Hi there, I'm the CEO of Freelancer.com. I'd be interested to know what problem you ran into?
* Extreme difficulty communicating with clients on the site during the bidding process. If there's a way to discuss terms and details on a prospective project, I haven't found it yet.
* Getting paid, in the US, is difficult, expensive, slow, and impossible to automate. (It was none of those things on vWorker).
* The vibe of the site is incompatible with high quality, professional contracting. If I send clients to your site, they don't hear about cost and schedule and deliverables. They get asked to follow you on twitter so they can level up and win a free t-shirt.
* No sub-accounts. I can't give an administrative assistant or subcontractor partial access to my account; it's either cut and paste or give out the master password.
* The whole setup seems geared toward people with a very different business philosophy than me -- hundreds of bids per month, dozens of skills on your profile, tens of client relationships. And if I work hard, I could get more of all of those things! That actively drives me away. I have dozens of skills, but I only want to list one or two. I want to make one or two bids per month. I want to work with one client at a time. Overall, the system says to me, "This is a place for spammy contractors to take tiny jobs," not, "This is a place for serious professionals to do quality work."
Really, what it comes down to from my perspective is that freelancer is not geared toward the type of freelancing we're trying to do: making a living as professionals in a first-world country.
As professionals, we have reason to want to grant limited account access to a secretary, accountant, or sub-contractor. This feature existed on vWorker, but not Freelancer.
As professionals, we want to be rated and visible based on delivering quality work on time and on budget and making our clients happy. On vWorker, ranking/visibility was based entirely on revenue x client rating, with a bonus "top worker" designation for never missing a deadline or having a bad rating. On Freelancer, we level up by following you on social media, get badges for logging in every day for a year, and generally get ranked according to tangential criteria. It's distracting, and appears unprofessional to clients who are being asked to "level up" and "earn badges" themselves when all they want to do is hire us.
As professionals, we don't bid until we've already come to terms with the client. On vWorker, we'd regularly have dozens of messages with clients establishing the details of a project, discussing timelines, etc. and then we'd put in a bid with that full understanding. Freelancer seems geared toward submitting a large number of bids without having ever really discussed terms -- the sort of thing that might work for "transcribe a 10 minute audio clip", but not for projects measured in months and costing $x0,000 to complete.
As professionals, we want to pay our $50 monthly fee and our 2% per-contract cut, use the site to connect with clients with real large-scale contracts, and get paid on a reasonable timescale. Trying to do that on freelancer is an exercise in frustration.
Thanks for your feedback. Some of the vWorker freelancers I agree were exceptional - this is why they are now at the top of the leaderboard in many categories. vWorker users earnings are, on a whole, up about 50% post acquisition from what they were before. If you send me an email I can look into your accounts and see if I can make a recommendation for you, if you like (my email is easy to guess @freelancer.com).
Re/ sub-accounts, we are looking at this, the actual use on vWorker was very low (less than ~500 users out of 2.5m). This is why we haven't implemented yet. We are looking at it, however.
You are mixing up the Freelancer leveling system with reputation. Reputation is completely distinct. Reputation is simply volume (dollar) weighted ratings on a per category basis. Thus the highest rated, most paid freelancers are at the top of reputation for a given skill. The gamification system is completely distinct and has no influence on the bid list, this is purely like a frequently flyer program in giving back perks to users who are good on the site (as distinct to those good at work).
Yes, we are a much bigger marketplace than vWorker. So there are more bidders, but also substantially more projects. We do have projects that are well over $250,000 on an ongoing basis.
No platform charges 2%. vWorker charged 15% flat. You can get down to 3% on Freelancer, the lowest commission in the industry for $49.95.
If you get in contact with me, I will see how I can help.
Regards Matt
This sort of confusion suggests the leveling system is far more prominent, and therefore distracting, than it needs to be.
* If you post a project on something like C++, Android, iOS or web design you get about 10 generic bids in the first minute. I suspect some coders use bots to bid on certain categories. This should be strictly prohibited.
* Not sure how you can stop the coders to bid so low, when a guy bids $30 for 2 - 3 days of work the quality of his work can't be that great. Maybe enforcing some minimum bid limit ? I know this is a hard problem to solve.
* Another problem that seems to keep the prices and quality down: coders that take a project and repost it with a much lower price.
* A buyer should be forced to describe what he needs in the project description. Generic projects like Easy work, it can be done by an expert in a few hours. Details after you bid. should also be prohibited. These kind of projects keep the prices and the quality of the work down for everyone.
Thanks for the feedback
1) Yes we are trying to crack down on the bid spam. However the marketplace is very liquid you will also almost always find that there is actually someone at the other end, so when you get 10 bids in 60 seconds if you start to chat there is a human at the other end. We get almost 1 million bids per month now. No other marketplace on the Internet comes close to liquidity (about 950k/mo now). This is great for finding people quickly and getting the right price for your project.
2) Well 5 billion people on this planet live on $8 day or less, I think you can't say just because someone is willing to work for 2-3 days for $30 they are automatically "bad".
3) Labour arbitrage is something we are looking at. It usually does not result in lower quality, quite the contrary, because the guys doing the arbitrage (flipping projects) need to retain a high reputation score or they will blow their accounts up and the business model will stop working. Right now they are acting as quality and customer service managers so they actually enhance the result for the end user.
4) Yes I absolutely agree, and we are looking into how this can be done better.
Regards Matt
91 emails in the course of 13 days is not acceptable, and it just suddenly started. I figured out how to disable it, but you might want to look into it.
We have thousands of projects per day posted. We need probably better fine grained control over the timing of these emails, I can tell you that if we send less emails we get complaints, if we send more we get complaints! We have to perhaps let the user decide the frequency.
The special notification on the other hand is very useful, it should be sent more.
I really liked vWorker, but I actively avoid freelancer, and the gamification is the biggest reason.
My bad reaction is actually from a conversation I had with a couple clients I had sent to the site -- they saw their own "level", I guess, and were rather put off by the whole thing. Not that I blame them; I find it pretty tacky, too. Hence I've been avoiding bringing new clients to the site.
It kind of says "we are for the sort of people who will jump through hoops to get a free article of clothing"
Perks and rewards are OK, but the prominence the XP/Badge/level system is given presents a very unprofessional image to potential clients. It's a distraction, a sideshow that's given center stage. I'd love to do enough professional-grade work on freelancer to earn a quick chat/consult with you (or even something like a free t-shirt), but I don't want the site inundating me and my clients with bullshit that doesn't add to either of our bottom lines. Our business relationship is not a game, but Freelancer surrounds it with excessive of game terminology and game mechanics, which gives off an air of "this place isn't for serious developers".
We had a client with us on vWorker. When we all transitioned to Freelancer, we thought "great -- lower fees and an easier to use website!" Their first login, they saw all the XP-level stuff and bailed. They simply weren't willing to conduct business on a website that seemed to treat everything like a game.
When you're running a serious business, perception matters. As you can see from this HN thread, some people who made the transition have a negative perception of the confusing, distracting sideshow of the XP system. It wouldn't be so bad if it was phrased in a more neutral way, like "Freelancer rewards". But giving something phrased in game terminology so much prominence is a big turnoff for some of us.
Of course, I don't have access to your internal metrics or split tests. Maybe the terminology works out as a net positive; maybe the people who like it engage enough more to make up for those who left because of it. I can't speak for your entire client base, only my little corner of it. And my little corner of it would be doing more business through Freelancer if the gamey stuff wasn't so prominently featured.
Never used your service, but I did use 99designs to design and build a site recently. And I can tell you that as soon as I got my design, I told the designer to email me and then I payed him through paypal for the design and for the website work. I was out some money to 99designs, but I was happier that random Indian dude got most of the money.
I think I have an account with freelancer.com, but the site comes off as so bloated to me that you need to be a regular to really navigate through it.
Regards Matt