

What happened in the early days of oDesk? - mikeland86
http://www.storylane.com/stories/show/1100544969/what-happened-in-the-early-days-of-odesk

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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

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

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jdotjdot89
Same here as well. Same amount of time, also. You just have to be judicious in
who you choose as your clients.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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?

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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jongs
This is one of my favorites

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musHo_sk
Great story

