Good feedback - we can incorporate these answers into our marketing materials.
1) How does it work once someone submits that typeform? what is your criteria for approval?
We do some basic screening that the person says who they are. However, we accept a variety of backgrounds - you can see that, on this week's Orbit, hourly rates ranged from $20 to $150/hour.
We keep Moonlight more of a pure marketplace. Multiple contractors can submit proposals on a project, and the client chooses who to work with. Proposals are structured and short - what's your rate, how many hours do you think it will take you, and why are you a good fit for the job. We've found that clients care more about relevant experience than pure cost. Average hourly rate has been over $100/hour thus far.
2) Who decided the hourly rate for the contractor? You or the Contractor?
The contractor sets their own rate. Moonlight adds a 15% fee on top, paid by the client. As I described in our proposal system above, it really is a pure marketplace - the customer determines whether the cost is aligned with value.
3) The Orbit landing page says "Richa S 165$ / hour", "Jacob L" 150$ / hour. Are these real people or placeholders? Cos I couldn't click them to view their profile.
We recently built out a lot of landing pages (see our sitemap.xml). We also value privacy of our contractors, so contractors only get added to the marketing website when they opt into being featured. So, I wrote a system that fills in contractors on landing pages by finding real contractors with the matched skills, then backfilling with pseudo-identities. However, I just realized that the Orbit page had a misconfiguration that caused only pseudoidentities to be filled in - so I'm pushing a fix now that should fix this and make 100% of the contractors on the Orbit page real.
Regarding "I couldn't click them to view their profile"- in the spirit of YC's "build things that don't scale", we've been running Moonlight off of spreadsheets and emails as we navigate product/market fit. This process has started to become painful recently, though - so we're working on an app, which should be online this month.
4) How much of the "165$ / hour" does Richa S get once approved by a client for work, assuming you (moonlightwork) take a cut. Is that negotiable between you and the contractor? Is it a 1 time fee or on-going based on the hourly rate?
The client pays a 15% processing fee in addition to the contractor's hourly rate. The contractor gets paid their full stated hourly rate via direct deposit.
5) Is the work done as 1099 Contractors? or W2?
1099 for USA-based contractors. We use Payable to provide the 1099.
6) Anything else you can add here, that will help potential prospects decide if this is worth applying for.
We're trying to make it as low friction as possible. If you're a contractor - you can just sign up and see what kind of matches you get. If you're a company, you can now sign up for Orbit and see what kind of talent is available and at what cost.