Neil Lock did not set out to design a nicer freelance site. He says he could not stop seeing what the existing ones got wrong. Lock, who has ADHD and autism, calls that way of seeing his superpower. Zinn Hub, the marketplace he co-founded with his wife, Natalie Lock, is what he built once he had pulled the model apart.
“Being neurodivergent is my superpower. I see life in code, not the way most people see it,” he says. He is clear about the limit. He does not think ADHD or autism makes someone better at technology. He does think it makes some systems impossible to leave alone. “I’ve always been obsessed with understanding how things work. If something doesn’t make sense to me, I need to pull it apart and understand what’s happening underneath.”
Freelance marketplaces did not make sense to him. He had spent more than 25 years on both sides of the work, as a buyer, a seller and an agency owner hiring specialists. What he saw was a set of rules treated as normal. Sellers gave up a large cut. Buyers paid a fee on top of the price. New sellers were buried under established ones. “Global” usually meant the site took international cards, not that two people without a shared language could find each other, agree the work and deliver it.
Lock says that is where his mind differs. Other people could use the platforms and work around the friction. He saw the friction as the system. The fee, the language barrier and the buried newcomer were not separate annoyances. They were one design, and the design did not feel fair. He had been a freelancer himself. So had Natalie. Zinn Hub was the rebuild.
Buyers pay no platform fee, so the price on the listing is the price paid. Sellers keep 100% of their first $500, then commission falls to as low as 7% on the Agency tier. Proposals are free. Listings, messages, reviews and live calls run in 46 languages. A buyer in one language and a freelancer in another do not need a shared one to do the job. In 2026 Zinn Hub was named UK Freelance Marketplace of the Year by 365 Awards, and Best Multilingual Freelance Marketplace in the United Kingdom by Best of Best Review.
The company behind it is Zinn Digital, Lock’s London business. He also founded pbn.ltd, an AI hosting platform for SEOs. Between them, the businesses host more than 700,000 websites. Zinn Hub is the piece that came from looking at a market, rather than a server, and refusing the version everyone else had accepted.
He still wants to be close to it. “I like to be at the front of my own businesses, not hiding in the shadows while other people do the work. I would rather be the one who explains how something works, and helps people understand it.” The same traits cut the other way. Deep focus makes interruptions expensive, and he has had to learn not to answer before he has thought. Entrepreneurship let him build the day around the part that works.
For developer Neil Lock, Zinn Hub is not a story about being better at business because he is neurodivergent. It is a story about not being able to ignore a system that did not add up, and building the one he could explain.