{"id":60852,"date":"2020-08-26T18:15:21","date_gmt":"2020-08-26T10:15:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.fbe.hku.hk\/alumni-overview\/startup-star\/harris-cheng-happy-hunting-ground\/"},"modified":"2020-11-13T11:04:35","modified_gmt":"2020-11-13T03:04:35","slug":"harris-cheng-happy-hunting-ground","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.hkubs.hku.hk\/tc\/alumni-overview\/startup-star\/harris-cheng-happy-hunting-ground\/","title":{"rendered":"Happy hunting ground"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Happy hunting ground\n<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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Freehunter and its CEO Harris Cheng are on a mission to help freelancers navigate the pain of finding clients.<\/p>

Freelancing can be a labouring process where creatives, lacking the weight and protection of a company, often get a raw deal from clients. Anyone who has tried being a freelancer will know finding and keeping work is the key to sustaining a living, and that can be very hard. Harris Cheng (BEcon&Fin 2017), Co-Founder & CEO at Freehunter, has experienced all these pains, having been a freelance photographer before his life as startup head.<\/p>

We are sitting in iDeodron, HKU\u2019s ultra-sleek co-working space, where Freehunter has been based for two and a half years. \u201cIt\u2019s like my second home right here, and I\u2019m in on weekends as well. I breathe and eat this startup, but I squeeze every minute out of it, work hard and play hard,\u201d Harris says. The Freehunter team, a collection of seven young tech-savvy enthusiasts (six from Hong Kong, one from Vietnam), have the purpose of helping freelancers sustain their businesses. From economics to photography and head of a tech company \u2013 how did Harris\u2019 adventure pan out in such a fascinating way?<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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The hunt starts at HKU<\/h3>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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As with many entrepreneurs, the path to starting-up begins in the halls of a university. Living in St John\u2019s College, Harris was elected to its executive committee, where he became known as the guy who had a million jobs to do. \u201cI learnt everything about design, arts, photography and I was even the DJ,\u201d he laughs. Realising he had a passion for many of these things, Harris developed his photography career and started earning corporate jobs, but discovered challenging issues. \u201cI would have assignments where the pay rate was very low, because 80 to 90 percent of fees would go to the middle men. There is a huge inequality and it simply is not fair on the freelancer,\u201d says Harris.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tHarris is grateful to Mr. Baniel Cheung, Adjunct Assistant Professor who has played a crucial role during his<\/span>\nstartup journey by guiding and supporting him.<\/span>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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Supporting the underdog<\/h3>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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The best ideas come from solving a problem, and passion for egalitarianism as well. Harris set about addressing this by creating Freehunter, helping freelancers and small business owners attain career opportunities. The first part of the business, launched two years ago, is about matching clients and freelancers. \u201cSupply and demand in the market is very imbalanced, there are relatively few jobs to the available talent in the market, so we help people who are passionate and serious about their freelance career to source high quality jobs,\u201d says Harris.<\/p>

Freehunter runs on a subscription model in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore \u2013 rather than taking a cut of the fees from the programmers, photographers, videographers, interior designers, writers and other creatives on its platform. Jobs are posted, and clients can directly approach freelancers. Has it been hard? \u201cEntrepreneurship is a chain of challenges, you are always falling down and getting up. Expanding our market to Taiwan was difficult, and we found that we couldn\u2019t simply replicate the Hong Kong model because the communities have differences from cost of living to copyright policies,\u201d says Harris.<\/p>

Creatives and companies on Freehunter are vetted, eliminating many problems faced by freelancers, including non-payment and \u2018scope creep\u2019, where suddenly the brief gets substantially bigger while the fee remains the same. While Freehunter received some angel funding, along with support from Cyberport and other awards, the business is growing on a shoestring. The survival skills Harris learnt as a freelancer are relevant as he leads his startup. \u201cWe need to be very conscious about budgeting, expenses and cash flow, I give up my blood, sweat and tears for this,\u201d he says. The company, which currently has thousands of people in its community, also intends to develop a networking side of the business going forward.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Ambitions to go worldwide<\/h3>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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The Freehunter team combined humility with a determination to do something big. \u201cI want to see us in countries all over the world, and we are a virtual business partner for every freelancer and business owner so they can find projects, collaborators and mentors. I would like to have millions of users in five years,\u201d Harris says.<\/p>

While Covid-19 has delayed events globally, Freehunter is thriving with subscribers increasing rapidly. \u201cPeople need to work remotely so lots of people with full time jobs have started freelancing, and those who have been laid off can discover a new career path, and even the meaning of life… Although I still have friends who still spend all days on Netflix!\u201d<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Harris and his tech-savvy team are ambitious to achieve a greater impact.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Freehunter is continuing its determination to be results oriented, wise with the budget, and problem solvers. Their over-arching philosophy is \u2018dare to challenge\u2019. \u201cThis means bringing good ideas, having the courage to challenge the boss, and finding problems and solutions. If we don\u2019t have this mentality we can\u2019t improve, think out of the box, or understand our users\u2019 perspectives,\u201d Harris says.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Happy hunting ground Freehunter and its CEO Harris Cheng are on a mission to help freelancers navigate the pain of finding clients. Freelancing can be a labouring process where creatives, lacking the weight and protection of a company, often get a raw deal from clients. Anyone who has tried being a freelancer will know finding […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"parent":60795,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"no","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-60852","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hkubs.hku.hk\/tc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/60852","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hkubs.hku.hk\/tc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hkubs.hku.hk\/tc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hkubs.hku.hk\/tc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hkubs.hku.hk\/tc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60852"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.hkubs.hku.hk\/tc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/60852\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60856,"href":"https:\/\/www.hkubs.hku.hk\/tc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/60852\/revisions\/60856"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hkubs.hku.hk\/tc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/60795"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hkubs.hku.hk\/tc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}