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Show HN: Handpicked freelance projects delivered every Monday

pipelinedaily.com

39 pointsPipeliners13 comments

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.

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!

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!

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...

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!

Why not hire for the 1.0 version through pipeline?

Yep we're going to send that out in next week's email too, but as a 'bonus' lead (as we make sure that for normal leads, no more than 3 people max receive the same lead).

Glad someone spotted that heh!

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.

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?

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.

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).

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 ...

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

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