
Tell HN: Now is the perfect time to roll out a new freelance platform - ehhe
The Elance is going to be shut down soon and merged into oDesk aka Upwork. And Upwork is an absolute disaster.<p>The messaging system doesn&#x27;t work. The stats don&#x27;t work. The search barely works. The ranking system is a joke. The invoices they send to clients are illegal in Europe.[https:&#x2F;&#x2F;community.upwork.com&#x2F;t5&#x2F;Clients&#x2F;Name-on-a-received-invoice&#x2F;m-p&#x2F;92225#U92225]<p>And for the last few days, the job application system -- arguably, the most important thing on the whole website -- stopped working.<p>If you want to appreciate the full extend of the disaster, just visit their forum and see what their freelancers and clients have to say about it:
https:&#x2F;&#x2F;community.upwork.com<p>They are already loosing people and the only reason anyone&#x27;s still using them is the lack of a better alternative.<p>This is the perfect chance for a new platform.
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jalopy
How can you build a platform that doesn't race to the bottom but allows it to
extract the value added (and hence profits) from collecting and vetting great
talent?

I always imagine the interaction with supply (quality freelance developer) and
demand (company needing work done) to be like this:

Company: "I need great freelancers!" Dev: "I'm a great freelancer! My rate is
$100/hr [or whatever]!"

[Company interviews Dev, sees prev results, feels happy w/Dev]

Company: "Great! We'll pay you that for the first few days on this platform,
then engage you for long term projects off the platform. That way, we don't
have to pay Matching Site the finder's fee."

~~~
Mithaldu
The end point you imagine there often does not happen because it is REALLY
useful to have an escrow agent inbetween. I use odesk/upwork personally, and
it provides me a lot of value.

It bills my work to my clients weekly, and automatically withdraws the money
from their credit card. This means if a client is unhappy with a freelancer
it's easy for them to start a dialogue and start it early; and at the same
time the freelancer has protection with less-than-honest clients and can lose,
at most, a week's worth of work.

Compare this to normal freelancer contracts where the cash is typically paid
monthly, with a delay of 14+ days after receipt of invoice. If a client acts
in bad faith in that case, the freelancer loses a lot more, and to get money
back, would have to go through international courts, which often costs more
than the money they lost.

~~~
jalopy
Very helpful insight, thanks. To summarize - the value added services of
billing, monitoring and dispute resolution make it worthwhile for the
contractor to use the service.

------
cefthurston
Full disclosure: I work with Gigster.

We noticed the same broken things here. I don't want to give Elance/UpWork too
hard a time - they can be good for some things (like Data Entry, etc) but
clearly their model has some issues when it comes to development projects.

Where our model is different is that all of our projects have a dedicated
Product Manager who overseas the build for fixed-price projects. The
developers and clients deal directly with the project's PM (not with each
other). That saves time for the client. It adds a layer but this counter-
intuitively improves communication. I speak broken Spanish. So if I run into a
Spanish speaker who speaks broken English then we can communicate. That's fine
if we're doing something simple but if the nuance of different words matters
then we'll do much better if we have a professional translator who's a native
speaker in both languages in between us.

I actually interviewed the former CEO of oDesk for my blog a few years ago
(long before Gigster existed) so I've been following this space and thinking
about where it's heading for a while. That's why I agree with the OP about the
opportunity for a new platform to rise in this space and the fundamental issue
that a race to the bottom will impact the quality of the build.

@jalopy & @mithaldu - I think what you're alluding to is the simplicity of not
having to deal with all the pain of being a freelancer (client management,
paperwork, etc). That's our appeal to developers: we give them specs and they
can just focus on building, not marketing themselves, client management, etc.

@logn - Eerily similar to how we operate.

~~~
j2bax
Do you guys have any plans of hiring experienced remote PM's in a similar way
that you hire freelance devs?

------
phantom_oracle
The major issue I am finding with the new platforms like gigster and toptal is
their negotiation strategies.

It is in their best interest to keep deal-flow high, which means that they try
not to reject submitted projects and try to push the low prices onto the
developer.

If a developer from India knows his chops and can run circles around JS-
developers in Silicon Valley, he will also know that he can charge $100 per
hour, over-deliver and still be cheaper than a bootcamp-JS guy.

Yet Toptal will negotiate a rate of $25 (or thereabouts), based on some
average-pricing they use and justifying that "this is what most devs charge in
your area, so $100 per hour will be too high, simply cause you're in India".

Also, this is a new account asking this question... It got me wondering
whether this is some backhanded marketing-PR for gigster.

------
WaltPurvis
I can confirm that Upwork is an unmitigated disaster. As someone trying to get
started and hire a contractor, I couldn't figure how to do some very basic
things. It's truly mind-boggling how bad it is.

Everyone involved in the design and programming should be placed on some kind
of industry Do-Not-Hire list.

> the only reason anyone's still using them is the lack of a better
> alternative

That, however, is not true. Freelancer.com has been around forever and is much
better. (By which I mean it's functional — a vast improvement over Upwork.)

~~~
onedev
You really have a way with words. I loved reading your comment.

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logn
My thoughts for a good freelancer platform (after having used them
extensively) --

1\. Require specs. If needed make this be marketplace listed work too, to
write a spec.

2\. Require flat-priced projects. Site moderators will handle scope-creep
disputes.

3\. Track each project's overall cost and analyze how much each developer
actually costs for projects.

I think this would help eliminate the problem that low cost hourly devs
sometimes make up for their pricing in quantity.

------
quickpost
I'm a freelance developer and I hire people to do small, well defined jobs for
me all the time from these sites (data entry, ms word to clean html
conversions, etc.).

I've used elance extensively and I'm very, VERY disappointed with how the
"transition" to upwork has gone. It is bordering on unusable and has added a
lot of difficulty to what should be a straightforward transaction. What a
disaster.

So yes, I would agree that there needs to be another competitor that is
straightforward to use and definitely an opportunity here. I feel like
Metcalfe's Law / network effects of the existing sites might be difficult to
overcome, but its worth a shot!

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sarciszewski
Thanks for the tip. I'm going to make one where the rates aren't disclosed in
the search feature, and billing options are only available in per-day and per-
week increments. :P

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Stephn_R
What about Gigster? [https://trygigster.com/](https://trygigster.com/)

They are part of the Summer Class of 2015 for Y-Combinator and are really
promising. You basically sign up to be a Gigster and then get paired with gigs
that pay. Within a week you could be up and running with real projects that
actually pay.

Gigster handles all the PM and HR related functions of a business and quickly
gets jobs to you so you can start right away.

------
nmquirk
Has anyone here even made any money from these sites? I looked at them a
couple times to earn some beer money. The jobs are always vague or the low
rates offered by some programmers makes the market less appealing.

~~~
gs7
I started looking for freelance jobs on Elance at the end of June for fun.
I've since completed 7 super simple tasks and made $1200. It's definitely a
race to the bottom and I'm lucky to have a cushy fulltime web developer job
because it'd be hard to live off of Elance earnings alone. But as a hobby it's
not bad. Completely agree though, clients tend to be super vague in their job
listings and their budgets are miniscule. Every once in a while I find a gem
though and it can be satisfying to help someone out remotely for some extra
cash.

~~~
PopeOfNope
Do you have any ideas on what changes could be made to make it less of a race
to the bottom? Charge a fee to post jobs? Enforce a minimum $/hr?

~~~
gs7
I honestly don't know if it's possible or even something that should be
prevented. There will always be people in countries with lower costs of living
that can offer to do a job remotely for cheaper. I don't know if it's fair
necessarily to exclude them and keep pricing higher artificially just for our
(developers) benefit. This is supply and demand on a global scale.
Fortunately, I found that overseas developers who offer to do those jobs for
pennies also often deliver subpar quality and have poor communication skills.
That's where I can stand out and capitalize on that competitive advantage.
Clients that want to pay ridiculously low amounts for huge, complex tasks are
clients I don't want to work with anyways. They tend to be a giant pain in the
ass. The overseas developers can gladly take them. Clients that know the value
of my more expensive rates are the ones that tend to be easier to work with
and have less unreasonable expectations. It's just a matter of trying to find
those clients that get it.

~~~
PopeOfNope
> Clients that know the value of my more expensive rates are the ones that
> tend to be easier to work with and have less unreasonable expectations. It's
> just a matter of trying to find those clients that get it.

Based on your previous post, it doesn't sound like you get these kinds of
clients on elance often. That makes perfect sense to me; elance and odesk have
a reputation of being race to the bottom sites, so why would somebody go there
looking for quality devs?

Thinking about this some more, it's possible the site I wished existed isn't
in the same field as odesk and elance. Those tend to be for shorter, cheaper
projects. What I'm looking for is a marketplace for higher end freelance devs,
so it's easier for work to find me and so somebody else handles all the escrow
details.

~~~
gs7
Absolutely. I skim every single job posting under web programming on Elance
and sometimes a week goes by before one shows up that's promising enough to
apply to. It's not ideal, but to me this is fine right now because I'm really
just doing this as a hobby. I like the short and sub-$500 fixed price projects
because it allows me to test the waters with a new client. If they are too
annoying to work with, I get the job done quickly and move on. My goal is to
pick up recurring clients this way over time that have already been vetted by
me with these smaller projects. For that Elance is not too bad. Upwork on the
other hand is a huge mess...

There are definitely some sites out there that help higher end developers and
clients to find each other. I see gun.io mentioned a lot. Someone posted about
trygigster.com here too. The problem I have with those sites is that they
focus too much on the top 5% of developers and huge company clients. There are
plenty of competent freelancers that aren't rockstar developers and many good
clients that aren't Fortune 500 businesses. It seems there isn't a marketplace
for those mid-range freelancers and clients. I'd love a site like that!

------
andy
What about freelancer.com? (formerly vworker)

~~~
moepstar
Freelancer.com isn't "former VWorker".

VWorker.com (which was formerly rentacoder.com) has been bought up by
Freelancer.com, which co-existed for some time.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VWorker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VWorker)

------
1123581321
It's the perfect chance for a newer platform that already exists. If people
are leaving because of trust issues, then they will go somewhere that people
can already recommend which means it needs to already be released and have
some customers.

~~~
ehhe
It's not the trust issues, it's that the current platform is literally doesn't
work most of the time.

But I do agree with you, a newer platform that already exists probably has a
better chance. All they need is some marketing directed at frustrated upwork
users.

------
1arity
Excellent. Thank you for this. Perfect timing.

------
flowctrl
freelancer.com is a similar, race-to-the-bottom type of system.

------
bbeneschott
Background: I am the COO of Toptal

While these technical problems with Upwork’s platform certainly do seem very
problematic, I’m not sure that “now is the time to roll out a new freelance
platform” is the right conclusion, at least not without some revision.

\- For starters, there are plenty of open freelance marketplaces out there
that operate pretty much exactly in the same way as Upwork (Freelancer.com,
for example). Some are more specialized (like 99designs), but in general the
list is pretty endless. Adding another identical platform to the mix is
unlikely to accomplish much.

\- The real issue is that the operating model for freelance platforms has been
broken. This has been the case for a long time, and is unrelated to Upwork’s
technical issues.

The open marketplace model falls short in several ways, many of which relate
to the “race to the bottom” phenomenon that other responses here mention:

For companies:

a. There’s no quality assurance and profiles/test scores can be fabricated.

b. You have to deal with a large volume of bids, and sifting through them
defeats one of the top reasons people hire freelancers: to move fast.

c. There’s very little in the way of protection on any engagement. The risk of
your project getting botched by someone incompetent or your freelancer
disappearing is significant.

For freelancers:

a. Talented professionals have to deal with absurdly low bids from unqualified
people. Many freelancers are forced to lower their rate to below what they’re
worth just to get any work.

b. The large volume of bids for most projects means that it can be much
tougher to stand out. The most talented freelancers are often the worst self-
promoters.

c. There’s no protection from clients with unrealistic expectations.

Long-term, these are the problems that successful freelance models will need
to be able to solve at scale. Is this doable? I certainly think so - it’s what
we’ve been working on at Toptal. Here’s what we believe the solution looks
like, and therefore how we’ve built Toptal to behave:

\- All engagements need to solve these problems both for freelancers and for
clients. Clients are looking for great freelancers and freelancers are looking
for great clients. Therefore the solution is to thoroughly vet both
freelancers AND clients.

\- Vetting must be rigorous and done in a non-automated, non-riggable,
extremely thorough way. Freelancers must be able to set their own rates and
not have to worry about low-bid contests. Only clients with serious projects
who are ready to pay freelancers what they’re worth need apply. No race to the
bottom.

\- There must be a high level of support during ALL engagements, even at
scale. Clients should only meet freelancers who were handpicked for their
project, and vice versa. This also solves the problem of high bid volumes.

\- Support should continue throughout the engagement to resolve conflicts and
ensure success.

This is exactly how Toptal has operated for several years now for freelance
software developers, and it has worked quite well--even though we made some
mistakes along the way. While this has been primarily in the software
development space thus far, the principles apply to other types of freelance
work as well.

Bottom line: Upwork’s technical issues are certainly problematic, but there
are larger issues that freelance platform models will need to solve in the
long run.

~~~
some-coder
Still I earn $40-50/h on Upwork while being from Eastern Europe and TopTal
limits me to $25/h because "well, people in your region are poor, you should
be poor too".

~~~
bbeneschott
This is most certainly false. If this actually happened to you, email me:
breanden@toptal.com.

