

Ask HN: I made a site to help freelancers find work. Feedback? - zaidf
http://tekbob.com/

======
zaidf
I have been freelancing pretty aggressively off of Craigslist for the past
three months. Through my experiences using CL for finding work, I decided to
develop TekBob. These are the things I hope to fix via TekBob that I find
broken with CL:

1\. Craigslist is local. But most contract work can be non-local. 100% of the
projects I have completed in the past 3 months have been non-local. TekBob
does not emphasize city/state level location so much.

2\. The most serious clients just want to get on the phone and iron out a
deal. Almost all my projects involved a phone call to seal the deal. So I
decided to cut the BS and just let clients connect to the developer. My thesis
is that there are enough freelancers looking for work and won't mind someone
calling them with work.

3\. Craigslist is a hit or miss in terms of finding new work,(in my
experience). I hope to provide a steady stream of leads, even if that means I
charge a small fee per lead in the future. My thesis is that if TekBob can
consistently send you $5,000 of work a month via 20 leads, you don't mind
paying TekBob $100 for the month.(for example)

And now...

Where Craigslist kicks our ass(for now): _they have people with projects and
we don't_. I have a plan on how to address this! I'll start working on it once
we have 25 freelancers listed.

~~~
zackattack
how do you plan to innovate over craiglist in cater to people who have
projects to post?

~~~
zaidf
Unsure at the moment for clients who'd like to explicitly post their projects.

I'm hoping the clients will do a search for "php" if they need a php developer
and call up a few devs.

We'll see how that goes.

~~~
zackattack
for example, tonight i want to hire someone to write a simple php/mysql webapp
(with a super basic login system) that interfaces with twilio (but maybe the
twilio could be .rb or .py). you don't make it super easy for me to find a
person who'd be interested in that project.

(email's in profile).

~~~
zaidf
you should just use vworker(formerly rentacoder). I don't think we can beat
them for your particular use case :)

~~~
rajamanickam_a
But you need to be careful when choosing vworker. Refer
<http://bit.ly/vworkersurvey>

~~~
DocuMaker
vWorker is one the safest resources in the business. If you were asked to
refund an escrowed payment, it was because you committed fraud. I read your
web page, and it looks like you put your buyer's source code on the internet.
That's against the rules. And I'm sorry, but copying and pasting old
complaints doesn't support your actions or your case.

------
pardo
It seems that you have not implemented any in-page SEO.

* You have no description meta in any page (even at the home page). Help the search engines to show a good snippet of your page by adding it.

* The urls of the particular listings look like <http://tekbob.com/freelancer/68573> Would be much better (and descriptive) if you had something like [http://tekbob.com/freelancer/experienced-rails-mongodb-devel...](http://tekbob.com/freelancer/experienced-rails-mongodb-developer-68573)

* I haven't found a single <h1> element in the whole website. Give some meaning to your markup, and start using descriptive tags. <h1>, <h2>, <th>, <strong> will help the spiders understand what are the important things in the page.

* None of your image seem to have an 'alt' or 'title' attribute. You should add these attributes to all your images, both for spiders, and for people that can not see your images.

* It would help your users (and the spiders) if you add some pages with all the tags or categories that you have. If they are too many, use at least a tag cloud.

* It seems that there's no robots.txt or sitemap.xml.

* Using YSlow on your page give also a number of hints of basic improvements to do (combine your js and css, enable gzip in your server, ...)

Also, there is no "About us", "FAQ", "Contact" or any of the usual sections
that a user may want to check before posting a listing, or using your site, to
see who is behind the site and whether you are serious or not.

Having a field that says when did the freelancer joined, how many contacts he
has actually answered and whether he is active or not would also be nice, in
my opinion. There's plenty of listing sites out there with a few entries that
you do not know if are still active, or stale. They could have been entered 4
years ago, for all you know.

[Edited the format, to make it easier to read]

~~~
zaidf
I've my work cut out when I wake up. Thanks a lot for the thorough feedback. I
really appreciate it!

------
ars
Can I do email instead of phone?

What with timezones and night owls, it may be hard to reach someone by phone.
Plus not everyone has a dedicated business line.

Anon-forward email would be great. Just for the initial connection, after that
you are correct, it's all phone.

So maybe a form to let the client enter a phone number and a best time to call
(including timezone), and send that to the freelancer?

(I would love to list myself, except I'm booked right now.)

~~~
zaidf
Yeah, eventually we'll add email. For now we'd like to focus on phone so we
can cater to clients with more urgent needs.

Good point about best time to call. Will add that field. In future we'll let
you customize what hours to accept calls. If someone calls you off-hours,
it'll tell them to try again between your hours.

Thanks for the feedback!

~~~
datapimp
I don't know if I'd add email.

Filtering out the freelancers who don't have a dedicated business line and who
aren't reachable by phone is a good service to provide to your clients, and it
is a reason I'd use tekbob over any number of your competitors.

There is no excuse not to have a phone number. Get google voice and Skype. As
a freelancer you are in the customer service industry, one. Two, your
competitors have phone numbers.

I regularly look for people to subcontract work to and I persons's skills or
experience are great but if I can't call them and reach them by phone to have
a conversation, that is an immense disadvantage when I'm comparing one worker
to another.

~~~
zaidf
_... but if I can't call them and reach them by phone to have a conversation,
that is an immense disadvantage when I'm comparing one worker to another._

That's been my experience as a developer. I can credit so many deals to being
the first guy to get on the phone with the client.

More likely there are many different segments in this market. I can easily see
why some folks almost expect email. But I think I am going after a very
specific segment of contractors/clients who like to get on the phone. It may
or may not work the way I've implemented. We'll see.

------
toro
Unfortunately I'm not in the US so I can't sign up. I be would interested in
email or Skype instead of phone.

Also, a couple of small things I noticed:

* The background image on your header doesn't repeat which leaves whitespace on a wide monitor (change no-repeat to repeat-x in your css).

* ie. should be eg. for the examples on the Add my listing page (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin_phrases:_I#id_est>, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.g.#exempli_gratia>).

* "dial your TekTim extension" should probably say TekBob on the Add my listings page.

~~~
zaidf
\- added repeat-x to background

\- good catch on "ie." :) learned something new.

\- fixed.

Thanks a lot! Those were some great, detail finds.

I am still wrestling with the international issue. For now, I am mainly
targeting this at US developers. Most of my clients(and profile of clients I'm
trying to attract) want to work with someone within the US(even if not
locally). They already get tonnes of emails from offshore shops and have a
hard time making a decision.

------
arn
seems like a portfolio link and/or email address would be helpful.

I also don't like the phone-only thing. It's 3am right now, I don't plan on
calling "Timothy" just to ask to see his portfolio, but I'd certainly like to
look at it right now. Am I going to come back to the site tomorrow during the
day? Maybe, but probably not. Would I email him right now to get a link to his
portfolio? Sure.

~~~
zaidf
Fair points - thanks!

\- Will add portfolio link. \- Not so sure about email quite yet.

~~~
xel02
Regarding the time difference you might think of offering freelancers the
option to highlight when they ARE available for calls by setting up a) Calling
times b) Their current desire for calls.

I.e Bob might be looking for a job and is willing to accept calls between 12pm
and 1pm, but not at 3am.

Or Jane may already have enough leads and does not want to accept any calls
(too busy) but normally is available between 3pm and 4pm.

~~~
zaidf
That's definitely the plan! We'll let people set their hours. If you call off
hours, it'll tell you to call later.

And we'll also provide an option to "delist" yourself temporarily while you
are too busy and don't want more work.

Thanks for the suggestions!

------
netcan
Focusing on quality of client could be an approach.

------
mattmanser
Out of interest I typed 'c# developer'. It doesn't work, chops off everything
to just 'c'.

~~~
zaidf
sorry. looking into it.

edit: worked fine for me. it didn't remove the #. can you give an example?
thanks.

~~~
mattmanser
Just tried it again in Chrome, Firefox and IE. It's definitely not working in
any of them.

<http://tekbob.com/tag/c#> developer

Also I don't think you're encoding the input properly, I can inject >, <,
quotes and stuff into your html using the search box.

I'm not really a script kiddie so don't quite know what I'm doing, but if the
search box isn't being encoded, are the input boxes?

