What happened in the early days of oDesk?

[davidw]

I didn't care much for Ries' "The Lean Startup", but one thing that did stick with me about it was the example of just doing stuff 'by hand' to see if there's a market for it, without worrying about creating some super-cool highly automated and perfect system from the get go, as would be our inclination as hackers. The oDesk story seems to indicate that they did something similar - putting people in touch very much 'by hand' initially. It'd be interesting to hear about the transition, but I think it's a good concept to keep in mind, as long as you are reasonably sure that, at some point, things can be automated pretty well.

[orky56]

I think it's important to understand the difference between hacking the problem versus hacking the solution. One will get you to product market fit while the other will get you to your minimum viable product. Reminds me of the old Zappos story where they would actually purchase the shoes from Foot Locker and shop those out.

[IsaacL]

I wanted to here more detail about how they want from a curated marketplace to the free-for-all it is today.

TopTal and Matchist have launched in the last few years, and are aiming to be curated jobs marketplaces (TopTal vets coders, Matchist vets clients). When I first saw them, I thought it was a great model, but this article suggests it's something oDesk tried back in the day and didn't work out. Anyone have any deeper insights?

[john_horton]

The short story is that hand-curation does not seem to work at a very large scale, so we need to create tools for automated discovery (e.g., search, recommendations, controlled skill vocabulary etc.) and automated but credible signals of ability and trustworthiness (e.g., feedback system, skills tests, verified identities etc.). In a nutshell, the challenge is trying to take the things Josh was doing by hand and turn them into data-driven features.

Note: I'm the staff economist at oDesk & I'm on the research/data science team.

[startupstella]

I'm also cofounder of matchist.com, and wanted to weigh in here. This is somewhat of a Jason Fried question...do you want to scale as quickly as possible? Should every business strive to be the biggest or greatest? Or is it more important to find a niche and just do that one thing really well. That's our philosophy building matchist...we don't plan to be the one stop shop for freelancers.

[timjahn]

Tim, co-founder of matchist here. Just to clarify, we vet both talent and clients.

[paulsutter]

Great essay.

This is why founders need to run their companies. CEOs with "Industry Experience" will just copy a pattern they saw somewhere else, and rarely succeed.

[jongs]

true. this is also why we need teams and investors truly focused on the long term. oDesk had both.

[aytekin]

Very inspirational story. Especially how they personally worked with the clients and freelancers in the first days.

Here at JotForm, Our 15-person support team completely runs over ODesk. We have supporters from Philippines, UK, US, Canada, Germany, Ukraine, Kenya and El Salvador. We even promoted one of our supporters as Support Team Manager and had great level of success.

The quality of people on oDesk varies, so when we need to hire a new supporter, we choose some of the best applicants and run 5-hour trials with them.

The best part is we have people all over the world, so when you contact us even at 3am, you will get a response within 20 minutes on average.

[talloaktrees]

Has anyone found work through oDesk and been satisfied with it?

[jasonkolb]

I've used it extensively as an employer. I've found a few real gems that I would love to hire full-time someday, but lately I've been having a very hard time finding quality talent. I've had four hires in a row that accepted the job and then completely dropped off the face of the earth afterwards.

I've also run into quite a few contractors who lie about their skill set--hoping, I assume, to get ANY kind of work and then learn it as they go. It makes ramping someone up kind of frustrating... but once you find someone good to work with I've had nothing bad to say about it.

[hippich]

yes. started with $8/hr in 2008 just to get first feedback on a profile when I was back in Belarus and now charging $100/hr. While it is not full time now - I am really satified with the fact I am working on what I like and get paid really well for that.

and oDesk gave me ability to get in USA (found my future H-1b sponsor on oDesk.) so I have personal bias :)

[rahoulb]

I've hired about ten people through oDesk; it took about a year before I got good at it (and I wasted a lot of money in doing so) but there are good people there.

As ever, good communication is key (I insist on them being in a campfire room with me whilst working so problems can be dealt with immediately).

EDIT: sorry, just noticed you said "found work", so my answer isn't really relevant.

[kshatrea]

I've been on the platform for about 6 months now, and I've found quite satisfying work and generally cooperative clients.

[andybak]

I've found contractors through oDesk and been satisfied. And I presume most of them felt the same way.

[mithras]

I found a very big client and now work for 3 times my (quite low) starting rate.

[csomar]

oDesk is huge, it represents the market. There is lots of sh*t, but also lots of good clients and developers.

[andrewf]

Storylane appears to be a hosted blogging platform that doesn't offer RSS feeds. Not sure if they're just desperate to get people joined up, or RSS is actually dead.

[belzegor]

I think in the end this has result in a lot of cheap and bad work going live every week in the world (what does that say about the quality of the web). I have seen rates so low you can have that guy working all week, and just hope that he finishes before your 100$ budget is over (for a site as big as say an ebay.com clone). There should be minimum wages, per continent if needed.

[dschiptsov]

Yeah, 3 middle men between third world and Oracle - the meta-model of current IT business,) and $5/h - $25/h is also telling.)

Self-proclaimed manager's dream.

[sidbatra]

Everyone has an interesting story to tell and our world ought to celebrate normal people more than it does. Storylane is a brilliant combination of the two. Love it

[countessa]

I guess "People sharing things that matter" is very subjective. A nice story to be sure....but "really matters"?

Is storylane curated or just a free for all?

[jongs]

Storylane is free for all (as in: NOT invite only but open to anyone). It is however community curated in that the best content surfaces to the top using the feedback users give.

[rubyrescue]

Build a global meritocracy - a person's geographic location should not inhibit the work that they can do.

Great Quote!

[gbsi]

It is amazing how little this is respected.

[belzegor]

you mean like: we should pay 2 dollars for slaves regardless of their location. I wonder.

[fourmii]

Great story about a startup just getting stuff done in it's infancy. Who are their major competitors now?

[timedoctor]

We're just starting as a competitor (www.Staff.com) and kind of starting in the same way by helping companies to find staff with personal interaction. The competitive advantage that we are focussing on is: 1. Focus on full time hires with technology and staff that are oriented to working full time for one company. One of the issues with oDesk is that great freelancers are in high demand working for several clients and so are not focussed on your work. On the other side of the coin, most freelancers on the platform do not earn enough to make ends meet, because they only get a couple of jobs for $2 per hour to try and get started and they never get traction 2. More of a managed solution where we help companies to find the right staff member. This is possible because we are focussed only on full time hires.

Then as a second stage of the business build a platform that has some advantages over oDesk and other existing remote staffing platforms.

[jongs]

This is one of my favorites

[musHo_sk]

Great story