I Lost My Community. So I Built a New One

Hey PH! I’m Antoni, 29. I grew up in a family business, my mother and I ran it together for 27 years (yes, I technically started working as a baby). It was more than a business though, it was a tight-knit community of people who genuinely looked out for each other. COVID shut it down. Like so many small businesses, it just couldn’t survive the economic fallout. Losing it meant losing that sense of community I’d known my whole life and that hit harder than anything.

That feeling is what pushed me to build BuildNix a Discord-native platform that works as both a freelancer marketplace, where clients can find and hire skilled talent, and a product marketplace, where creators can list and sell their digital work.

We’ve since grown it into a full website because we’re not just building a platform, we’re building a future with everyone on it. Our model is simple: freelancers pay a 20% fee, and buyers pay nothing. No hidden costs, no feeling ripped off. We want clients to keep coming back and freelancers to keep getting opportunities.