
Show HN: Handpicked freelance projects delivered every Monday - Pipeliners
http://www.pipelinedaily.com
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iraldir
Hi, nice project. The pricing for me is a bit off if I don't follow a single
lead. You should either have \- a free month to try it out \- a price based on
revenues (but that is complicated because it makes you the middleman then à la
upwork) \- a system where you show maybe description of the leads without
linking to the actual recruiters, and to access the link I need to pay or
something.

Anyway something like that. Right now I feel very dubious paying 49$ for what
is possibly a scrap from linkedin via a bot.

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Pipeliners
Hi! You raise some great points. A free trial is our most frequent request but
it's quite a tricky one for us because there is a large time investment to
find and handpick leads for each user, and if we offered a free trial, we
wouldn't be able to offer the same quality across the board. Your idea to show
a description without linking to the company is a great idea though, this
could be a 'free' tier, where we show projects without contact information and
users can pay a small fee to reveal them. Awesome!

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Pipeliners
Thought I'd write a bit here to explain our background -- I'm James and I'm a
UX/UI designer. I've freelanced for 5 years and had the struggle of dry spells
and bad clients. I then began winning more work and came up with a few methods
to find relevant projects.

I saw a few similar services to Pipeline but felt that they were quite pricy,
so I wanted to release something myself and scale up my own methods of finding
work, whilst avoiding a spammy and crappy service. I partnered up with another
person and we launched Pipeline a few weeks ago.

It's built in Webflow at the moment and it's hooked up to Stripe + Moonclerk
for payments.

We source leads in 3 ways:

1.) We aggregate leads from 200+ sites, job boards, Slack groups etc. 2.) We
have partnerships with a few recruiters who send us leads in exchange for
having their roles filled quickly. 3.) Some leads are sent directly through
Pipeline.

We have found it to be a useful service but we have room for improvement and
we're working on version 2.0 which will allow users to register, view project
leads within Pipeline etc (we're hiring for this over on Reddit).

Thanks for looking and I hope this can at least help 1 person!

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tomek_zemla
It looks like an interesting service, but it is difficult do judge a quality
without getting actually relevant (to me) sample of freelance gigs... For
example I recently specialize in creative coding on HTML5 Canvas and I kind of
doubt I would get many truly relevant leads simply because of my narrow focus.

This does not mean this is not a good service, but it might work well for
Angular developer (popular speciality) and not at all for somebody like me
(fairly niche speciality). And without a 'test drive' I have no idea...

~~~
Pipeliners
Yes you're right. We've had people write to us with certain skills and we've
had to say that we simply can't provide enough high quality or relevant leads
for that certain area. We'd love to incorporate a free trial in the future,
but at the moment it's quite a bit of work to gather leads for each user, but
the handpicked aspect is the heart of our service and we'd hate to automate
that. We'll have to add to our team and then think about offering a trial!

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RickS
Some thoughts:

1) Put pricing higher on the home page. I expected this to be like other
services that take a project percentage, was surprised to find a $50
subscription fee, which I won't pay because I didn't find a quick answer to 2:

2) Did these leads ask to be contacted by every pipeline user every week?
Either they didn't, and I don't want to spam strangers like that, or they did,
and that sounds AWFUL, and climbing into a dog pile like that is going to
scare off anyone who has a decent pipeline of their own.

edit: saw "We aggregate leads from 200+ sites, job boards, Slack groups etc."

That's super gross. The point of services like these is that they're _not_
from those sources.

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Pipeliners
Thanks for the reply and the feedback! Leads don't get asked to be contacted
by Pipeline users unless they submit leads through Pipeline itself. They have,
however, placed project advertisements or work with recruiters so they expect
to be contacted - I'm not really sure I understand this point. They don't get
contacted every week, only whilst they are hiring (and we only advertise the
same positions to 3 users max).

• "edit: saw "We aggregate leads from 200+ sites, job boards, Slack groups
etc.""

Why is it super gross? We find and filter many, many, many leads that are
super low quality and unsuitable, we're taking a lot of the sourcing work out
of the hands of freelancers/agencies and we find leads from
people/companies/websites that they're likely not to have visited. For us, the
point of this service is to send filtered and high quality leads, saving our
users time and resources that could be better spent on completing projects.
Hope that makes sense?

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chatmasta
Don't most people hiring freelancers accept bids within a week? My worry with
this service is that by the time I see a project, the stakeholder has already
hired someone for it.

~~~
Pipeliners
Yes absolutely - that's why we spent so long selecting leads at the weekend
and on Monday, because they're the freshest and those are the ones we try to
send (unless a company has got in touch through Pipeline).

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mohsinr
I worry how scalable is this as a freelancer I get good quality leads in the
start but as number of users increase on the service, pool of quality leads
gets scarce ...

~~~
Pipeliners
Hi! We're currently limiting users to 100 with a view of taking up to 250
users in the future if we feel there are enough leads. -James

