
Show HN: A place to buy and sell services directly from each other - sushimako
https://www.work.io
======
jaggs
I'm sorry I found it all very confusing. For me personally it failed the 5
second test - what is the site primarily about, and how can I extract 80% of
its functionality quickest?

I clicked on the Buy button and was no further forward.

The design is very slick, but there's too many words on the front page, no
obvious action button/s and no immediate examples of how this could benefit
me.

~~~
lucahammer
May I ask you to try the 5 seconds test with my profile?
<https://www.workio.com/u/MjA3ZD/luca-hammer>

Does that work for you?

~~~
jaggs
It would work better if it was something like...

Welcome to work|i|o the one stop shop for...blah.

Or some form of one line and _clear_ explanation of what the site is/does.

You're trying to get across 3 things very quickly here:

1\. What the site is for. 2\. How does it work (how can I use it?) 3\. Why
should I use it (what's the benefit for me?)

If there are alternatives, why should I use you instead of the alternatives?
(e.g. too expensive, too clumsy, too rancid or whatever).

~~~
lucahammer
I am not sure I get what you want to say. We should do these three things or
we are doing them?

~~~
cocoflunchy
You should do these 3 things; I registered and I am still not 100% confident
that I know what you do.

------
timdorr
Holy buzzwords, Batman!

Seriously, I hate them. It makes it seem like you don't have anything
substantial when you use them. They appear as filler for a weak product. Talk
to me like a human. Given that I'm trying to find other humans for work, I
would rather trust something that felt honest than something peppered with
marketing-speak.

~~~
hucker
It doesn't really help that 'please' is categorically misspelled as 'pls'
either...

~~~
hnriot
That isn't a misspelling, but a very common shortcut. I fail to see how this
in any way detracts from the readability of the text. Other shortcomings
notwithstanding, "pls" is fine for the vast majority of internet users.

~~~
bdunbar
Using 'pls' in formal communication indicates sloppiness and imprecision of
thought. It indicates that one is not serious. A mental flyweight.

Shorter: spelling counts.

~~~
gojomo
Generally in my life I've shared the same opinion... but are you sure that if
A/B-tested, 'please' would outperform 'pls' in the context of Work.IO's goals?

For example: when soliciting user participation, it often helps to _lower_
user anxiety that what is written needs to be perfectly crafted/grammatical.
'Txtspeek' can send a signal: it's OK whatever 'u' want to type here.

~~~
bdunbar
a) A/B testing grammar is a lame idea.

b) Please isn't perfectly crafted, it's just the right way to spell that word.

c) Text speak is a signal, but only a positive one for functionally illiterate
Eloi.

------
michaelbuckbee
A few things:

1\. Congrats on launching!

2\. You have an explanation video hidden somewhere on the site (like literally
I saw it then got back to the homepage and couldn't recall which link I had
clicked to find it). Having that front and center would really help.

2a. Don't use the robot voiceover for the video. If you're not comfortable
doing it yourself find somebody on Fiverr.com to do it for you.

3\. It would be very helpful to have some extremely simple examples of what
you are providing. Along the lines of: "Jim wants to boost sales, instead of
hiring a costly salesperson he can request getting leads." (which is something
I think you do).

Looks like you're off to a good start.

~~~
brunooo
Thanks Michael, we're working hard on Topic / Industry specific landing pages,
where it's just the video, 5 best products (without the detour of you having
to customize them by hand) and 5 great people providing them.

Voiceover was Voicebunny or Bodalgo, very close decision, but there are
definitely artifacts from the Mercedes GPS she did left over, but you (gladly)
haven't heard the timing test we spoke...

------
cinbun8
This is what I understand 1 minute after perusing your website.

1 - This is some sort of a marketplace where you can buy and sell expertise.
Kinda like a Air bnb for odd jobs. Reminds me of a similar startup that tried
that, but I cannot remember their name.

2 - The landing page's layout is a little confusing. I clicked on a couple of
links and landed on your about page[1]. When you have a 90 second video
explaining what your product is, why would you not put that on a landing page
? The call to action would be very easy for me. Click on the video and know
more about you.

3 - Although you meant for people to click sign-in on the landing page, that
action was not very obvious to me. You should look to prioritize 'Sign-up' not
sign in. The fact that they are both green buttons that look alike does not
help.

4 - Your key customer sign-up categories appear to be a buyer who gets
services and a seller who markets his / her services. You might want to
streamline signups to reflect that.

5 - The text overlay on the image is not very visible / readable. Have you
considered switching the images to color on mouse-over ?

6 - Where is the submit button for 'Suggest a feature' under watercooler ?

7 - I don't quite get the watercooler part. Is it meant for users to share
insights and that becomes part of the news ?

8 - What is your pricing ? Where can I see what cut you take and what I get in
return ? What are people signing up for ?

9 - When I sign up, its not very clear to me that something happened on the
screen. Its great that I am logged in, but the UI needs to do more to inform
me about what just happened.

10 - A short tutorial on signing up would be great. The app asked me to add
funds and I don't understand what for.

I like the idea. The presentation and the user flow could use a little work.
Gather the feedback you get here and fine tune your site. Nice work.

[1] - <https://www.workio.com/about/>

~~~
brunooo
Hey, thanks a ton for the detailed feedback!

1) Solvate and many others.

2) Went with the current one to see what appeals to people, but like mentioned
the industry specific landing pages will be a lot like you suggest.

3) Sign-In is both Signup & Login, the redundant one is just as backup (just
to explain the thoughts behind it).

4) Still fiddling with this, most sites like oDeks et al do it, but nt yet
sure if it's more effective (considering that you only have to sign up in the
very last moment, eg order a job or offer a service)

5) 2 of the people just had this ones in B&W, will switch once we have a
broader pool.

6) Right, submit on \n is still no good practice.

7) Highlight whats happening on the platform, bit of a placeholder now, but
think more lively statistics, stories, industries, rankings here in the
future.

8) 15% cut, we take care of the whole payment, landing pages etc.

9) Right, not all callback messages there yet.

10) This only happen if you "made up your mind" eg clicked "order" on a
product, but a nice generic tutorial video combined with 9 would be nice.

Thanks again for taking the time, all the feedback, and the chance to start
thinking about it while typing this.

~~~
jaggederest
While you're taking suggestions, let me enter my information instead of
parsing my social network connections:

a) I don't have some of those social networks at all and

b) I'm not going to let you have access to the other ones.

I'm probably the ideal target for you, in terms of offering services, but I'm
simply not going to bother if you require, even politely, intrusion into my
life.

~~~
lucahammer
Understood.

You can offer services without connecting anything. Right now they additional
info is only used for matching.

We will work on a way to enter information manually.

------
bravura
Could you please explain how you will address:

* quality: How do I know the quality of the work will be good? What happens in the case of disputes?

* reputation: How will you keep track of reputation of the workers? Odesk, Vworker, Ebay are marketplaces that do a decent job at filtering out spammers and bad guys. Where they lack is determining the difference between good and great. Everyone gets FIVE STARS or close to it for every job, unless it's completely bungled. This also creates a perverse pressure on the contractor. If an employer complains about the contractor publicly, the contractor quickly lose all work. Workers are thus pressured to satisfy out-of-scope employer demands so they get a five star rating and maintain their sterling reputation.

~~~
lucahammer
* quality: Matching the task with the right providers is crucial. At the moment we do a lot of manual vetting, making sure each task gets to the right people and everyone is happy. Over time we will collect more data to improve matching. Disputes are handled by ourselves right now and we want to have humans in charge for these things in the future.

* reputation: We also have a rating system in place which is used to give the provider feedback on their work and also helps us with matching future tasks. Buyer will get rated too. At work.io the buyers don't have to choose the provider but only defines what results they want to have delivered. There is the option to buy services directly by someone but these deals are normally done because of the reputation someone has outside of work.io

~~~
brunooo
In addition to what luca said: We take a lot of pressure out of the
marketplace by not having a biding mechanism in the first place, so better
matches in terms of budget / skills etc are likely (happy to go into more
depth on this) and we also collect tons of implicit data, so once we should
get some traction, it should be easier to model the current manual work we do
behind the scenes into corresponding algorithms (also happy to expand on
this).

------
geuis
_All_ of your fonts are too small. _All_ of your text colors are too gray. I'm
in my early 30's with fairly good eyesight, and its just way too hard to read
anything on your site. I tried signing up and going through the Sell services
bit, but just gave up because the whole thing gives me a physical headache
trying to read anything.

~~~
lucahammer
We will work on that. At the moment the highest priority is to create great
processes. Design improvements will follow. (Some small ones are already in
testing as they are part of the process too.)

------
krapp
Interesting, and nice design.

I'd like to be able to add my github and behance.net profiles as well if I
can. Those would reflect my skills a lot better than would my facebook.

Also I don't really like that my username seems linked to whatever my email
address was -- I should be able to display my real name, and if I can change
that I haven't found where yet.

What is the user ID for and why is it listed in my profile?

I would like to know a bit more about how you're handling payment, and dealing
with conflict and arbitration. Can I connect my paypal account? Is there some
kind of escrow thing like elance uses?

~~~
sushimako
Thx for the feedback!

Your should already be able to connect your LinkedIn account on your profile
page. Github, behance and other identity providers of specific industries will
be added in the future.

Right now we fetch your name from the identity providers that you connect
(e.g. linkedin) and fall back to the user part of your e-mail address if none
connected. Being a little experiment, this is the only way to set your name
for now (i.e. no manual input). Of course we will change this, if that's what
the users want.

Re: payment: Upon ordering a job the buyer transfers money to work.io (via
creditcard, paypal or purchase order) and after the job is completed and
accepted, all participating users will receive their share in their account-
wallet. This earned money can then be payed-out via paypal, check or ACH.

Right now, we're handling disputes/conflicts ourselves and will rely on human
support in the future as well.

~~~
krapp
Couple more things.

Why is it linked to my facebook account? I don't remember ever opting in for
that. How do I unlink it now because my facebook account is not a business
account.

For that matter, how much control do I actually have over what you pull from
my accounts?

\- Can I delete anything you add and unlink any accounts I link? \- Can I opt
not to synchronize my accounts or lock my profile at a certain state? \- Can I
delete my entire workio account if I want, and if so, what if anything does
workio retain of my data?

~~~
lucahammer
We do some auto discovery via your mail adress. Only public available data.

Right now you only can decide to connect or unlink your whole account. This is
done on your profile page. Let us know if there is a problem so we can look
into it. You can hide topics, industries and geographies we have pulled from
your accounts.

If you choose to delete your account (no clickable link right now, mail us) we
will remove all of your personal data. We will retain data you submitted as
part of fulfilling a job. There may be backups that still contain other data
by you but these won't be used if we can avoid it.

~~~
krapp
Fair enough. I would rather the site showed me that it discovered the
account/data and then gave me the option to include it or not, that would have
seemed a bit less intrusive. The assumption that it's automatically stuff I
want on that profile may not be true. I may not want to present that
particular name or profile pic, or deal with not accepting friend requests
from clients.

------
dalehurley1
I am sorry but I am confused to what your site does. It looks good, but what
is it that it does as I am confused. This is not to slam you. I hope to help
you. "Global Expertise, On Demand & Delivered Online" is just buzzwords and
does not concisely tell me what you do or what benefit you provide.

For instance I go to planscop.io and I am told "Project Management for
Contractors - Planscope is a simple tool that helps you build better client
projects and close more deals.". I know it is for contractors for managing
projects.

NewRelic.com - "A DEVELOPER’S BEST FRIEND - See how we help 25,000+ customers
monitor their apps." I know it is for Developers and it monitors my apps.

Risks.io - "Track Your Project's Risks, Assumptions, Issues and Dependencies
Online"

Basically I think work.io does is "Work.io connects employers and knowledge-
workers together for highly-skilled one of projects."

~~~
dalehurley1
"Work.io connects employers and knowledge-workers together for highly-skilled
one off* projects."

~~~
brunooo
Dale, Thanks! Work in progress, skipped the tagline & extra text on the
frontpage as long as we didn't see a clear winner yet...

------
mbesto
As many others have pointed out, I'm confused. Here's a good starting point
for your pitch/value proposition:

1\. What problem are you trying to solve? (It seems like you're trying to
solve many problems at once, but state these with more clarity)

2\. How are you solving this problem? (What part of your solution solves the
problem and how?)

3\. How is this different from the competition? (When describing how you are
solving the problem what do people do today that you do differently for the
customer)

Also, it appears there are two sets of value propositions - one for Buyers and
one for Providers. You'll need to clearly explain both to each audience.

Edit- Oh and good luck! The technology itself is extremely impressive and good
job looking for feedback....now iterate!

------
crntaylor
I created a profile (which was quick and easy, well done). I wanted to connect
it to my LinkedIn profile, but apparently you require access to 1. my profile
2. the email I use for my LinkedIn account and 3. my connections.

I can understand 1, but not 2 or 3, and I'm not willing to provide them to you
without a good explanation of why you need them. I imagine other users will
feel the same way. Why not just require access to my profile? It's much less
threatening that way, and you'll get more people connecting their LinkedIn
accounts.

------
Zak
Pretty design, and nice concept overall but there doesn't seem to be any way
to add certain kinds of information other than connecting social networking
sites. I don't want to do that.

~~~
lucahammer
Thanks for the feedback. We wanted to make it harder for people to add topics
and industries only to get certain jobs. We will look into ways for user who
don't want to connect their profile to social networking sites.

~~~
Zak
A way might be to simply limit the number of topics and industries a person
can list, though that has its own downsides.

Just thinking of my own case, you won't get much of use from Facebook (I post
pictures of kittens and cookie recipes), twitter (It's been nearly a year
since I've tweeted anything) or Linkedin (I barely use it). You'd get more of
use from HN, reddit or (especially) github, but it might be harder to extract
useful information from those sources.

~~~
lucahammer
We will definitely add more services in the future and you are right that
these three were the easiest to start with and give ok results for many
people.

You could still provide buyers with awesome cookie recipes!

------
slashedzero
I think the design of the site and the product conflict. The design looks like
you're selling the person, not their expertise, especially from the front
page. I'm sure any of these people can do multiple things, but I don't care
about that, if my goal is to set up shop in Asia, mention that. I am in no way
able to know that just seeing Sophie Song's face on your front page.

Also, for sellers to solely use social media as a verification system just
rubs me entirely the wrong way.

I really like the idea though, good luck!

~~~
lucahammer
We had no faces on the homepage when we started. Usertests showed that people
were unsure who will fulfill the tasks and therefore didn't want to give us
their money. At the moment we show some faces and some tasks which may be even
more confusing.

Sorry for the social media verification thingy. It works for most people and
so we choose to start from there. We will look into alternatives in the
future.

Thanks! If I can help you with anything let me know.

------
olefoo
This looks very good. But I can tell it's still early days yet.

One UX/UI bug you should fix is to make it possible to see draft offers in
one's profile. I did a save and continue, and had to dig through my browser
history to get back to my draft offer.

I also got a 403 notice in the UI when I clicked the Save and Continue button.

I do agree with some of the posters here that you need to clarify the value
proposition to first timers.

I'm excited to see a marketplace for consulting products like this opening up,
and intend to make use of it.

~~~
brunooo
Your drafts should be in the "Buy" menu, and your offerings in the "Provide"
menu as well as on your profile.

Hunting down the 403, shouldn't happen here...

Thanks, get in touch with any of us at any time, happy to get more direct
feedback & support you in any way we can.

------
krisj
I think the problem here is that you're doing EVERYTHING. If you tested out a
single vertical (e.g. legal work for startups), and connected it with a market
of, say, well credentialed lawyers who're interested in working for
themselves, then I would know exactly what your site is for, and how/when I
might use it.

If you tell me that I should use you for everything, I'm probably going to use
you for nothing. Give the verticals their own websites.

~~~
lucahammer
Landingpages for verticals are already planned. Thanks.

------
matlock
The editor is pretty fancy, dragging stuff around when you create a new
document works really well. Will give it a try

~~~
sushimako
thx! Btw, to anyone who wants to try it out: there's no signup needed.

Just start a new document from any of the Templates or create a copy from a
landing page (e.g. <https://www.workio.com/b/Y2NlMTY5MDYt/security-assessment>
) by clicking the "Customize and order" button.

------
chrislomax
Like the others have said, the design is good but I just don't know what I am
getting from the site on first approach. I also don't like how the home page
main call to action is Sign In, what am I signing into and why should I?

I expect the homepage to tell me how you are going to help me, not for me to
find out how you can help me?

~~~
lucahammer
Here is an older version of the homepage:
<https://skitch.com/lucahammer/eagkm/workio-hompage-old>

------
subnet
the replay-mode of the editor just rocks :) I'm offering consulting-serives
about Facebook-platform there, + you can ask me a free question about platform
as well :)

<https://www.workio.com/u/NTU0MT/michael-kamleitner>

------
lewisflude
Great domain name you have there!

------
aurora72
just 3 spontaneous impressions:

1- The site (front page) is not bad. Anyway it addresses the one big problem
of buying and selling the desired jobs. 2- The name and position of
"Watercooler" is interesting and invokes curiosity about the site. 3- The
presence of Linked-in as a login option is bad, because the Linked-in is bad.
I've deleted my Li account after a crazy frustration upon their wanting me to
become a paid member just for me to send a message to a member! No need to
link to a doomed site such as that.

That's all.

------
cyphersanctus
Great design.

------
julienmarie
The design seemed really familiar to me... is there any connection with
<http://www.systemone.net/> ?

~~~
lucahammer
Yes. Can you find it?

------
vavoida
reminds me of this classic

Ronald Coase - The Nature Of The Firm, 20 pages
[http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0335.1937....](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0335.1937.tb00002.x/pdf)

summary <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm>

btw. great design!

~~~
brunooo
Indeed, linked it in
[http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_long_march_from_cro...](http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_long_march_from_crowdsourcing_to_a_global_meri.php)

~~~
vavoida
interesting rww post & comments

furthermore [http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/03/the-nature-of-the-firm-
and-w...](http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/03/the-nature-of-the-firm-and-work-
markets.html)

------
nkuttler
Which browsers did you test your layout in?

There's overlapping text in the boxes on the frontpage in FF, Chrome and
Opera. That's all I tried.

------
natrius
There are many grammar errors throughout the site. Pay someone to copy edit
it.

~~~
brunooo
Yup, embarrassing indeed in some places, wip, but not yet easy to simply
extract all current data to easily hand it to someone.

Thanks for pushing it up the "damn,we gotta take more care of that" list.

~~~
wanderful
Take screenshots or print the pages. They don't need to look at the code to
review the copy. Change the mindset to look for solutions rather than
problems.

------
kamakazizuru
so how exactly is this any different from vworker, odesk, elance etc?

~~~
lucahammer
We aren't in the listing business. You define the results with the editor and
we make sure you get them delivered.

~~~
wanderful
So you manage outsourcing? Might I recommend saying that? I've noticed
throughout the comments that you tend toward drawn out explanations. Make it
simple and then people will fill in the missing details. If they miss a few,
no worries, because they get the gist. You don't need to give them all of the
details up front, because that makes it complex, hard to understand and
boring. Try and fill in as many details as you can with imagery and the
structure of the site.

