
I Launched My Startup Yesterday, This Is How The Hectic Day Went - james-fend
http://www.webstartup.me/launched-startup-yesterday-hectic-day
======
sequoia
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_.]

Good luck!

~~~
AznHisoka
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.

~~~
gravitronic
Blatant lies are not the way to appear trustworthy.

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jmilloy
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.

What am I supposed to be interested in here?

~~~
makira
Whenever I push a new version of an app, I always do it in the morning after
having slept a good night.

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.

~~~
james-fend
Live and learn. I prob won't make that mistake again as I just woke up from a
crash nap and trying to catch up on blog comments..

------
rplnt
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.

~~~
james-fend
Turned off. You're the 2nd person to suggest that. Thanks.

~~~
kami8845
You may not want to turn it off. From an advertising perspective I would
suggest you split-test it. Yeah it will annoy some people, but entry-pops have
great effect and are used by most performance marketers whenever possible.

------
driverdan
Congrats on the launch but to me it appears to be just another elance.

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
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.

~~~
james-fend
Also, those spray and pray 'generic' bids that many companies on Elance and
oDesk can't get away with that. So they actually have to display some sort
brain power and ability to the project poster.

The ability for the project poster not be embarded by 40-50 bids all at the
same time and not having a clue about their work ethic/communication/etc. and
going purely off of reviews and botched portfolios.

------
ilaksh
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.

------
user24
well done on launching,

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
work my ass. get creative. then repeat.

------
hadriagh
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?

~~~
james-fend
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

~~~
ssmoot
Also, get some sleep before launching. :-)

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radagaisus
Are those considered good numbers?

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
thanks for the list.. getting small quirks like this fixed is my goal for this
week.

------
cidermonk3y
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

~~~
james-fend
Thanks.. yep, fixing that is on the list

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rtrocc
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.

~~~
james-fend
Thank you!

------
jcc80
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.

------
joshcrews
I was James's Rails mentor and I can testify that he definitely did not know
Ruby on Rails at the beginning of November, but he is sharp.

~~~
smadam9
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.

~~~
gamechangr
I agree. I'm trying to learn RoR right now. Seems fast for 8 weeks!

------
andrewcamel
Would you consider posting weekly updates? I would really like to read them
and I'm sure they'd contribute some traffic to new site.

~~~
james-fend
Yeah definitely. If you want to, you can choose to subscribe on the right and
it should auto-email you with each new post.

------
dools
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.

------
plasma
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.

------
nsxwolf
Inspired by some of the things bdg said, I'm thinking, could you find a niche
a service that allows only US-only freelancers?

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
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.

~~~
james-fend
Shoot me an email james@freelancify.com.

------
instakill
Are you considering adding any other payments types? Not a fan of paypal.

~~~
james-fend
Either am I. That's why the app uses Stripe to process our own payments. What
others do you suggest to add?

~~~
hadriagh
Dwolla might be a good alternative

~~~
james-fend
How could I forget?!

------
bdg
Here's some feedback, take with it what you will.

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.

~~~
smadam9
To add to bdg's response....

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"

~~~
biot
One thing comes to mind: if you eliminate lowball pricing, would that not get
rid of the very reason most freelance sites exist? What I mean is if I'm
willing to pay leading market rate for site design work, wouldn't it be likely
that I can find a handful of leading designers that I could choose from?

Ditto for programming and so on. Once freelance sites solve the problem of "I
can't find anybody", most devolve into a race to the bottom where it's
unlikely that you'll find quality even if you're willing to pay leading market
rates.

------
grocerocity
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?

~~~
james-fend
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.

------
caublestone
"12:30AM - I go to have a celebration lunch for finally launching. And I get
absolutely stuffed! Hmm… lunch special fajitas"

You time traveled!? I do the same after a lack of sleep. :)

~~~
james-fend
lmao.. fixed.

------
wyck
This looks just like all the other sites where people want full e-commerce
solutions or groupon clones for 200$.

------
sidcool
Heartiest congratulations for launching. I have signed up as I like to do some
freelance work. Good luck!

------
bond
Congrats for launching!

I remember from thefastlaneforum.com you were developing Fendza, what happened
to that project?

~~~
james-fend
Hey man! Thanks! Errr.. long story. I kind of broke it down on there with this
thread: [http://www.thefastlaneforum.com/progress-
threads/32190-progr...](http://www.thefastlaneforum.com/progress-
threads/32190-progress-thread-james-f-startup-2-a.html)

~~~
bond
Glad you didn't gave up. Best of luck with this one.

------
fourmii
Well done James! Congrats on the launch and sharing your story. Nothing like
these posts to inspire!

~~~
james-fend
thanks!

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equilibrium
Well done on launching! Under how it works I'd suggest numbering the steps.

~~~
james-fend
Great suggestion! Will do today..

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cjw
I'm curious about what kind of setup you have running the site.

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outside1234
congrats - what are you trying to learn with your first launch?

~~~
billpatrianakos
Oh, good question! Hopefully we get an answer. As someone planning to launch
this year I'm eager to learn from someone doing it now.

