About us
We wanted to create a better way to find local talent.
Throughout my career working with design agencies and startups, I have been asked countless times if I could refer a contractor for a project. It got to the point where I started reaching out through Facebook groups to form a list of contractors and their contact details for when they were needed.
When I started working for myself and needed to find contract talent in my own city or country, It was no easy task. Being unable to find someone in my city, I went to remote freelancer websites - but the USD currency conversion to AUD messed up the project budget. The problem when you hire people from overseas is by the time you convert the currency it’s the same price or better value to find someone in your own country. Sometimes you need someone from your country for government grants. Not being able to find the talent within your city also means you can't have in-person meetings and workshops, or they can not work out of your office.
Recognizing how hard and time-consuming it can be to find great talent, Colist makes it easier to find local contractors for both in-house projects happening in your office or to work remotely.
Allowing the contractors to be discovered for amazing opportunities and ongoing work, and enabling businesses to find talented designers and developers for their needs, Colist acts as an efficient link to find freelance/contract digital talent.
The team
Ariel Beninca
Founder, UX/UI designer & front end devAriel Beninca is a multi skilled designer specialising in software and product design. Her skills include UX/UI design, web design, graphic design, marketing and front end development. Over the many years in her industry she has needed to both find contractors for the design agencies and businesses she has worked for and been a contractor herself. Throughout this experience she identified a pinpoint and gap in the industry.
Daniel Hallawi
hief investment officerDaniel Hallawi is a Finance Professional with 14 years experience ranging from Wealth and Funds Management to Venture Capital and Private equity.
As a result of previously running multiple start-ups, Daniel is able to articulate the founders journey when matching opportunities to capital. Sitting on a number of start-up boards, Daniel provides his experience and guidance of taking a new company from setup to revenue, getting investor ready and building high performing teams.
Allen smith
Recruitment specialistAllen Smith is the founder of Seventwenty and Co-Founder of DMCG Global, specialized recruitment businesses of marketing, creative and digi-tech talent. As a business owner providing creative and technical contract/freelance staff, Allen Smith has experienced first hand how the gig-economy can really affect the effectiveness and profitability of a recruitment company.
With a growing number of freelance assignments spanning a life cycle of under 1 month, quite often a few days here and there, the process can be quite cumbersome, labour intensive and cost prohibitive. Allen identified the gaps in the market and saw an opportunity to build a platform that would give clients the power to connect with local freelancers directly and take the guess work in finding suitable specialist specific to their projects. Thus saving time, money, increasing the earnings of contractors, and helping businesses with short term hires which recruitment businesses would deem cost prohibitive.
Yogeshwar Chauhan
Senior Software DeveloperYogeshwar is an experienced software developer who is working on the backend of the product using Laravel and view.js.