I've been with Matchist for about a year, but have been pretty disappointed with the projects thus far: I've been contacted for about 10 ill-specified integrations with their Zapier partner, and a couple of Salesforce projects. I haven't gotten a single lead that has anything to do with my advertised skills (web development in a variety of platforms). One way to look at the projects I'm getting matched to is as a sign of the market as a whole and that I should give up my experience with Rails, Node and other modern technologies in favor of Zapier. That seems like a questionable conclusion to draw from limited evidence.
I think Matchist and other sites like it fill a real need - matching developers with contracts and doing some preliminary vetting on both sides of the table. I wish them well. I've said many times on here I would gladly pay a sizeable cut for an agent to keep my pipeline full of suitable work (web development I can do on nights and weekends), but I have yet to find anything that really works.
As co-founder of matchist, and more importantly, a past freelance web developer of many years, your comment makes me pretty sad. The fact that we're not helping you the way you need to be helped is a problem.
First, I encourage you to please email me (tim at matchist) and share any/all feedback you have regarding us sourcing you clients. Specifically, I'd love to learn more about how/why you feel the projects we're sending your way have nothing to do with your advertised skills.
Second, I know we're not perfect in the "finding the absolute perfect clients" department yet. Every day, we work on ways to get better in that area. Feedback from developers like yourself helps immensely.
Interesting, thanks for the insight. Zapier is still limited and therefore shouldn't be seen as a replacement for Rails and the like.
I imagine it would be hard to have an agent that can keep a steady flow of work coming in since 1) the agent would most likely want to have multiple developers (that just turns into a Matchist type service) and 2) constant communication would be needed. I have a thought of running a service that finds projects and deals with the actual clients but never really got much interest from others.
Zapier is absolutely not a replacement for Rails. It is, however, all Matchist seems to pitch. I'm sure that they get a lot of clients asking for that sort of work, and that their projects are representative of that particular market. My point is, that's a market I have little interest in entering right now. Think of the difference between e.g. Pivotal Labs and the local "computer store" that advertises web development below networking and VOIP. I want someone to help push me towards the Pivotal Labs end of the spectrum. I don't need the opportunity to compete with other developers for low-value, low-skill work. I would like to pay for the opportunity to work on challenging, career-furthering projects that aren't the coding equivalent of "wham, bam, thank you RAM." That opportunity could take the shape of an agent.
I have two counterpoints in favor of the agent idea. Let's say I sign up with Al the Agent. Al's responsibilities can be roughly described as business development for an individual - i.e. me. I'd like it if Al could talk to me periodically, find out what I do and what I'd like to do, and keep putting opportunities for appropriate contract work in front of me. That's MVP. There's lots of room for improvement and other services, but MVP is literally someone else pounding the pavement. Now, to my counterpoints.
First, I don't care if Al has multiple developers. I only care that he can keep my pipeline full when I need it. Sports, film, television, music - all these other fields use agents, and those agents represent multiple clients in controlled ways. I don't care if Al represents 10 other developers, and in a way, I hope he does - it raises his profile (and, implicitly, mine). As long as he's still able to adequately meet my needs, I'm happy. If he starts pitching low-value WordPress theming (something I have no interest in), I'll sever the agreement. Even if this agency did turn into a Matchist-type service (which it needn't), that would not be a bad thing. As long as it doesn't turn into another boss, I'm happy.
Second, constant communication isn't really necessary. I can just talk to Al on a weekly basis, tell him what's going on, what I'd like to do, when I'll need more work, when I'm going to be on vacation, etc. That's not a taxing amount of communication, especially since I'm willing to make the economics work with a large percentage cut. I have a very limited amount of time I can put towards moonlighting (roughly 20 hours a week). If someone can help me do more profitable things (e.g. coding for money) with those hours, I'm happy to share the spoils. The common wisdom on HN is that a good developer can command somewhere around $100/hr for freelance work, which doesn't seem exaggerated since SV salaries can easily push $70/hr before benefits. If Al can get me 20 hours of work a week at $100/hr, I'm happy to cut him a big slice of that pie if he's willing to do that sort of communication.
To reiterate, I encourage you to shoot me an email (tim at matchist) to address you getting irrelevant or uninteresting work from us.
We have the type of work you're looking for (the Pivotal Labs work in your analogy) and we have the integration type work that you seem to not want a part of (which is fine). If you don't want a ton of Zapier work and you're getting a ton of Zapier work, that's not how our service is designed to work.
This sounds like a case of your preferences not being represented properly in our system.
Hey Barton! Zapier co-founder here, is there anything we could do when we refer customers to Matchist that would help you spec out these integrations? We've found Matchist to be quite nice when customers know what they want, but I'm curious what its like on the other side.
