- The settings link is a 404 if you haven't completed your profile yet.
- There isn't a link to complete the registration flow from the rest of the app. If you click Settings prematurely and get that 404, your profile is hosed unless you know to find http://availability.is/users/calendars in your history.
- There's no obvious way to choose a profile photo.
- The calendar listing doesn't auto-update. I just went and made a calendar (thinking it was required) in GC, but I can't link it to your site.
- It isn't made clear during registration that the availability calendar is a feature, not a requirement.
Any good freelancer/contractor knows your availability is largely unimportant to the success of your own business. In other words, you don't normally lose money because you're unavailable, you lose it because you don't have work lined up.
Most customers don't look just for available candidates but for ones that also match the required skill set. Just looking for some available "backend developer" wont work.
I don't think so. If you need external support to fix a problem, it's because of their skills, not because of their availability. Most businesses can shift feature development for some weeks/months until an expert is available (if they can't find one) but an instant, crappy solution wont help them.
It's about skills + price. Not about availability. I don't know many freelancers with full-time exclusive projects that last more than 12 months.
Yup - I want to do this too..but I need a certain number of people in the same location to make it worthwhile. You can hack the urls to include the "location" parameter in the meantime though.
I agree - The weird thing is I have a google account that I use for work, but I'm not comfortable using it to sign up to other services. Where as I have no issues signing up for things with GitHub.
I don't think everyone appreciates infinite scrolling, perhaps showing more profiles per paginate would be better (or give the user a choice between the two, or how many per page).
No, they opened them up to everyone a few years ago, I believe. I had no problem getting one living in the US, although it does cost significantly more than a normal domain would.
Maybe a signup via email as an alternative to those of us that don't like to use our various google, twitter, facebook, github accounts for signing up?
The registration form is terrible: each time it doesn't like some input all the fields are reset and you have to start from scratch.
Then the website URL validation is broken: for instance, I can't use a domain with a hyphen for it, but I can in the e-mail field.
Also, the twitter field could be optional, and in any case tolerate getting the handle with the @ symbol prefixed.
Anyway, the really bad part is the first point because it promotes the others from annoyances into pain.
The site looks good, though. It might end up working very well with some refinements as others noted.
We tried to do something along these lines in Melbourne, Australia. It was called Dragonfly. A few points:
- We emailed people to update their availability. If they were available this week, we'd email. Otherwise they could set their busyness to between 1 week and 3 months.
- We tracked where people were working and used that to bill the companies that hired them. First we charged a flat subscription rate of $3600 per year but people didn't want to pay that. We then charged $100 per week per freelancer. They wanted to go back to paying the subscription again. Then we went broke.
- People won't keep their availabilities up to date. They won't like you asking them to keep their availabilities up to date either. They really won't like you asking them where they're working this week.
- People will ask you how you're curating the list. If you're not curating it, theirs no point in using it as I can get list of people to hire anywhere. I want a list of people that are good at what they do.
- Recruiters function because they hide the cost of hiring freelancers. You're a design agency, your charge out rate is $250/h. Hiring this gun front end developer through a recruiter costs me $100/h. I make $150/h, simple math.
The most important things to solve from POV is how you're going to curate the list and keep the bad coders off it. You want to start with A's and only have A's. As soon as B's creep onto the list then your reputation goes down. Also, because you want to keep showing growth, C's and D's begin to creep onto it. Also, your friend who you like but sucks at JavaScript will ring you up and ask to be placed on it.
>- People won't keep their availabilities up to date. They won't like you asking them to keep their availabilities up to date either. They really won't like you asking them where they're working this week.
StackOverflow Careers handles this rather nicely. If you mark yourself as available and are contacted, you get a notification email. If after N days you don't respond (through SO) to the contact, you are automatically marked as unavailable.
It's not perfect, but in most cases it should remove stale list entries after their first contact.
Sorry to hear it didn't work out for you. We are doing something very similar with http://onsite.io, and have encountered some of the same problems.
People won't update their availability for 2 reasons, they can't be bothered or they want to keep their options open. Good freelancers will often have a few offers on the table at the same time and can pick and choose between jobs.
One of the ways we have attempted to deal with the problem is by building in the option for available and qualified freelancers to state an interest in a position. Hiring companies are still returned a list of matched candidates, but can further refine it by showing only those interested in the job.
We are looking at also building in a simple 1 click update via email (I'm booked next week, I'm booked for 2 weeks, I'm booked this month) that will allow freelancers to update their availability without having to sign in. Unfortunately people don't like emails much either. So this will require careful testing.
Agree that curation is important. Nobody is going to pay for access to a list of people of dubious quality. They would rather have 4 good results than 200 bad ones. You will get accusations of elitism, but if you are serious about building a valuable product, quality control is paramount.
6. Seems not. Fuck you. I'd much rather create an account than give you my gmail address, have you use my fake name that I set on my google account, and have a single point of failure for authentication availability and security. That is assuming you only request read access.
Not the OP, but don't take it personally. When someone's building a side project, there are so many things to do, and making using of an existing authentication system is fairly reasonable in the interests of time and effort vs value.
Of course, you have a right to your privacy, but you don't need to be so rude.
I'm going to take it as a testament to the idea that you'd really like to sign up that you've left such strongly worded comment.
There had been the option to sign up with twitter too, but I dropped everything but Google because that gave everything I needed very simply (dates, avatar, email), in a single step.
Part of the problem I felt was consolidating different auth mechanisms into a single account - which I decided not to deal with by leaving out.
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[ 29.9 ms ] story [ 1086 ms ] thread- The settings link is a 404 if you haven't completed your profile yet.
- There isn't a link to complete the registration flow from the rest of the app. If you click Settings prematurely and get that 404, your profile is hosed unless you know to find http://availability.is/users/calendars in your history.
- There's no obvious way to choose a profile photo.
- The calendar listing doesn't auto-update. I just went and made a calendar (thinking it was required) in GC, but I can't link it to your site.
- It isn't made clear during registration that the availability calendar is a feature, not a requirement.
e.g. http://availability.is/for/sebinsua links to http://twitter.com/http://twitter.com/sebinsua
[1] http://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/icons/
A friend pointed out we'd then need a subsequent site for checking available.is's availability too
Downtime isn't uncommon either, it happens, but it's also one of the reasons your rate should be high enough to support your downtime.
Besides, even if it is, knowing when a particular freelancer is available still is useful - isn't it?
It's about skills + price. Not about availability. I don't know many freelancers with full-time exclusive projects that last more than 12 months.
The site looks good, though. It might end up working very well with some refinements as others noted.
- We emailed people to update their availability. If they were available this week, we'd email. Otherwise they could set their busyness to between 1 week and 3 months.
- We tracked where people were working and used that to bill the companies that hired them. First we charged a flat subscription rate of $3600 per year but people didn't want to pay that. We then charged $100 per week per freelancer. They wanted to go back to paying the subscription again. Then we went broke.
- People won't keep their availabilities up to date. They won't like you asking them to keep their availabilities up to date either. They really won't like you asking them where they're working this week.
- People will ask you how you're curating the list. If you're not curating it, theirs no point in using it as I can get list of people to hire anywhere. I want a list of people that are good at what they do.
- Recruiters function because they hide the cost of hiring freelancers. You're a design agency, your charge out rate is $250/h. Hiring this gun front end developer through a recruiter costs me $100/h. I make $150/h, simple math.
The most important things to solve from POV is how you're going to curate the list and keep the bad coders off it. You want to start with A's and only have A's. As soon as B's creep onto the list then your reputation goes down. Also, because you want to keep showing growth, C's and D's begin to creep onto it. Also, your friend who you like but sucks at JavaScript will ring you up and ask to be placed on it.
Good luck.
http://workingnotworking.com/
StackOverflow Careers handles this rather nicely. If you mark yourself as available and are contacted, you get a notification email. If after N days you don't respond (through SO) to the contact, you are automatically marked as unavailable.
It's not perfect, but in most cases it should remove stale list entries after their first contact.
People won't update their availability for 2 reasons, they can't be bothered or they want to keep their options open. Good freelancers will often have a few offers on the table at the same time and can pick and choose between jobs.
One of the ways we have attempted to deal with the problem is by building in the option for available and qualified freelancers to state an interest in a position. Hiring companies are still returned a list of matched candidates, but can further refine it by showing only those interested in the job.
We are looking at also building in a simple 1 click update via email (I'm booked next week, I'm booked for 2 weeks, I'm booked this month) that will allow freelancers to update their availability without having to sign in. Unfortunately people don't like emails much either. So this will require careful testing.
Agree that curation is important. Nobody is going to pay for access to a list of people of dubious quality. They would rather have 4 good results than 200 bad ones. You will get accusations of elitism, but if you are serious about building a valuable product, quality control is paramount.
Cheers.
2. Sign up...
3. As a freelancer...
4. Google account?!
5. Go back. Is there no other option?
6. Seems not. Fuck you. I'd much rather create an account than give you my gmail address, have you use my fake name that I set on my google account, and have a single point of failure for authentication availability and security. That is assuming you only request read access.
Not the OP, but don't take it personally. When someone's building a side project, there are so many things to do, and making using of an existing authentication system is fairly reasonable in the interests of time and effort vs value.
Of course, you have a right to your privacy, but you don't need to be so rude.
What the hell is the matter with you?
There had been the option to sign up with twitter too, but I dropped everything but Google because that gave everything I needed very simply (dates, avatar, email), in a single step.
Part of the problem I felt was consolidating different auth mechanisms into a single account - which I decided not to deal with by leaving out.