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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 unli

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.
- wayn3 9y ago
  toptal does not do any of this. they just take a high cut because they can. their margins are ridiculous

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.

wayn3 9y ago
toptal does not do any of this. they just take a high cut because they can. their margins are ridiculous