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Upwork Freelancer Earned $1.6M Creating Pitch Decks

42 points by redbell 4y ago

fm2606 4y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20220518195902/https://www.businessinsider.com/upwork-freelancer-earned-million-pitch-decks-startups-2022-5 https://web.archive.org/web/20220518195902/https://www.busin...
marban 4y ago
Decent income but I bet there are even more profitable solo shops on Fiverr who sell garbage cliparts and shady SEO stuff instead of work hours.
- adhesive_wombat 4y ago
  > shady SEO Is there another kind?
  - Sebb767 4y ago
    There are people who try and people who simply make money selling snake oil.
    - xwdv 4y ago
      SEO is such a moving target you have to sell some snake oil to survive long in the business.
      - aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
        Is this really true? Are there no honest people to work with out there?
        dbg31415 4y ago
        There are, but... like most of the technical SEO stuff where you can be honest is done now. Use unique titles, don't have multiple H1s, etc. A lot of that stuff was actually useful 5-10 years back when most sites were really shit at the technical side of SEO. Any more... it's all the soft, subjective stuff. And companies gotta bill hours. So most "SEO" folks are really just content folks, not technical in any way shape or form. And they know without that job they're back to flipping burgers, so they're gonna sell you a lot of shit you don't really need. Often lie about you needing shit to justify their existence.
        martin_a 4y ago
        I second this. All of their work, besides technical SEO, can be useless and even actively damage your rankings after a minor Google update on a rainy Thursday afternoon. There's no hard proof any of the stuff they sell you really works, because _nobody_, contrary to what SEO consultants might tell you, knows how those rankings really work. It's just a guessing game. Do good technical SEO (including performance + accessibility) and don't do what SEO agencies tell you. That should get you decent rankings over time.
        adhesive_wombat 4y ago
        > actively damage your rankings after a minor Google update on a rainy Thursday afternoon If I were Google, I'd be making these changes all the time specifically to trash the profitability of SEO which damages the usefulness of results. By randomising out the effectiveness of any SEO method, the central limit would just be the actual content. Assuming they are actually aiming for useful results, and not, say, profitable results (like, say, blogspam and mirror websites that have more ads than the originals).
        xwdv 4y ago
        They are aiming for profitable results.
        azinman2 4y ago
  - michaelbuckbee 4y ago
    I do a lot of "SEO" work that is basically telling people to not write clear titles for their blog posts like: "3 wild things I learned yesterday" and instead write titles like "How to fix X problem with Y thing". Similarly a huge amount of "SEO" work now is just telling clients they need to write more articles, use more words per article, write a better quality article, etc.
    - adhesive_wombat 4y ago
      > use more words per article Well that explains why I have to read about the colour of someone's grandmother's kitchen walls before they'll tell me a recipe. I guess all those kids who padded their essays at school up to a certain page count are doing well in such low signal-to-noise-optimised environments.
      - cinntaile 4y ago
        Wasting time, energy and money to please our algorithm overlords.
      - michaelbuckbee 4y ago
        This (like most SEO things) is very execution dependent if it's good or bad. For every chicken pot pie recipe that starts with a 4 page anecdote about their college days there's other folks making mistakes in the opposite direction. A friend had a client that didn't want to "waste time" on writing product descriptions for the items they were selling on their Shopify store. For the type of B2B+SaaS type articles I interact with it mostly comes down to me encouraging them to "dig deeper" into the actual topic and answer more questions around the core topic (edge cases, how using different OSs change things, latency impact), etc.
tyingq 4y ago
Earned $1.6M total since 2017, up until today. Still impressive, of course.
- fny 4y ago
  $200-$300k per year in your own time is a great gig.
moltar 4y ago
Reads like an ad for Upwork tbh.
- voakbasda 4y ago
  What? You mean this isn’t representative of what the average worker could hope to earn? Say it ain’t so!
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
qq66 4y ago
Used right, this can be entirely worth it. We invested in a company at valuation of $X, spent about 6 weeks and $10,000 on Upwork improving the deck, video, animations, branding, etc., which helped them raise another round of capital at $2X valuation within 3 months.
llimos 4y ago
There's something really refreshing about reading about a good old-fashioned business that makes money by making things people want and getting paid for it.

42 points by redbell 4y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20220518195902/https://www.businessinsider.com/upwork-freelancer-earned-million-pitch-decks-startups-2022-5 https://web.archive.org/web/20220518195902/https://www.busin...

marban 4y ago

Decent income but I bet there are even more profitable solo shops on Fiverr who sell garbage cliparts and shady SEO stuff instead of work hours.

adhesive_wombat 4y ago
> shady SEO Is there another kind?
- Sebb767 4y ago
  There are people who try and people who simply make money selling snake oil.
  - xwdv 4y ago
    SEO is such a moving target you have to sell some snake oil to survive long in the business.
    - aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
      Is this really true? Are there no honest people to work with out there?
      - dbg31415 4y ago
        There are, but... like most of the technical SEO stuff where you can be honest is done now. Use unique titles, don't have multiple H1s, etc. A lot of that stuff was actually useful 5-10 years back when most sites were really shit at the technical side of SEO. Any more... it's all the soft, subjective stuff. And companies gotta bill hours. So most "SEO" folks are really just content folks, not technical in any way shape or form. And they know without that job they're back to flipping burgers, so they're gonna sell you a lot of shit you don't really need. Often lie about you needing shit to justify their existence.
        martin_a 4y ago
        I second this. All of their work, besides technical SEO, can be useless and even actively damage your rankings after a minor Google update on a rainy Thursday afternoon. There's no hard proof any of the stuff they sell you really works, because _nobody_, contrary to what SEO consultants might tell you, knows how those rankings really work. It's just a guessing game. Do good technical SEO (including performance + accessibility) and don't do what SEO agencies tell you. That should get you decent rankings over time.
        adhesive_wombat 4y ago
        > actively damage your rankings after a minor Google update on a rainy Thursday afternoon If I were Google, I'd be making these changes all the time specifically to trash the profitability of SEO which damages the usefulness of results. By randomising out the effectiveness of any SEO method, the central limit would just be the actual content. Assuming they are actually aiming for useful results, and not, say, profitable results (like, say, blogspam and mirror websites that have more ads than the originals).
        xwdv 4y ago
        They are aiming for profitable results.
        azinman2 4y ago
- michaelbuckbee 4y ago
  I do a lot of "SEO" work that is basically telling people to not write clear titles for their blog posts like: "3 wild things I learned yesterday" and instead write titles like "How to fix X problem with Y thing". Similarly a huge amount of "SEO" work now is just telling clients they need to write more articles, use more words per article, write a better quality article, etc.
  - adhesive_wombat 4y ago
    > use more words per article Well that explains why I have to read about the colour of someone's grandmother's kitchen walls before they'll tell me a recipe. I guess all those kids who padded their essays at school up to a certain page count are doing well in such low signal-to-noise-optimised environments.
    - cinntaile 4y ago
      Wasting time, energy and money to please our algorithm overlords.
    - michaelbuckbee 4y ago
      This (like most SEO things) is very execution dependent if it's good or bad. For every chicken pot pie recipe that starts with a 4 page anecdote about their college days there's other folks making mistakes in the opposite direction. A friend had a client that didn't want to "waste time" on writing product descriptions for the items they were selling on their Shopify store. For the type of B2B+SaaS type articles I interact with it mostly comes down to me encouraging them to "dig deeper" into the actual topic and answer more questions around the core topic (edge cases, how using different OSs change things, latency impact), etc.

tyingq 4y ago

Earned $1.6M total since 2017, up until today. Still impressive, of course.

fny 4y ago
$200-$300k per year in your own time is a great gig.

moltar 4y ago

Reads like an ad for Upwork tbh.

voakbasda 4y ago
What? You mean this isn’t representative of what the average worker could hope to earn? Say it ain’t so!

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

qq66 4y ago

Used right, this can be entirely worth it. We invested in a company at valuation of $X, spent about 6 weeks and $10,000 on Upwork improving the deck, video, animations, branding, etc., which helped them raise another round of capital at $2X valuation within 3 months.

llimos 4y ago

There's something really refreshing about reading about a good old-fashioned business that makes money by making things people want and getting paid for it.