Building a freelance marketplace in India as a non-technical, first-time founder (CA background)

I'm Lohit, a practicing Chartered Accountant in Guwahati, Assam — not exactly the usual founder background for a marketplace startup.

The idea for Legal Lancer came directly from my accounting practice: I kept seeing the same pattern with clients wanting to hire freelancers but hesitant because of payment risk and no real way to verify who they were dealing with. Meanwhile, freelancers I knew had their own version of the same complaint — chasing payments, no protection if a client just disappeared after receiving the work.

What I've built: a freelance marketplace focused on the Indian market, with identity-verified freelancers and escrow-held payments that only release once work is approved.

What's been hardest so far, honestly:

• Learning SEO and marketing from scratch with zero background in either, mostly through trial and error (and a lot of course-correcting after getting things wrong)

• The classic marketplace chicken-and-egg problem — freelancers signed up faster than businesses did, which meant rethinking a lot of the early content and outreach strategy

• Figuring out which "backlink"/guest-post opportunities were genuinely useful versus which were just paid placements dressed up as organic ones

What's working: business-facing content specifically about hiring risk and payment structure seems to resonate more than generic "best freelance platform" content ever did — makes sense in hindsight, since that's the actual gap in the market I was trying to fill.

Happy to answer anything about the build, the non-technical-founder angle, or the SEO/marketing learning curve — genuinely still figuring a lot of this out and would value the community's take.