I'm Xposting this from his blog... don't think it will make it past moderation:
Looks intriguing but be very careful with your credibility; a freelancing site that’s considered untrustworthy is a failed freelancing site. I say this because I saw your post about “Launched yesterday” then on your site I see the testimonial “Freelancify helped us find a great designer to get our blog launched. -GrowNasheville” Wait- the site launched yesterday and someone has already taken a transaction from idea to proposal to bidding to work to review to launch & payment? huh? That doesn’t exactly add up… maybe there was a private beta launch with a few dozen vendors and a couple clients…?
Who is this “GrowNasheville”, anyway? GrowNasheville.com/blog/about : “GrowNashville was created and organized by James Fend [the founder of freelancify.com]…” ahh… I see.
You will have testimonials soon enough, I’m sure; having them now is not worth risking your credibility. [EDIT: At the risk of stating the obvious: you can't write your own testimonials.]
Hey sequoia,
Yes, that does need to come down. That image was actually a leftover from the original 1-page splash landing site that runs running since June until yesterday. Never thought twice to take it out as my eyes literally skip over it when scanning that page.
Also, I dunno if it helps to say you've just launched yesterday. I rather try to pretend that I'm old and established by putting (C) 2008-2012 or something in the footer.
I don't think I get it; I've never launched a site, so maybe that's why. I'm going to be critical and skeptical about this particular post, but that doesn't mean that I don't think it's laudable, stressful, and exciting to launch a product by yourself (and I'm glad you are getting front page press here)
Why would James launch at 5:30 AM after getting no sleep? This sounds like a good way to make mistakes, make it hard to keep up with issues that come up, and generally make the day seem hectic when it maybe didn't need to be (and in fact wasn't). Was there a mission critical launch deadline? Were there key users to be gained at 5:30 AM? Instead, he took a three hour nap during business hours, with emails and bugs accruing that needed "immediate attention".
In fact, it doesn't sound like a very hectic day to me at all. A three hour nap in the middle of the day? An hour long victory lunch? Those sounds like the wonderful rewards of having a flexible (read: no) schedule. James worked hard leading up to the launch day, for sure. But on launch day, he spent one to two hours writing two emails, and one hour fixing a certificate bug. 3 hours. The rest was spent refreshing logs and being excited. Fun! Not hectic.
Aptly, "THE DAY'S RESULTS" is a large, prominent chart with... one data point.
Please, lose the page-blocking pop-up. It's one of the worst web practices and I wouldn't even bothered reading the article if it weren't so praised in the comments. It's always easier to close a page than close the pop-up.
The ability to tell the person who posted the project that their project will be a piece of crap if they try to get something done for that much and why.
Its really great that so many people signed up listing actual US rates.
On the other hand, almost all of the projects are $500 or less, most of them $300 or less. Which are outsourcing budgets, and pretty much incompatible with the US rates for most projects.
I wonder what you could do to get U.S. organizations with actual project budgets to use these types of sites. I have always wished there was something like a US-only freelancer's site. Maybe this person could create a section where only US freelancers could bid, or a section that had a minimum rate at $40 or something.
I really like odesk because I am used to being poor and I always know I can find a spec to prototype and get a job without having to leave my house or network or anything, but I can't afford healthcare or my own apartment.
I had a few "real" gigs with a good US rate but I spent too much time working on my startup and ran out of money, sort of panicked and picked up a job at an outsourcing rate, and now I feel like I should to move to Bangalore in order to maintain my standard of living.
I think one of the big take-aways for me was do more substantial testing before pulling all the tricks out of your hat to get traffic. Imagine if his email list had been 10,000 people, how many would have been turned off by that first impression?
Yes, true. The urge to get user validation was too much.. besides, I can always email the list again in a few weeks to let them know of fixes and enhancements. Like a 'we listened to you and here's what we did... ' email
Good job man, had a brief look around, looks swish. Hope to have a more in depth look a bit later on. One thing i did notice in your signup form for workers, i hit enter accidentally before filling out 1 field. This caused an error and i lost all the information i had previously entered. Barring password and perhaps username do you think that the form should reload the information if an error has occured? Something to consider perhaps when you have the time :P
Very inspiring. Thanks for sharing, and congratulations! You seem to have done everything right. Now continue putting the same type of effort and don't let it crumble.
Congrats - looks great and learning Ruby well enough in 8 weeks to build this is inspiring. Another reminder that there is no excuse to not learn myself. Good luck.
Although I can program already, I'm sure most people would agree that James's idea of putting a post on his learning experience of Ruby would be an interesting read.
Can you please put a note in your calendar to do a new post on January 25, 2013 "I Launched my Startup one year ago, this is how the hectic year went" :)
Great job on the launch, sounds like you got some good numbers coming into the site and it was good to get an inside look into response rates/conversion based on a moderate initial launch email list.
I've looked at a few freelance sites before, but turned away because all the "Requests for help" want an e-bay clone for $200.
It's at that point I think the entire site is rubbish (low quality offers for work etc), so I think you may want to ensure work offers are reasonable to set a standard.
Thanks for sharing your launch story! Would you be willing to share the stats on the 310 emails you collected over the past 7 months? I would be interested in seeing the open & bounce rates specifically.
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 . 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.
"Come Join the Exciting World of SPAMMING!" Not the founder's fault by any means, but it looks like this new site is not immune. That'd be a selling point: "invite to list"/vet the listings.
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.
Wow. 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.
Looking on the site I see:
"Build an E commerce website for multifunctional women\’s clothing line..."
The budget is given at $300-$500. Is this even close to realistic? We pay offshore developers $30/hr. I know their agency takes a chunk of that, but a credibly completed e-commerce site for a few hundred bucks?
Just wanted to point out that your traffic graph is typical for a relatively new blog. The reason your traffic dropped after the posts to reddit/hn is because those are anomalies. Your organic traffic from search is your real traffic rate. Building this up takes time, a lot of time. More than 1 year with constant blog posting.
Sad but true. I'm in the same boat and my traffic graph looks exactly the same as yours :)
As someone looking to learn to code from scratch and build a Web/smartphone app, I'm curious what your coding background was before your 8 week ruby cram session began?
great question. I was a web designer working with only html/css. I had no clue what an MVC was before I got told the best route is to learn Rails by Josh.
I'll definitely be making a blog post about the learning Rails aspect as it was requested alot today. If you want, I'd suggest to subscribe that way it'll email you when that post is created.
[+] [-] sequoia|14 years ago|reply
Looks intriguing but be very careful with your credibility; a freelancing site that’s considered untrustworthy is a failed freelancing site. I say this because I saw your post about “Launched yesterday” then on your site I see the testimonial “Freelancify helped us find a great designer to get our blog launched. -GrowNasheville” Wait- the site launched yesterday and someone has already taken a transaction from idea to proposal to bidding to work to review to launch & payment? huh? That doesn’t exactly add up… maybe there was a private beta launch with a few dozen vendors and a couple clients…?
Who is this “GrowNasheville”, anyway? GrowNasheville.com/blog/about : “GrowNashville was created and organized by James Fend [the founder of freelancify.com]…” ahh… I see.
You will have testimonials soon enough, I’m sure; having them now is not worth risking your credibility. [EDIT: At the risk of stating the obvious: you can't write your own testimonials.]
Good luck!
[+] [-] james-fend|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AznHisoka|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmilloy|14 years ago|reply
Why would James launch at 5:30 AM after getting no sleep? This sounds like a good way to make mistakes, make it hard to keep up with issues that come up, and generally make the day seem hectic when it maybe didn't need to be (and in fact wasn't). Was there a mission critical launch deadline? Were there key users to be gained at 5:30 AM? Instead, he took a three hour nap during business hours, with emails and bugs accruing that needed "immediate attention".
In fact, it doesn't sound like a very hectic day to me at all. A three hour nap in the middle of the day? An hour long victory lunch? Those sounds like the wonderful rewards of having a flexible (read: no) schedule. James worked hard leading up to the launch day, for sure. But on launch day, he spent one to two hours writing two emails, and one hour fixing a certificate bug. 3 hours. The rest was spent refreshing logs and being excited. Fun! Not hectic.
Aptly, "THE DAY'S RESULTS" is a large, prominent chart with... one data point.
What am I supposed to be interested in here?
[+] [-] makira|14 years ago|reply
It's very important to be alert and able to react in case something goes very wrong. Launching after being up 20 hours is taking risks for no reason.
[+] [-] rplnt|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] james-fend|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] driverdan|14 years ago|reply
What makes you different?
As a freelancer who charges a lot more than $10/h and isn't interested in $200 projects why should I join?
[+] [-] james-fend|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ilaksh|14 years ago|reply
On the other hand, almost all of the projects are $500 or less, most of them $300 or less. Which are outsourcing budgets, and pretty much incompatible with the US rates for most projects.
I wonder what you could do to get U.S. organizations with actual project budgets to use these types of sites. I have always wished there was something like a US-only freelancer's site. Maybe this person could create a section where only US freelancers could bid, or a section that had a minimum rate at $40 or something.
I really like odesk because I am used to being poor and I always know I can find a spec to prototype and get a job without having to leave my house or network or anything, but I can't afford healthcare or my own apartment.
I had a few "real" gigs with a good US rate but I spent too much time working on my startup and ran out of money, sort of panicked and picked up a job at an outsourcing rate, and now I feel like I should to move to Bangalore in order to maintain my standard of living.
[+] [-] user24|14 years ago|reply
If you've not launched anything before, be warned that your traffic is going to drop like a stone now. What are your plans to keep the traffic going?
[+] [-] james-fend|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hadriagh|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] james-fend|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] radagaisus|14 years ago|reply
Feedback:
- the search button isn't aligned properly
- why everyone have 5 stars? and why are the stars gray? they look sad.
- clicking on the category name should check its box
- why can't I click on the top categories on the main page?
[+] [-] james-fend|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cidermonk3y|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] james-fend|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rtrocc|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] james-fend|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jcc80|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshcrews|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smadam9|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] james-fend|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewcamel|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] james-fend|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dools|14 years ago|reply
Great job on the launch, sounds like you got some good numbers coming into the site and it was good to get an inside look into response rates/conversion based on a moderate initial launch email list.
[+] [-] plasma|14 years ago|reply
It's at that point I think the entire site is rubbish (low quality offers for work etc), so I think you may want to ensure work offers are reasonable to set a standard.
[+] [-] nsxwolf|14 years ago|reply
There's got to be a market for people who are willing to pay more simply to not have to deal with overseas developers.
[+] [-] jeffpalmer|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] james-fend|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] instakill|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] james-fend|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bdg|14 years ago|reply
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 . 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.
[+] [-] sequoia|14 years ago|reply
"Come Join the Exciting World of SPAMMING!" Not the founder's fault by any means, but it looks like this new site is not immune. That'd be a selling point: "invite to list"/vet the listings.
[+] [-] smadam9|14 years ago|reply
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"
[+] [-] james-fend|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nsxwolf|14 years ago|reply
The budget is given at $300-$500. Is this even close to realistic? We pay offshore developers $30/hr. I know their agency takes a chunk of that, but a credibly completed e-commerce site for a few hundred bucks?
[+] [-] wildbunny|14 years ago|reply
Sad but true. I'm in the same boat and my traffic graph looks exactly the same as yours :)
[+] [-] LeandroLovisolo|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grocerocity|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] james-fend|14 years ago|reply
I'll definitely be making a blog post about the learning Rails aspect as it was requested alot today. If you want, I'd suggest to subscribe that way it'll email you when that post is created.