Freelance Inbox
freelanceinbox.com
freelanceinbox.com
And frankly, most advertised freelance jobs are bottom feeders who just want cheap and fast. With this type of service, there's no big incentive for the service to avoid listing those jobs.
I'd much rather the placement service take a percentage, say 10 or 15% of the total. Then, the incentives are lined up right. They'll look for the highest paying jobs, avoid bottom feeders, and they'll be sure to give the job to the best performer in whatever sub-specialty area (say Python desktop apps).
Then comes ridiculous measures like the screen grabbers and the 3rd party holding your onto your payment etc.
I understand the curation value proposition the site has, but if the clients in question get 100s of qualified responses, I might as well not bother.
Here's an interesting idea: Is there some way for this service to prevent unprofessional and scammy developers from spamming my leads? That kind of behavior is very common in the freelance market, and it effectively poisons potential clients for the good freelancers.
To some extent, the paywall will cut down on the number of low-quality freelancers. But in my experience, they're a plague even on some paid sites.
That's a really fair question. It's a little interesting that someone posted this today as in the very near future, some of these concerns are going to be addressed...
The goal is to create a system whereby those developers who are willing to pay and become quality members of the community are greatly benefited. I realize this can only happen though if the community isn't too large. The community will have two caps, one for basic members (200) and another for pro members (150). When the community is full, anyone who wants to signup will be put on a waiting list.
Community members have the advantage of having a continual fresh stream of leads gathered from throughout the internet. For these leads, the competition is completely open. They also, however, have exclusive first access to leads posted straight to the community, as well as well as other benefits which will be revealed soon.
This isn't a very thorough answer, but if you check back in on Thursday, you'll find more details. Or if you can't wait, shoot me an email kesler@freelanceinbox.com and I can give you greater detail.
Let's say I give you 29$/mo, what is there to stop you from sending the same 3 projects to 500 other devs who have also checked the 'Ruby' box?
Each member also gets to specify what leads they are interested in, so that spreads leads around as well.
EDIT: Didn't realise it hadn't also been posted to Hacker News already. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7901640
A couple of things hurt the credibility IMO:
* "Client has $300+ budget" < This gives a very bad impression. I wouldn't want to hear from any client who has a budget in the vicinity of $300.
* Wordpress, PHP, Website Dev (?) but no Clojure, Scala, Haskell. < There might not be many jobs, but I think adding (and catering to) these groups will make your brand a better one.
* 60+ leads a month for less than $1 a day < I don't get the math here, you can send 99999+ leads and none of them would make sense to me. I would instead highlight the 100% satisfaction guarantee. And while you are at it, why don't you make it a 3 months money-back guarantee. If people get some good leads, even if none them turns into a job, I don't think many of them will ask their money back. Provided that you move away from the bottom-feeder market of course.
Best of luck!
But there's one essential problem: you are selling a limited resource for a very low price, which will cause problems later on. And the rate is unreasonably low.
First, the easy bit. What is $29/mo to a decent freelancer? One hour of work for a beginner. And (ideally) the value the person gets back is at $300-$X000. So if it gives such a massive value, why pay so little? The users would be happy to pay more.
$29/h is not much, and it will take a while to make it sustainable. So your motivation is to grow user base. But growing user base would increase competition and will make it worse for your users. By charging more, you could focus more on your value proposition, spend more times on leads rather than new users.
Also, I wouldn't commit to X leads/day. Leads are finite and limited. Would I be happy if you promise 5 weekly leads and you deliver 10? Yes. Would I be happy if you promise 20 weekly leads and deliver 15? No, you under delivered, I didn't sign for this. Under promise and over deliver is much better.
And distributing leads is another problem. But you would have to grow a bit to actually face this problem.
All in all, I like your idea and had a little fun writing this comment :) if you want to chat a bit more about, my contacts are in my profile.
[0] Only one thing I didn't like. "Are you passionate about finding leads? Is 10 hours of your time worth more than $29? Do you have too much time on your hands?". The first 2 questions put me in a nodding mood and when I read the last one: wtf...? It's not emotionally consistent (I just made up this name).
You raise a lot of good points. I'll be in touch.
Why not 10 (or so) leads a month? It would take time to work on those leads, no?
Not that the frequency is too important or that fewer leads mean higher quality leads. I'm just playing with the idea from a client's perspective. Wouldn't it be less disruptive if you got the leads emailed you less frequently?
1. Enable higher budgets, such as $10,000.
2. Enable more tech choices, such as Ember, Elixir, Erlang.
3. Enable future date ranges to help with better planning.
I also agree on the higher budgets being required. For longer-term projects, even $10,000 buys absolutely nothing. For some folks, that doesn't even buy a week of their time.
*On Thursday, Freelance Inbox will have a big announcement that will alleviate concerns like yours going forward. As fair warning, you might want to claim a spot early :)
Also, is there some "I'm busy" functionality I can tick, when I know, that I won't be available for lets say 2 months? If you're going to evenly distribute the leads among the freelancers, it wouldn't make sense sending me those, when i won't answer any.
I signed up for Freelance Inbox because I was frustrated with sifting through all the awful leads on job boards. In hindsight, I didn't know how to identify a good lead even if I found one. When the first Daily Leads email landed in my inbox, I thought "Oh, okay. So these are what good leads look like."
The $29/month provides a steady stream of freelancing opportunities, as if I had a virtual assistant finding leads for me Monday - Friday. Now I can spend my time responding to well-written, serious leads while patiently building freelancer/client relationships.
My experience with Workshop was that leads were good, just not for me. I really needed more solid and fatter clients.
Also, a slight nitpick, the audio bell on the "Contact Us" is a little bit annoying.
"Each weekday by 10:30am PST, we send at least 3 of these leads to you."
Then further down:
"Each weekday by 9:30am (PST) you will receive at least 3 leads in your inbox ..."
9:30 am or 10:30 am, which is it?