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Here's some feedback, take with it what you will. I like that you're starting yet another freelancer site, simply because I hate the other ones. They're full o
by bdg 15y ago
Here's some feedback, take with it what you will.
I like that you're starting yet another freelancer site, simply because I hate the other ones. They're full of often sub-quality contractors spamming the boards hoping to hit one and take some money. The other bids are from nations where the exchange rate makes my yearly salary make me look like a king. I take what I do seriously, I like serious clients, and I've find next to no success on these freelance sites (I may have found a few projects where I could make $100/h, but the volume of those jobs is small). I have no way to sell my skills on these sites. I'm not saying I have the answer, I'm simply explaining why I hate the other freelance sites.
Looking over your site, the first thing that jumps out at me is "City, State". I am from Canada, where we have provinces. Are you an international site? Your registration form could do with a bit of tweaking, I make mental jumps between "Persona", "Security" and "Location" a number of times. OAuth would have been nice.
The profile setup drop-downs are not obvious what they do until I interact like them, I feel like it is missing the down-arrow to the right. Nice-to-have if the category drop-downs didn't allow me to reproduce things, or I could leave one empty, add more, etc.
Next is who I've seen already-- Someone wants a full website for about $300, that's a critical issue with other sites. There's no real negotiation going on, the customer feels like they only need to spend $200, which, even for someone charging $25/hour means "do it an a day." Something like the sports site isn't scoped out as a massive endeavor, but it's bigger than the asking price. Yet out the other door, someone is asking for someone to scrape an XML feed for emails every hour for $500. Again, I'm not sure how to deal with these things, but these are reasons I'm not a fan of these sites.
The "More" position on the job posting makes me think that there is more text in the description simply because "more" at the end of a paragraph everywhere else on the internet means that. (more)
Your next challenge would be getting heavy traffic. I recently started blogging and my traffic looks like this: http://i.imgur.com/WuPOC.png http://i.imgur.com/WuPOC.png . Some articles I posted to reddit's programming, some I posted here, and I really learnt that I'm dealing with different audiences, reddit was more interested in my walk through of a project-euler solution, hacker-news was more interested in something on self-improvement. Most of my articles haven't hit the right-spot the first few had that brought me lots of traffic, this is three-fold. First, I'm not posting them in the right places, most people who are programming simply don't care about a number of hand-wavy concept things I talk about (but a good number of people do, just not the /r/programming or HN crowd). The second factor for my drop in traffic is I simply did not put the extra effort, that final 10% into my posts that I did with my first few. My big-traffic posts I had easily put through three or four drafts, let them sit for a week or two while I reflected on them, I just put more work into them, covered more corners. The last factor was my website usability, which was totally awful and I'm attempting to hack blogger templates to fix a number of things that many of my readers are pained by.
What I'd apply to you from what I learnt was that you need to find the right place to sell this, I'm thrilled to see you've launched but you need to put your product in front of people with a sales-pitch that brings them in. You need lots of people who want feelancers, and you need slightly less freelancers. If I knew the best places to target those people, I'd tell you. However, I'm sure if you did find the right place, 400~ hits would seem like an anthill.
- smadam9 15y agoTo add to bdg's response.... I've experienced 12designer's project posting and they have been separating by category and putting a minimum project price on projects within specific categories. The price can be raise, but can't be lowered. A minimum price could help standardized the playing field. To quote bdg: "take with it what you will"
- biot 15y agoOne thing comes to mind: if you eliminate lowball pricing, would that not get rid of the very reason most freelance sites exist? What I mean is if I'm willing to pay leading market rate for site design work, wouldn't it be likely that I can find a handful of leading designers that I could choose from? Ditto for programming and so on. Once freelance sites solve the problem of "I can't find anybody", most devolve into a race to the bottom where it's unlikely that you'll find quality even if you're willing to pay leading market rates.
- james-fend 15y agoThanks, mental note taken. I answered bdg's response above I think you may be able to relate to.
- james-fend 15y agoWow. Thank you for the insights.. I've added your suggestion to this ever-growing list of to-do.. eventually, the app should get polished up well with these quirks. The issue with quality of projects is quite a complicated problem. There were quite a few ways to tackle this problem, but in the end I decided to leave it open and follow the flow with a live app in the wild. Just off the top of my head, these came to mind: - Pre-qualify all projects - Pre-quality all freelancers before signing up - Create a must-use middle man on all projects started with a project manager assigned to it Even with the list of just those three, the cause and effect of implementing each pigeon holes the business model a lot. Although; doing any of those three or anything else is not out of the question either. At the end of the day; I guess what I am trying to say is I decided to leave the system completely open and eventually find Freelancify's "calling" and path and follow that to transform into a service that fills the hole (the exact problem you described) that neither Elance, oDesk, etc. fills right now. I think by listening to users, it'll eventually get there. And by Freelancify being a startup and not huge like the others, it has the luxury to pivot and move.