Mela - The agent that hires creative freelancers

Hey Product Hunt, Rushabh here, co-founder of Mela. First launch here.

Hiring a creative freelancer still works the way it did fifteen years ago: post a job, get flooded with applications, and settle for whoever looked best in a thirty-second scan. The best editors and designers rarely apply at all.

Mela is an AI agent that does the hiring the way a great producer would. You describe what you need in plain words. It understands the brief, vets creatives whose style and level actually match, and negotiates pricing and proposals for you.

It's early, but the numbers are moving. The agent has vetted over 1,000 freelancers so far. We didn't trust its judgment at first, so we kept scoring it against human evaluators on the same portfolios until the gap closed; it now lands within their range.

Hiring a freelancer from scratch takes an agency HR 2 to 3 days. On Mela, it takes five to ten minutes, and some of India's biggest agencies have already onboarded with us. The platform has run 150+ searches so far

The belief behind all of it: as AI makes passable content infinite, taste and judgment become the scarce resources. The vetting and the scoring above are our attempt at building an agent that can recognize both.

Honest feedback means more to us than upvotes today. Ask us anything, we're here all day.

the portfolio-judging instead of resume-screening approach is genuinely sharp, that's the part most tools skip and it's exactly where projects usually go sideways.

Hey Product Hunt, Amith here, the other half of Mela.

Rushabh covered what it does, so here's how we did it.

Before we wrote any code, we matched freelancers to briefs by hand. Portfolio by portfolio. And the pattern was brutal in its consistency: the people who got picked weren't the ones with the longest skill lists. They were the ones who'd done that exact kind of project before, in that industry. Nobody ever asked "what else can they do."

So that's what we built the agent to see. Not keywords. Taste, relevant work.

The hardest part wasn't the AI. It was trusting it. For a while we scored every one of its evaluations against human reviewers on the same portfolios, and honestly, early on the gap made me uncomfortable. It closed. That's when we let it run.

The other thing I'll admit: our first version made freelancers come to a dashboard. Almost nobody did. So we moved the whole thing to WhatsApp, where they already live, and usage told us instantly we should have started there.

We're a two-person team building this from India. Ask me anything, especially the uncomfortable questions.

One thing I'd love to see is a built-in mood board or visual reference uploader so Mela can better understand the aesthetic I'm going for beyond just text. Right now I'm describing colors and vibes in words, but being able to drop in pinterest pins or screenshots would probably get the shortlisted freelancers a lot closer to my vision on the first round and cut down on revision rounds.

Told it I needed a lo-fi indie vibe for a coffee brand and it actually vetted portfolios based on style instead of just keyword matching. Way better than scrolling through 200 generic proposals on Upwork.

Would love to see a way to invite collaborators into the conversation so my team can weigh in on the shortlist before Mela finalizes a hire. A shared thread where everyone can react to portfolios or tweak the brief together would keep it feeling like a real creative process instead of a solo loop.