Request HN: A request to all Freelancers

[jagtesh]

Hey everyone, esp. all the freelancers on HN

I started Grep42 (http://www.grep42.com) 8 months ago with the vision of making a freelancer's life easy. I was a freelancer and I realized that we guys spend a lot of time looking for work on different platforms - which could be saved if a technology could bring those jobs to us instead of us going out looking for them. That's how Grep42 was born. I built the product and shared it with you and received a lot of suggestions and support for which I'm very thankful.

However, I've now run into a thought-block. The analytics haven't improved and I get a lot of 1 time visits. I've added most of the stuff you guys requested but somehow you're still not finding it very usable - and I'm dumbfounded. A request to all freelancers here, please try it out and tell me what can I do to help you. If you feel this is useless garbage, I'll throw it away. If you feel you would be willing to bet your dollar on this, I would appreciate that with the same amount of grace. So help me, help you. Your 2 cents are appreciated.

Some questions you could ask yourself:

- As a freelancer, what are the 5 most nagging problems? (technical or non-technical, more personal the better. "no fixed hours" qualifies as a valid problem)

- What are your favorite sites that you use to search for projects?

- Do you get direct referrals? Is there something I can do to make that better?

I look forward to your answers, thanks!

Jagtesh

jagtesh A.T gmail D.O.T com

[davidcann]

I like the concept of the site, but it looks like 100% of the iOS/iPhone/iPad projects are from elance and odesk, which I refuse to work through.

a. Most nagging problem: clients slow to make decisions.

b. Sites: many RSS feeds, but I rarely look at them (see c).

c. Direct referrals: Yes, this and repeat clients are the primary ways I get projects.

If you had an RSS feed that excluded elance and odesk, I'd add it to my feed reader.

It seems more difficult for clients to find quality freelancers than it is for quality freelancers to find clients, so perhaps you could look into solving problems for the clients. I agree that direct referrals are most important, so perhaps you could make a tool to crawl the social graph to find freelancers who are a friend-of-a-friend?

[cstrouse]

I've used elance, freelancer, and v-worker, and a few others without much success.

The Aussie companies have retarded policies for allowing you to get your funds out of their account (freelancer makes you wait 15 business days for instance for the first transaction). They also take their cut before you even start the work, often placing your account into the negative and then if the client bails they keep your money.

It's hard to get bids accepted when most people are choosing providers based solely on lowest price rather than aptitude. Also, like 90% of the people that I've worked with on these sites are high-maintenance and change the project's scope every five minutes. One guy even is trying to sue me even though I implemented what it is he wanted (pre-scope-creep).

And as for Craigslist being better; I don't think so! Every job that I've gotten through Craigslist except for one has been low pay, the client dragged their feet with everything and yet was super demanding and unrealistic in their expectations.

There's gotta be a better way to do freelance business but these sites don't appear to be it. Many of them are just places with sub-par services for freelancers that are designed to upsell you add-ons like testing and badges.

[dbaugh]

I am currently trying to find my first project post graduation to do. I am having a very hard time getting started in the freelance. So I would say getting the "first one" is a pretty large problem, at least for me.

[aw9994]

Similar situation here! I've tried oDesk and others without much luck.

[jagtesh]

There was a very interesting comment here, some mins ago about the quality of work on these sites. This dude was arguing that its cheap and mostly done by Indians. Hell yeah its cheap work - and oDesk I'm looking at you. They've created swarms of data-entry workers who occasionally try their hands at web/software development. One argument is that they're increasing competition and polluting the freelance-ecosystem. But another argument is that these clients who hire the "cheap workers" are small-timers couldn't afford "the real programmers". So their market is entirely different. They aren't really eating our market share - just that those kind of "cheap" jobs are overwhelmingly more it's becoming harder to find niche jobs. This answers my own question in a way - focusing on experienced coders who have a reputation for delivering and not fucking up. And doing what I can to make their lives easy.

Btw, I'm Indian. Bad code and not shipping on time has little to do with being Indian (or there wouldn't be so many Indians in the valley). Call them what they are - inexperienced and unprofessional programmers.

[kingofspain]

First result on my search turned up "We want to start with contractor as 2-5 $ per hour". If I'm going to have to filter out all the crap like this I probably won't come back. I did notice after you can set a minbudget but my first impression 'here we go again!'. Unless you expect to cater to the low, low end maybe a sensible default filter level would be a good idea? If you really want to get $2/hr then you can override.

Answers:

1. As with other people here, pickiness, constantly changing specs, ridiculous demands (the classic Facebook for $500 - which even innocuous postings can turn out to be)

2. I've stopped completely now as I no longer have time to weigh through 100 pages of crap for the one good job. I found most "joy" with vworker, but my last 2 hour job beat my 4 month earnings from there.

3. Some. Though I'm afraid I can't think of way you could improve this right now.

[beatpanda]

a) 1. Picky high-maintenance clients that change or add requirements midstream 2. Clients who don't pay on time 3. My own issues with estimating and managing time 4. Finding quality clients 5. Finding ethically appropriate projects – I've been roped into religion-oriented work unwittingly as a subcontractor far too often.

b) Craigslist is consistently the best, because Craigslist is just a thin technology layer over real people talking to each other. The barriers to entry and restrictions that come with oDesk and elance are more than I have time to deal with (I'm also a full time student).

c) I get direct referrals sometimes, but right now, my best bet is new clients.

Also, is there some kind of filtering mechanism on your site? That would be nice.

[aymeric]

http://www.virtualrockstars.com/ does something similar (not affiliated)