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How Can I Make My Dog Food Taste Better?

1 pointjaredbrown4 comments

I'm a freelance developer. I'm always looking for other talented developers and designers, like the ones that read HN, to help on my projects. But I have a lot of trouble finding them. Job boards and resume search sites are too expensive. elance and other sites like it are full of outsourcing companies and are rigidly structured for quote/bid projects.

What I need is a site that's free to search and has quality developers and designers posting their resumes, work samples, etc. I think there needs to be some sort of community validation of the users so they are validated as well.

So I started building a site to serve as an open directory of talent.

At the moment anyone can sign up and post their resume.

What should I do to attract/foster talented designers and developers to the site? Should I make sign up by invitation only? Should the site be limited to only IT professionals? Should I allow users to post code and graphic snippets as sample work? Should all users need to get x number of recommendations before they appear in search results?

In real life, freelancers rely on referrals to get good work. I know that I have a small rolodex of people I send people to -- including a preferred designer, a preferred JavaScript guy, etc.

What would be cool is if you made it invite only - but also showed the graph of invites & connections. So, for example, I know that if I invited my designer friend, I would be judged based on her work. This velvet rope could help recreate the quality threshold we all experience in the real world.

To keep it being a second-class LinkedIn, you could limit referrals -- say, you only get x every year, or you can only recommend x people per field. Imposing a cost on referrals / connections could keep people using them in the best way -- not like the people on LinkedIn with 1000 connections.

Great points. I think limiting the invites is key. What do you think about posting your resume and sample works on the site?

One approach or "philosophy" which seems effective on other sites is to aggressively favor relevance/visibility on the basis of past recommendations or some other metric. So, creating not a high barrier to entry, but a way to screen out new entrants until they have X factors behind them - maybe a certain number of examples, or a certain amount of information associated with them.

That's a good point and it is how I believe workingwithrails.com has handled this. You are ranked by the number of recommendations you have. That way new users who are unvetted do not rise to the top. Though in my experience recommendations are generally short and weak in their content. Maybe a system where users can say if they have worked with the person and if they would work with them again would be good.

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