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Ask HN: New project, pick.im, A Freelancer Marketplace

42 points by andrewhyde ↗ HN
Hello HN. Would love to hear your thoughts.

Yesterday we launched a very light version of pick.im. It is a marketplace for freelancers. For clients it is a way to search for freelancers in their area, at their pricepoint. For freelancers it is portfolio management, lead generation and (eventually) contracting and payment services.

We are focusing the search to be local (Designers in Portland) and not on specific cost (a 'competitive' search yields the ~65% of the market) This is much different than many other sites that really focus on bidding to the lowest cost in the world. We are not that.

Our broad statement is: professional tools for freelancers. Our shorter motto is: celebrate freelance.

We are working to build a site that allows search on: Type of Freelance Availability Cost Recommendations / Connections (linkedin connection)

In the next few weeks we are adding a simple contracting and payment option, essentially adding a 'buy it now' button to a freelance portfolio.

If you freelance and want to sign up put 'HN' in the invite code: http://pick.im/request/invite

23 comments

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bradleyjoyce
Andrew, look forward to seeing this project grow! I think it will be super useful!
andrewhyde
Thanks, really hope it helps freelancers find quality clients.
bradleyjoyce
also, already it's pretty clear you're going to have lots of people clamoring for new/more features... +1 for saying No.. a lot... somehow I don't think you'll have a problem with this :-)
JonAtkinson
Hi Andrew. I've just registered, looks like a great service.

A few initial impressions: I'd like to be able to express my pricing in both an hourly rate and full project value. Also, support for multiple currencies would be nice, there will be plenty of users who want to bill in EUR or GBP.

andrewhyde
Added to the roadmap, will let you know when we push it live.

The pricing for day rate is more on an estimate the freelancer can use as an example and build their custom hourly rate from there.

Project rate gets around the 'low hourly rate but lots of hours' problem.

danohuiginn
relatedly, the profile page asks me to fill out: Budget range [ ] to [ ]

There's no explanation of what you want there, and I'm uncertain what to enter (dollar amounts of the min/max project I'd consider working on? I'm not sure I could provide useful values here). Some help text or suggested answers would be useful.

danohuiginn
Also, in "Where else can people go to find out about you?" I'd rather have space for a second website (in my case, I'd put in a link to the coworking space I use) than for pre-selected social networks.

[the whole idea of social network as resume enhancement unnerves me, also; I'm comfortable with the idea of potential clients looking me up on FB &c, but I don't want to shove my profile directly in their face. But that's just me being squeamish about these things]

It would also be good to make it clear through the profile-filling process that there is a separate section for a portfolio. I was trying to work out where to fit in mention of things I've worked on.

bradleyjoyce
those aren't required fields, if you don't like them you don't have to fill them out
JonAtkinson
Could this even be a free text field? Some may prefer to put hourly, per project, or even equity stakes in their terms. Yes, it makes your data a little more difficult to filter, but the flexibility would be nice.
duck
Looks like a good idea. I like sites that base your location via IP, but when there is no results I think it is better to show at least the closest result so there is some context. I.e. do I need to put the next town over or do I need to put in the closest big city.
andrewhyde
Working on this. We launched with zero freelancers yesterday (could have added the initial launch list, but decided to just quickly launch).

After we have a feel for the number of freelancers in areas, we can increase the radius of the search.

steverb
Looks great. It'd be nice if I were able to put in more than one website address for where folks could find out more about me.

I use stack overflow's cv publishing, but have my own site. Don't want the headache of keeping two CVs up to date.

davidcann
I like it, but I'd suggest an option for searching "anywhere" or at least by country. I freelance full time, but rarely work with companies near my physical location.
evandavid
Absolutely. I live in New Zealand, and would be happy to hire anyone in my country (it's not a huge place). But because "We're assuming you're in Christchurch, Canterbury.", which is about 5 hours drive from here (and a 3 hour ferry trip), and because I can't change it to just "New Zealand", the entire service is pretty much not usable.

Other than that I really like the simplicity. I don't like services like elance that make me perform the whole transaction through their website. I would prefer a simple classified-like solution like this appears to be.

jenn
I agree. I do like that it defaults to local people and supporting local freelancers is fantastic, but when a local search doesn't return what I need it would be nicer to expand to "anywhere." I don't particularly prefer local over remote for my work or for those I'm working with. And hey - more eyeballs = more money! So says @garyvee at least! ;)
Zak
The price range doesn't take in to account rates. For some developers, a two week project is $2000. For others, that's one billable day.
pxlpshr
So, the difficulty here is not being able to give enough feedback where it counts: the talent/portfolio section because Austin shows "empty". So to echo feedback already left, perhaps change it to operate like:

I need a [Designer] based in [Anywhere] and my budget is [Bootstrapped].

This would make it immediately more useful until you have critical mass on a per city basis -- and even then, isn't the trend being able to work essentially from anywhere? It's definitely nice to be able to zone talent by city, but in the end I don't really care if a landing-page rockstar is based in NYC if they fit the style and price I'm looking for.

Good idea though, keep at it. Look forward to this getting populated.

davidcann
Two more issues I noticed:

* The keywords I enter on my profile keep getting re-ordered automatically by your software. It wants to put javascript first, but that's not my primary language, so I don't want it appearing first below my name. I've opted to delete it from the list instead.

* I'd suggest that the "time to complete" and "cost for similar" fields in the Add Project form to be optional. I prefer to not have this kind of information posted publicly, so I had to enter dummy values.