What with timezones and night owls, it may be hard to reach someone by phone. Plus not everyone has a dedicated business line.
Anon-forward email would be great. Just for the initial connection, after that you are correct, it's all phone.
So maybe a form to let the client enter a phone number and a best time to call (including timezone), and send that to the freelancer?
(I would love to list myself, except I'm booked right now.)
Good point about best time to call. Will add that field. In future we'll let you customize what hours to accept calls. If someone calls you off-hours, it'll tell them to try again between your hours.
Thanks for the feedback!
Filtering out the freelancers who don't have a dedicated business line and who aren't reachable by phone is a good service to provide to your clients, and it is a reason I'd use tekbob over any number of your competitors.
There is no excuse not to have a phone number. Get google voice and Skype. As a freelancer you are in the customer service industry, one. Two, your competitors have phone numbers.
I regularly look for people to subcontract work to and I persons's skills or experience are great but if I can't call them and reach them by phone to have a conversation, that is an immense disadvantage when I'm comparing one worker to another.
That's been my experience as a developer. I can credit so many deals to being the first guy to get on the phone with the client.
More likely there are many different segments in this market. I can easily see why some folks almost expect email. But I think I am going after a very specific segment of contractors/clients who like to get on the phone. It may or may not work the way I've implemented. We'll see.