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I have been freelancing pretty aggressively off of Craigslist for the past three months. Through my experiences using CL for finding work, I decided to develop
by zaidf 16y ago
I have been freelancing pretty aggressively off of Craigslist for the past three months. Through my experiences using CL for finding work, I decided to develop TekBob. These are the things I hope to fix via TekBob that I find broken with CL:
1. Craigslist is local. But most contract work can be non-local. 100% of the projects I have completed in the past 3 months have been non-local. TekBob does not emphasize city/state level location so much.
2. The most serious clients just want to get on the phone and iron out a deal. Almost all my projects involved a phone call to seal the deal. So I decided to cut the BS and just let clients connect to the developer. My thesis is that there are enough freelancers looking for work and won't mind someone calling them with work.
3. Craigslist is a hit or miss in terms of finding new work,(in my experience). I hope to provide a steady stream of leads, even if that means I charge a small fee per lead in the future. My thesis is that if TekBob can consistently send you $5,000 of work a month via 20 leads, you don't mind paying TekBob $100 for the month.(for example)
And now...
Where Craigslist kicks our ass(for now): they have people with projects and we don't. I have a plan on how to address this! I'll start working on it once we have 25 freelancers listed.
- zackattack 16y agohow do you plan to innovate over craiglist in cater to people who have projects to post?
- zaidf 16y agoUnsure at the moment for clients who'd like to explicitly post their projects. I'm hoping the clients will do a search for "php" if they need a php developer and call up a few devs. We'll see how that goes.
- zackattack 16y agofor example, tonight i want to hire someone to write a simple php/mysql webapp (with a super basic login system) that interfaces with twilio (but maybe the twilio could be .rb or .py). you don't make it super easy for me to find a person who'd be interested in that project. (email's in profile).
- zaidf 16y agoyou should just use vworker(formerly rentacoder). I don't think we can beat them for your particular use case :)
- rajamanickam_a 16y agoBut you need to be careful when choosing vworker. Refer http://bit.ly/vworkersurvey http://bit.ly/vworkersurvey
- DocuMaker 16y agovWorker is one the safest resources in the business. If you were asked to refund an escrowed payment, it was because you committed fraud. I read your web page, and it looks like you put your buyer's source code on the internet. That's against the rules. And I'm sorry, but copying and pasting old complaints doesn't support your actions or your case.
- vgurgov 16y agoGreat idea and nice execution, congrats! My 2c: I'd suggest you to focus at one niche and make it really great! Just as facebook started in one University and then expanded over others.. For instance now you have 4 Rails developers in your list. Why not make it place to go if you need Rails developers? Or Python? This way you can laser-focus all your marketing efforts. Good luck with that!