for white space.

Go-to-market planLaunch plan

Spanning SEO, email, social and paid.

Cross-team coordinationProgram management

Across Contra’s team and an external design studio.

The bottom line

The distinctive work here is the strategy and the methodology, and I’d rather be straight about that than pad it. I don’t have confirmed post-launch performance numbers for this engagement. What’s real is the reframe from a rate calculator to a business case, and a defensible model built on marketplace data that was never collected to answer this question. That combination of content strategy, product marketing, data methodology, and UX thinking is the story. Pre-launch SEO projections existed, but they were estimates, so they stay out.