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Moonlight helps companies increase momentum by hiring expert software engineers as part-time consultants. We just finished YC’s Startup School (where we were in

Moonlight helps companies increase momentum by hiring expert software engineers as part-time consultants. We just finished YC’s Startup School (where we were in the first office hours video [1]). While we’ve had many contractors join our marketplace, our main focus has been getting more clients to hire through Moonlight. What differentiates us from other sites is that we have quality contractors who are not normally in the contractor market. 62% of our 1000+ contractors have day jobs at technology companies. at companies like Facebook and Google. We've realized through user testing that clients like to see who is available and how much time they have to work each week, before they submit a problem to the contractor community. So, today we’re releasing that as a product! Orbit is a weekly email of top software contractors ready immediate work. We have 1000+ contractors with backgrounds like “Frontend team at Facebook” and “Former Android Team at Google.” When you sign up for Orbit, we’ll send you the latest issue - and inside you can read about some of the projects where Moonlighters have made an impact. If you’re interested in contracting through Moonlight - you can sign up here: https://www.moonlightwork.com/apply https://www.moonlightwork.com/apply [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abtHadERzXU&t=27m https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abtHadERzXU&t=27m

ben_jones 9y ago
Cool stuff, I had a really similar idea. I was going to call it bat signal but your branding is probably better for legal reasons.
justboxing 9y ago
> If you’re interested in contracting through Moonlight.. Thinking about it. Couldn't find any info on your site (from a contractor / freelancer perspective), so asking here. 1) How does it work once someone submits that typeform? what is your criteria for approval? 2) Who decided the hourly rate for the contractor? You or the Contractor? 3) The Orbit landing page says "Richa S 165$ / hour", "Jacob L" 150$ / hour. Are these real people or placeholders? Cos I couldn't click them to view their profile. 4) How much of the "165$ / hour" does Richa S get once approved by a client for work, assuming you (moonlightwork) take a cut. Is that negotiable between you and the contractor? Is it a 1 time fee or on-going based on the hourly rate? 5) Is the work done as 1099 Contractors? or W2? 6) Anything else you can add here, that will help potential prospects decide if this is worth applying for.
- kondro 9y ago
  Don't know about anything else, but saw their cut is 15%. Not sure which side it gets added on though, although it doesn't really matter in the long run.
  - philip1209 9y ago
    Contractors set their rate and get paid that. The client pays a 15% processing fee on top, and from that 15% comes things like credit card processing fees, payout fees, 1099 fees, etc.
- philip1209 9y ago
  Good feedback - we can incorporate these answers into our marketing materials. 1) How does it work once someone submits that typeform? what is your criteria for approval? We do some basic screening that the person says who they are. However, we accept a variety of backgrounds - you can see that, on this week's Orbit, hourly rates ranged from $20 to $150/hour. We keep Moonlight more of a pure marketplace. Multiple contractors can submit proposals on a project, and the client chooses who to work with. Proposals are structured and short - what's your rate, how many hours do you think it will take you, and why are you a good fit for the job. We've found that clients care more about relevant experience than pure cost. Average hourly rate has been over $100/hour thus far. 2) Who decided the hourly rate for the contractor? You or the Contractor? The contractor sets their own rate. Moonlight adds a 15% fee on top, paid by the client. As I described in our proposal system above, it really is a pure marketplace - the customer determines whether the cost is aligned with value. 3) The Orbit landing page says "Richa S 165$ / hour", "Jacob L" 150$ / hour. Are these real people or placeholders? Cos I couldn't click them to view their profile. We recently built out a lot of landing pages (see our sitemap.xml). We also value privacy of our contractors, so contractors only get added to the marketing website when they opt into being featured. So, I wrote a system that fills in contractors on landing pages by finding real contractors with the matched skills, then backfilling with pseudo-identities. However, I just realized that the Orbit page had a misconfiguration that caused only pseudoidentities to be filled in - so I'm pushing a fix now that should fix this and make 100% of the contractors on the Orbit page real. Regarding "I couldn't click them to view their profile"- in the spirit of YC's "build things that don't scale", we've been running Moonlight off of spreadsheets and emails as we navigate product/market fit. This process has started to become painful recently, though - so we're working on an app, which should be online this month. 4) How much of the "165$ / hour" does Richa S get once approved by a client for work, assuming you (moonlightwork) take a cut. Is that negotiable between you and the contractor? Is it a 1 time fee or on-going based on the hourly rate? The client pays a 15% processing fee in addition to the contractor's hourly rate. The contractor gets paid their full stated hourly rate via direct deposit. 5) Is the work done as 1099 Contractors? or W2? 1099 for USA-based contractors. We use Payable to provide the 1099. 6) Anything else you can add here, that will help potential prospects decide if this is worth applying for. We're trying to make it as low friction as possible. If you're a contractor - you can just sign up and see what kind of matches you get. If you're a company, you can now sign up for Orbit and see what kind of talent is available and at what cost.
pjungwir 9y ago
I watched your video and I am tempted to sign up (as a freelancer). I guess Toptal is a competitor, as someone who claims to offer elite talent. I like how unlike them you don't seem to require lots of CS algorithm quizzing and a big unpaid sample project (as far as I can tell anyway---you might want to be more up front there). Also I would be on the high end of your $70-200/hr range, and I've heard a lot of stories of Toptal members being pressured to charge low rates. If you can give me work that pays better than my own current rate, without a big time investment up front, then I'd be very interested. I must say Toptal sure has great PR! They have really positioned themselves as the place to go if you want to hire elite people. But I'm skeptical given the effort to apply and the rumors about lower-than-promised rates, so maybe you can beat them in terms of client satisfaction and customer retention. I noticed your site has a weird double scroll thing (Firefox on Ubuntu), and the freelancer signup form has triple scroll bars. Seems like a detail worth fixing. In the video you seemed to really resist their advice to start out handling things manually (like invoices). I guess that was two months ago, but you might want to listen to them a little more. :-) Anyway I'm pretty booked for the summer but I still might sign up just to get on your list and see if you can boost my rate. Good luck! :-)
- philip1209 9y ago
  We have some Toptal contractors on the platform. In general, I think that Toptal focuses more on outsourced projects, including management, whereas Moonlight is working more to supplement internal teams. Based on my understanding, Toptal takes a fairly high cut, but this is because they handle so much overhead like project management. Rather than pure web development, our early projects have included data processing, applying machine learning, and lots of dev-ops work. I think that variety of projects keeps things interesting, and in fact 39% of contractors say that they use Moonlight to work on technology different than their day jobs. As I mentioned in a previous comment, we operate as more of a pure marketplace. If the hourly rate misaligns with a contractor's abilities, that basically means that they will not get as many projects. Can you email me details on your version of Firefox? We're using http://Bulma.io http://Bulma.io for css - does the same thing happen on their website? (I'm philip at moonlightwork.com) Regarding doing things manually - we've embraced it entirely. Moonlight operates off of spreadsheets and emails at this point. Our login page doesn't work, and signup is powered by Typeform + Zapier. We use Paid Labs for invoices, and Payable for paying contractors. Because of non-scalable approach, piloting Orbit and launching it took one day (and got us new projects on the first test among existing clients). We've identified the part of an application that are most important to build, and are hoping to start rolling out pieces this month.

ben_jones 9y ago

Cool stuff, I had a really similar idea. I was going to call it bat signal but your branding is probably better for legal reasons.

justboxing 9y ago

> If you’re interested in contracting through Moonlight.. Thinking about it. Couldn't find any info on your site (from a contractor / freelancer perspective), so asking here. 1) How does it work once someone submits that typeform? what is your criteria for approval? 2) Who decided the hourly rate for the contractor? You or the Contractor? 3) The Orbit landing page says "Richa S 165$ / hour", "Jacob L" 150$ / hour. Are these real people or placeholders? Cos I couldn't click them to view their profile. 4) How much of the "165$ / hour" does Richa S get once approved by a client for work, assuming you (moonlightwork) take a cut. Is that negotiable between you and the contractor? Is it a 1 time fee or on-going based on the hourly rate? 5) Is the work done as 1099 Contractors? or W2? 6) Anything else you can add here, that will help potential prospects decide if this is worth applying for.

kondro 9y ago
Don't know about anything else, but saw their cut is 15%. Not sure which side it gets added on though, although it doesn't really matter in the long run.
- philip1209 9y ago
  Contractors set their rate and get paid that. The client pays a 15% processing fee on top, and from that 15% comes things like credit card processing fees, payout fees, 1099 fees, etc.
philip1209 9y ago
Good feedback - we can incorporate these answers into our marketing materials. 1) How does it work once someone submits that typeform? what is your criteria for approval? We do some basic screening that the person says who they are. However, we accept a variety of backgrounds - you can see that, on this week's Orbit, hourly rates ranged from $20 to $150/hour. We keep Moonlight more of a pure marketplace. Multiple contractors can submit proposals on a project, and the client chooses who to work with. Proposals are structured and short - what's your rate, how many hours do you think it will take you, and why are you a good fit for the job. We've found that clients care more about relevant experience than pure cost. Average hourly rate has been over $100/hour thus far. 2) Who decided the hourly rate for the contractor? You or the Contractor? The contractor sets their own rate. Moonlight adds a 15% fee on top, paid by the client. As I described in our proposal system above, it really is a pure marketplace - the customer determines whether the cost is aligned with value. 3) The Orbit landing page says "Richa S 165$ / hour", "Jacob L" 150$ / hour. Are these real people or placeholders? Cos I couldn't click them to view their profile. We recently built out a lot of landing pages (see our sitemap.xml). We also value privacy of our contractors, so contractors only get added to the marketing website when they opt into being featured. So, I wrote a system that fills in contractors on landing pages by finding real contractors with the matched skills, then backfilling with pseudo-identities. However, I just realized that the Orbit page had a misconfiguration that caused only pseudoidentities to be filled in - so I'm pushing a fix now that should fix this and make 100% of the contractors on the Orbit page real. Regarding "I couldn't click them to view their profile"- in the spirit of YC's "build things that don't scale", we've been running Moonlight off of spreadsheets and emails as we navigate product/market fit. This process has started to become painful recently, though - so we're working on an app, which should be online this month. 4) How much of the "165$ / hour" does Richa S get once approved by a client for work, assuming you (moonlightwork) take a cut. Is that negotiable between you and the contractor? Is it a 1 time fee or on-going based on the hourly rate? The client pays a 15% processing fee in addition to the contractor's hourly rate. The contractor gets paid their full stated hourly rate via direct deposit. 5) Is the work done as 1099 Contractors? or W2? 1099 for USA-based contractors. We use Payable to provide the 1099. 6) Anything else you can add here, that will help potential prospects decide if this is worth applying for. We're trying to make it as low friction as possible. If you're a contractor - you can just sign up and see what kind of matches you get. If you're a company, you can now sign up for Orbit and see what kind of talent is available and at what cost.

pjungwir 9y ago

I watched your video and I am tempted to sign up (as a freelancer). I guess Toptal is a competitor, as someone who claims to offer elite talent. I like how unlike them you don't seem to require lots of CS algorithm quizzing and a big unpaid sample project (as far as I can tell anyway---you might want to be more up front there). Also I would be on the high end of your $70-200/hr range, and I've heard a lot of stories of Toptal members being pressured to charge low rates. If you can give me work that pays better than my own current rate, without a big time investment up front, then I'd be very interested. I must say Toptal sure has great PR! They have really positioned themselves as the place to go if you want to hire elite people. But I'm skeptical given the effort to apply and the rumors about lower-than-promised rates, so maybe you can beat them in terms of client satisfaction and customer retention. I noticed your site has a weird double scroll thing (Firefox on Ubuntu), and the freelancer signup form has triple scroll bars. Seems like a detail worth fixing. In the video you seemed to really resist their advice to start out handling things manually (like invoices). I guess that was two months ago, but you might want to listen to them a little more. :-) Anyway I'm pretty booked for the summer but I still might sign up just to get on your list and see if you can boost my rate. Good luck! :-)

philip1209 9y ago
We have some Toptal contractors on the platform. In general, I think that Toptal focuses more on outsourced projects, including management, whereas Moonlight is working more to supplement internal teams. Based on my understanding, Toptal takes a fairly high cut, but this is because they handle so much overhead like project management. Rather than pure web development, our early projects have included data processing, applying machine learning, and lots of dev-ops work. I think that variety of projects keeps things interesting, and in fact 39% of contractors say that they use Moonlight to work on technology different than their day jobs. As I mentioned in a previous comment, we operate as more of a pure marketplace. If the hourly rate misaligns with a contractor's abilities, that basically means that they will not get as many projects. Can you email me details on your version of Firefox? We're using http://Bulma.io http://Bulma.io for css - does the same thing happen on their website? (I'm philip at moonlightwork.com) Regarding doing things manually - we've embraced it entirely. Moonlight operates off of spreadsheets and emails at this point. Our login page doesn't work, and signup is powered by Typeform + Zapier. We use Paid Labs for invoices, and Payable for paying contractors. Because of non-scalable approach, piloting Orbit and launching it took one day (and got us new projects on the first test among existing clients). We've identified the part of an application that are most important to build, and are hoping to start rolling out pieces this month.