AVBL is a beautifully-crafted platform that simplifies manifesting in the creative world. It’s geared to make each individual's journey one that can be traveled, from thinking up ideas to seeing them realized. Without the confusing extra noise that leaves you feeling like only a number, it may be the perfect time to rejoice, for both production and freelance sides alike. Brooklyn resident and AVBL Founder Ryan Hooks is one to take the current social media and start-up era by the horns through building something worth talking about and using.
AVBL is invite-only presently, another smart feature that ensures that the quality of and for the users is rightfully kept intact. The crisp minimalist designs of AVBL are a pleasing palette for the eyes and complete the theme of "simplifying" – so really, all that’s left for the creative to do is to see and be seen—and in return birth newness with each other.
AVBL started about two years ago when I had already been freelancing for about 7 years and I was looking—You know, the whole industry was always looking for some sort of organized system that would make our lives a little easier for freelancers and for the producers side as well. So over the past few years I’ve collaborated with a couple different people and finally the idea of human availability or AVBL emerged as an easy way to search for people’s skills by date—and organize people’s free time and work time. We just went live recently and it is a platform where you can upload your profile and your skills, and then you can find people and people can find you. It’s a find and be found concept to help you be able to manifest your talents.
The process was and is interesting. I had general mock-ups about a year and half ago of influence from many different sources. The idea was to take the best of all the elements from each platform that already existed on the internet, and then put them together in one cohesive platform. The process of finding a programmer was actually pretty interesting because I used all these search platforms and freelancing platforms to try to find people, and it was like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Ultimately, I met AVBL’s programmer, Olex Ponomarenko, at a coffee shop in my neighborhood. I oversaw him programming this really wonderful site and I knew he was the one to build AVBL. So essentially, I handed over the idea to Olex and Haik Avanian who helped design most of the site, and they took it and ran with it. Ever since we’ve been beta, I’ve been filling AVBL with different artists, illustrators, designers and musicians, and building the community. Now that we’ve launched, it’s exciting to see all of the different types of skills coming in from around the world. We hope to propel the creative society forward and not be tethered by the necessities of old ways of thinking.
We all have jobs that we do to pay our rent but ultimately, at the end of the day we as humans want to show off our souls essentially, and we want to leave creative things behind—even if it’s a couple babies [laughs]. It’s interesting to see what’s important to each person. For me, I want to eat some good food with friends, I want to go hear some amazing musicians, I want to go drink some good beer, and be amongst vivacious characters. What I started to realize with all these new technologies automating most of our jobs, is that we need to constantly rethink what 'jobs' are—recently even journalism is starting to be done with artificial intelligence so what that leaves us with is a lot of free time to play and collaborate, to invent new things and think of new ideas. We should be building communities where we are singing and dancing and joking together and not get lost in the internet. AVBL is an online platform to manifest our ideas offline because ultimately, face to face is the best place.
