Hedwig
Your freelance assistant
The problem Hedwig solves
Hedwig helps freelancers and small businesses in Africa simplify their workflow by offering invoices, payment links, and proposals directly inside Telegram. Instead of juggling multiple platforms for creating invoices, tracking payments, and receiving funds, Hedwig centralizes everything in one AI-powered agent. Freelancers can instantly generate professional invoices, share payment links with clients, and even draft proposals—all while securely receiving crypto or fiat payments with automatic conversion.
This makes existing tasks faster, safer, and easier, allowing freelancers to focus more on their work and less on payment hassles.
Challenges I ran into
We experimented with different wallet infrastructures, but each came with its own challenges. Blockradar was too expensive for our use case and limited free users to one chain, while Privy gave us issues with sending tokens reliably. Eventually, we settled on CDP Server Wallets because they allowed us to map wallets to user IDs securely and integrate spend permissions. Another hurdle was that Hedwig was originally built on WhatsApp, but Meta disabled the account, forcing us to migrate to Telegram. Hosting also proved tricky—Vercel couldn’t handle our webhook requirements, so we moved to Railway for stability. Finally, we had to choose between natural language handling and structured function calls; we chose functions because they were more reliable and reduced the risk of hallucinations.
Link to the GitHub Repo of your project
Live URL of your project
What is your product’s unique value proposition?
Unlike existing platforms that separate tools for proposals, invoicing, and payments, Hedwig unifies them all in one Telegram-based assistant.
Our alpha demonstrates how AI and smart contracts can automate and secure the entire freelance workflow — from proposal and contract generation to payment link creation, invoicing, and escrow-backed payouts. This reduces fraud, builds client trust, and saves freelancers time by handling everything in one seamless experience.
Who is your target customer?
Our target customers are freelancers and independent professionals in Africa who work remotely and face challenges managing proposals, contracts, and payments securely.
These users often juggle multiple platforms to create invoices, receive payments, and track client activity — a process that’s time-consuming and prone to errors or fraud. Through user interviews and early testing with our first 100 users, we confirmed that freelancers need a single, trusted assistant to handle payments, contracts, and client management directly from a familiar platform like Telegram.
Hedwig simplifies their workflow, boosts trust, and saves valuable time — all within one automated experience.
Who are your closest competitors and how are you different?
Our closest competitors include:
- Acctual – acctual.com
- Nedapay – nedapay.xyz
- Invoyce – invoyce.pro
- Upwork – upwork.com
- Fiverr – fiverr.com
Most of these platforms focus on either traditional freelancing (Upwork, Fiverr) or basic crypto invoicing (Acctual, Nedapay, Invoyce).
Hedwig stands out by combining AI-driven workflow automation, multi-currency invoicing, and autonomous financial management — all within Telegram.
Unlike Upwork or Fiverr, Hedwig doesn’t take commissions or control client relationships, giving freelancers full ownership of their earnings and interactions.
Unlike Invoyce, Nedapay, or Acctual, Hedwig integrates payment links, invoice generation, and proposal creation directly with an intelligent agent that helps users manage contracts, payments, and client communication seamlessly.
By merging AI automation, blockchain transparency, and simple accessibility, Hedwig delivers an all-in-one assistant for freelancers in Africa to run their business securely and efficiently.
What is your distribution strategy and why?
Hedwig’s distribution strategy focuses on community-driven growth, partnerships, and in-app virality — a model built around where African freelancers already work and communicate.
We’re launching primarily through Telegram, which already serves as a daily workspace for freelancers, digital marketers, and small business owners across Africa. By embedding Hedwig directly into Telegram as an AI freelance assistant, we reduce onboarding friction and reach users instantly through familiar channels.
Our strategy includes:
Community partnerships with African freelance hubs, startup accelerators, and creator collectives to onboard teams directly.
Referral-based incentives, where users earn points or rewards for inviting other freelancers to use Hedwig — fueling organic growth.
Freelancer platform integrations, allowing users to share invoices, payment links, and proposals across other networks seamlessly.
Local influencer and ambassador programs to reach niche creative and gig-economy communities in Nigeria and Ghana.
This approach works because it leverages trust, familiarity, and network effects within existing freelance ecosystems rather than relying on paid acquisition. By building a product that lives where freelancers already are and grows through peer recommendations, Hedwig achieves cost-effective and sustainable distribution.
Technologies used
Cheer Project
Cheering for a project means supporting a project you like with as little as 0.0025 ETH. Right now, you can Cheer using ETH on Arbitrum, Optimism and Base.