Tell HN: Now is the perfect time to roll out a new freelance platform
The Elance is going to be shut down soon and merged into oDesk aka Upwork. And Upwork is an absolute disaster.
The messaging system doesn't work. The stats don't work. The search barely works. The ranking system is a joke. The invoices they send to clients are illegal in Europe.[https://community.upwork.com/t5/Clients/Name-on-a-received-invoice/m-p/92225#U92225]
And for the last few days, the job application system -- arguably, the most important thing on the whole website -- stopped working.
If you want to appreciate the full extend of the disaster, just visit their forum and see what their freelancers and clients have to say about it: https://community.upwork.com
They are already loosing people and the only reason anyone's still using them is the lack of a better alternative.
This is the perfect chance for a new platform.
41 comments
[ 460 ms ] story [ 887 ms ] threadBased on your previous post, it doesn't sound like you get these kinds of clients on elance often. That makes perfect sense to me; elance and odesk have a reputation of being race to the bottom sites, so why would somebody go there looking for quality devs?
Thinking about this some more, it's possible the site I wished existed isn't in the same field as odesk and elance. Those tend to be for shorter, cheaper projects. What I'm looking for is a marketplace for higher end freelance devs, so it's easier for work to find me and so somebody else handles all the escrow details.
There are definitely some sites out there that help higher end developers and clients to find each other. I see gun.io mentioned a lot. Someone posted about trygigster.com here too. The problem I have with those sites is that they focus too much on the top 5% of developers and huge company clients. There are plenty of competent freelancers that aren't rockstar developers and many good clients that aren't Fortune 500 businesses. It seems there isn't a marketplace for those mid-range freelancers and clients. I'd love a site like that!
Thus, for one recent project, I could have chosen from a dozen C++ programmers, all highly rated, charging around $10/hour, but I went straight for the guy charging $60/hour. He did the job perfectly in 7 hours. My hunch, based on past experience, is the alternative would have been days and days of sorting through disappointing results from 3 or 4 different $10/hour jokers before finally giving up.
I would be very interested in a platform that somehow performed real quality control and only accepted people charging a minimum of $50/hour, so that I was virtually guaranteed to only deal with competent professionals who would reliably deliver.
For my purposes, I like the elance/Freelancer model, where I can post a job and quickly hire someone to do 2 hours or 20 hours of specific work. I've just been very disappointed with the quality of work I've gotten every single time I've used these services (with one exception, noted above).
Gun helps you find somebody that fits your requirements, which I think is a step up from elance and the like. They even kick freelancers out of the system if they scam customers or produce poor quality work.
I'm not surprised you're disappointed with the quality of work from elance and similar. Anyone and their dog can offer services through that platform, and the reality is that the people doing the hiring often don't know what they actually want and they don't know how to evaluate the quality of what they're given (on a technical level), so it's pretty easy for a bad developer to get a 5 star rating.
we're not perfect by any means, but i'm happy to see there's love for what we're about!
But I do agree with you, a newer platform that already exists probably has a better chance. All they need is some marketing directed at frustrated upwork users.
VWorker.com (which was formerly rentacoder.com) has been bought up by Freelancer.com, which co-existed for some time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VWorker
I always imagine the interaction with supply (quality freelance developer) and demand (company needing work done) to be like this:
Company: "I need great freelancers!" Dev: "I'm a great freelancer! My rate is $100/hr [or whatever]!"
[Company interviews Dev, sees prev results, feels happy w/Dev]
Company: "Great! We'll pay you that for the first few days on this platform, then engage you for long term projects off the platform. That way, we don't have to pay Matching Site the finder's fee."
Some modest pay to list fee for a project, then extra tools unlocked for more $.
Even large placement agencies usually only try to get a cut of your salary for 6 months usually, then you 'go direct'. ("contract to hire" standards I've generally seen in my experience).
It bills my work to my clients weekly, and automatically withdraws the money from their credit card. This means if a client is unhappy with a freelancer it's easy for them to start a dialogue and start it early; and at the same time the freelancer has protection with less-than-honest clients and can lose, at most, a week's worth of work.
Compare this to normal freelancer contracts where the cash is typically paid monthly, with a delay of 14+ days after receipt of invoice. If a client acts in bad faith in that case, the freelancer loses a lot more, and to get money back, would have to go through international courts, which often costs more than the money they lost.
I think that vetting both sides would be one way, albeit a bit difficult to really do once you're trying to scale.
I've used elance extensively and I'm very, VERY disappointed with how the "transition" to upwork has gone. It is bordering on unusable and has added a lot of difficulty to what should be a straightforward transaction. What a disaster.
So yes, I would agree that there needs to be another competitor that is straightforward to use and definitely an opportunity here. I feel like Metcalfe's Law / network effects of the existing sites might be difficult to overcome, but its worth a shot!
Everyone involved in the design and programming should be placed on some kind of industry Do-Not-Hire list.
> the only reason anyone's still using them is the lack of a better alternative
That, however, is not true. Freelancer.com has been around forever and is much better. (By which I mean it's functional — a vast improvement over Upwork.)
1. Require specs. If needed make this be marketplace listed work too, to write a spec.
2. Require flat-priced projects. Site moderators will handle scope-creep disputes.
3. Track each project's overall cost and analyze how much each developer actually costs for projects.
I think this would help eliminate the problem that low cost hourly devs sometimes make up for their pricing in quantity.
Jobs have been becoming old and boring. As an HR in her 50s old men and old husband is so boring and they are absolute disaster on the bed. They can't even moan properly while making out, and their erection system is a joke.
The last few times I made out to men in 50s --arguably, those strong men -- their sticks stopped penetrating.
I don't intend to appreciate the full extent of disaster. This is a perfect chance for new comers to come up and start hooking me.
I can give them the blow job or mouth job, whatever they want.
Send across your CV - coo@wannabefortune500.com
They are part of the Summer Class of 2015 for Y-Combinator and are really promising. You basically sign up to be a Gigster and then get paired with gigs that pay. Within a week you could be up and running with real projects that actually pay.
Gigster handles all the PM and HR related functions of a business and quickly gets jobs to you so you can start right away.
We noticed the same broken things here. I don't want to give Elance/UpWork too hard a time - they can be good for some things (like Data Entry, etc) but clearly their model has some issues when it comes to development projects.
Where our model is different is that all of our projects have a dedicated Product Manager who overseas the build for fixed-price projects. The developers and clients deal directly with the project's PM (not with each other). That saves time for the client. It adds a layer but this counter-intuitively improves communication. I speak broken Spanish. So if I run into a Spanish speaker who speaks broken English then we can communicate. That's fine if we're doing something simple but if the nuance of different words matters then we'll do much better if we have a professional translator who's a native speaker in both languages in between us.
I actually interviewed the former CEO of oDesk for my blog a few years ago (long before Gigster existed) so I've been following this space and thinking about where it's heading for a while. That's why I agree with the OP about the opportunity for a new platform to rise in this space and the fundamental issue that a race to the bottom will impact the quality of the build.
@jalopy & @mithaldu - I think what you're alluding to is the simplicity of not having to deal with all the pain of being a freelancer (client management, paperwork, etc). That's our appeal to developers: we give them specs and they can just focus on building, not marketing themselves, client management, etc.
@logn - Eerily similar to how we operate.
It is in their best interest to keep deal-flow high, which means that they try not to reject submitted projects and try to push the low prices onto the developer.
If a developer from India knows his chops and can run circles around JS-developers in Silicon Valley, he will also know that he can charge $100 per hour, over-deliver and still be cheaper than a bootcamp-JS guy.
Yet Toptal will negotiate a rate of $25 (or thereabouts), based on some average-pricing they use and justifying that "this is what most devs charge in your area, so $100 per hour will be too high, simply cause you're in India".
Also, this is a new account asking this question... It got me wondering whether this is some backhanded marketing-PR for gigster.
While these technical problems with Upwork’s platform certainly do seem very problematic, I’m not sure that “now is the time to roll out a new freelance platform” is the right conclusion, at least not without some revision.
- For starters, there are plenty of open freelance marketplaces out there that operate pretty much exactly in the same way as Upwork (Freelancer.com, for example). Some are more specialized (like 99designs), but in general the list is pretty endless. Adding another identical platform to the mix is unlikely to accomplish much.
- The real issue is that the operating model for freelance platforms has been broken. This has been the case for a long time, and is unrelated to Upwork’s technical issues.
The open marketplace model falls short in several ways, many of which relate to the “race to the bottom” phenomenon that other responses here mention:
For companies:
a. There’s no quality assurance and profiles/test scores can be fabricated.
b. You have to deal with a large volume of bids, and sifting through them defeats one of the top reasons people hire freelancers: to move fast.
c. There’s very little in the way of protection on any engagement. The risk of your project getting botched by someone incompetent or your freelancer disappearing is significant.
For freelancers:
a. Talented professionals have to deal with absurdly low bids from unqualified people. Many freelancers are forced to lower their rate to below what they’re worth just to get any work.
b. The large volume of bids for most projects means that it can be much tougher to stand out. The most talented freelancers are often the worst self-promoters.
c. There’s no protection from clients with unrealistic expectations.
Long-term, these are the problems that successful freelance models will need to be able to solve at scale. Is this doable? I certainly think so - it’s what we’ve been working on at Toptal. Here’s what we believe the solution looks like, and therefore how we’ve built Toptal to behave:
- All engagements need to solve these problems both for freelancers and for clients. Clients are looking for great freelancers and freelancers are looking for great clients. Therefore the solution is to thoroughly vet both freelancers AND clients.
- Vetting must be rigorous and done in a non-automated, non-riggable, extremely thorough way. Freelancers must be able to set their own rates and not have to worry about low-bid contests. Only clients with serious projects who are ready to pay freelancers what they’re worth need apply. No race to the bottom.
- There must be a high level of support during ALL engagements, even at scale. Clients should only meet freelancers who were handpicked for their project, and vice versa. This also solves the problem of high bid volumes.
- Support should continue throughout the engagement to resolve conflicts and ensure success.
This is exactly how Toptal has operated for several years now for freelance software developers, and it has worked quite well--even though we made some mistakes along the way. While this has been primarily in the software development space thus far, the principles apply to other types of freelance work as well.
Bottom line: Upwork’s technical issues are certainly problematic, but there are larger issues that freelance platform models will need to solve in the long run.
I wasn't necessarily advocating for another upwork copycat. All I was trying to say by this post is that if there's a new or existing platform that works (unlike Upwork) and is superior in some way (i.e. it solves the problems you pointed out), now is the time to ride the wave.
I was aware of TopTal, but according to your website your platform only solves those problems for 'the top 3%'. Even if we assume that two thirds of the freelancers on Upwork are completely incompetent, then there's still 30% of perfectly competent and capable people who also need work.