4,000 Creatives Joined Thrilla Before Launch. Here Is What They Told Us.

Before Thrilla processed a single booking or collected a single subscription fee, more than 4,000 creative professionals signed up and told us exactly what they needed.

We read every submission. Every feedback field. Every free-text response typed into a form by a model, a DJ, a production crew member, or an actor at 9pm on a Tuesday.

This is what the UAE creative industry told us.

Four thousand registrations before a public launch is not a vanity metric. It is a signal. It tells you that a large group of people were actively searching for something that did not exist yet, and when they found even the idea of it, they signed up immediately.

Of those 4,127 registrations, 97.9% opted in to receive updates. That is not a typical waitlist opt-in rate. The near-universal opt-in tells you this audience is not passively curious. They are waiting.

The single biggest theme across all open feedback was not visibility, not networking, not career development. It was jobs, bookings and gigs, appearing in over 1,000 individual submissions.

The word that came second was payment.

Not the concept of payment. The anxiety around it. Freelancers describing shoots they completed and invoices that went unanswered. Creatives who wanted to know the money was confirmed before they turned up. That anxiety is well-founded: according to independent research into the freelance creative sector, the majority of creative freelancers have experienced delayed payment of six months or more, more than once in their career.

Thrilla was built around this problem specifically, with plans added The client pays before the job begins. The talent gets paid when it is done. No invoice. No follow-up. No waiting.

The Categories Nobody Built For

One of the clearest operational insights from the waitlist was what people could not find. When asked to select their talent type, 699 people selected Other and then described themselves in their own words.

Inside that field: 120 DJs. 127 dancers. 67 singers. 13 voice-over artists. 20 makeup and hair artists.

These are not niche categories. DJ alone represents a significant segment of the UAE events and hospitality economy, a market the Dubai Department of Economy and Tourism projects will continue growing at double-digit rates through 2030. These creatives signed up despite not finding their category. That is a strong signal about intent. It also tells you how many more did not bother.

Thrilla is adding these as first-class categories before public launch.

The Multi-Hyphenate Reality

Fifty-seven percent of talent on the Thrilla waitlist selected more than one role. Some selected six.

Actor. Model. Content creator. Event host. Stylist. Videographer. This is not confusion about the form. This is how creative careers actually work in 2026, particularly in a market like the UAE where one person often covers multiple disciplines across a single production.

The industry has spent years trying to put creatives into single-category boxes. The data from 4,000 people says that approach does not reflect reality.

Thrilla profiles support every role a creative holds, and match them to briefs across all of them simultaneously.

What This Means for the Industry

The UAE creative economy is a market the data firm DataCube Research projects will reach $9.58 billion by 2033. The people building that economy have been operating without infrastructure. No standardised booking process. No payment protection. No single place where a verified client can find the right talent for a brief and confirm everything in one flow.

Four thousand people joined a waitlist for a product that did not exist yet because they recognised the gap.

Thrilla is the infrastructure the GCC creative industry has been waiting for.

Early Access Opens This Week. If you are a creative professional in the UAE or GCC, Early Access is live at thrilla.io. The waitlist spoke. The platform is ready.

Claim your Early Access today!