Impressive team behind this. Excited to see what they cook up.
670 karma · joined September 2, 2010
"The salary is not competitive" hints that you may not be happy with your compensation across the board.
Don't look at equity any different than cash. It's a more complicated asset, as there is less certainty about its future value compared to the dollar -- but at the end of the day it's compensation, just like cash.
If you aren't happy and motivated by your compensation you should negotiate harder or find a new role. Your career and this startup will both be better off for it.
I just signed up and am very confused on what I can do. I see a feed of albums from strangers, but there's no way to listen to it. If I want to add music, I have to copy and paste links shown at the top of my screen (they're not even hyperlinked).
If I'm discovering music: - I want a quick/easy way to listen to what's in front of me - I want a quick/easy way to get recs from friends
If I'm sharing music: - I want a quick way to share music
I feel like these are your core experiences and I'm having trouble finding my path through any of them. I see there's a browser extension and a bunch of community features, but the first user experience (at least on web) for any of those core paths above isn't there.
Can you deliver on one of those paths in a really easy way? Looks like you've already got tie ins with discogs. Can you start with just a spotify web player? I think the preview of a song can be made available publicly, which would at least get a delightful enough first experience for listeners (listen to what you see if it looks interesting -- not sure many would "save" without that or at least some solid meta data)
I want what I think this product is supposed (based on your description) to be to exist, so I hope this feedback is helpful.
Edit: Signed out and noticed you have "continue with spotify" on the logged out / sign in page https://digs.fm/users/sign_in -- that wasn't available on your home page https://digs.fm/. I would've signed up with spotify if available and maybe that would've exposed clearer UX?
For personal, I'm trying my best to text people when they come to mind. I always appreciate when someone does that to me.
For business, I'm trying https://www.strata.cc/, which uses your email history to nudge you to reconnect with people. I'm just starting to use it but has already made some spot on recommendations in the first couple of weeks.
I’m not sure the conclusion applies for all cases. It may too easy to get lost in a thread behind an attachment.
Once I got used to it, iMessage’s UX has held up best (posting twice — once in focused thread and again in main thread). Not sure actual post has to happen in both places, but at least the activity should, otherwise there’s too high a risk to lose something or to have context switching set too high a friction bar.
Our marketing website cycles have gotten so much shorter with Webflow. Even though it's just replacing HTML/CSS/JS for marketing sites, the direct design and publish access in a way that's intuitive and reliable saves us time directly on the marketing site (0 dev time now) and frees up dev to focus on more interesting things. We've gone from design -> develop -> commit/publish, to design + publish in one nice tool.
How long have you had it and how do you like it?
I'm surprised there isn't a modern/stylish chair that can compete with HM/Steelcase and hit the $400ish range. Maybe I just don't understand enough about the materials and manufacturing costs necessary, but seems like this should be doable -- and the deeper I research brands who try this (like Autonomous.ai), the more I read about the chairs being creaky, poppy, and sometimes uncomfortable.
A Casper/Purple/Saatva for office chairs seems ripe for this climate (WFH).
If you're not budget conscious, look at the Herman Miller Aeron, Steelcase Leap V2, Steelcase Gesture, or Humanscale Freedom. Budget, seems to be a serious crapshoot. Lots of people like the top end Ikea chairs and those will cost 1/4 as much, but depends on if they fit your body and if you're ok with rigid arms.
Steelcase Leap V2 seems like the winner to me. Most adjustable, with a soft seat (Aeron has hard edged bottom mesh... and looks like an insect). Humanscale Freedom with headrest looks best IMO but not as comfortable and couldn't find good remanufactured ones.
Lots of refurbished/second hand options.
I ended up going with a remanufactured (starts with refurbished, gets cleaned up nicely, reupholstered and rebuilt). Half price for a chair that I hope feels like new.
BTOD (https://www.btod.com/) and Crandall (https://www.crandalloffice.com/) look like they sell the same product (and Crandall is the "factory" for both). If you go this route, see what price works better for you after promo codes and tax are factored in.
I went with this BTOD Leap V2: https://www.btod.com/steelcase-leap-v2. Ordered yesterday. Fingers crossed that it feels like new.
I can't believe a great $300 or $400 (new) chair that's fully adjustable doesn't exist.
Think of it as debate, after which either you or the person you're debating with will learn something.
Debate makes for progress and understanding, and we shouldn't be afraid of it. But I completely understand where you're coming from, given the general social media climate today.
Even though my company focuses on front-end dev, we still use webflow for our marketing website because it's that easy.
They're by far the closest to achieving what Dreamweaver once set out to. Works best when used for marketing websites and when mixed with a basic respect for CSS.
(1) Idea > (2) Make page in something that feels like figma/sketch > (3) Publish ... is such a pleasant workflow.
We will absolutely branch out, but not sure on timing or specific skillsets.
Fixing what companies (Startups) and freelancers (React, React native, iOS, Android) are on Turtle lets us focus on our platform.
We believe the infrastructure is the biggest missing element in making remote, part-time work successful. Something as simple as how fast or reliably a chat message gets delivered becomes important in asynchronous work. Chat, tasks, meetings, payments, and vetting processes are the core elements of our platform today and these feel critical to any vertical. The vetting processes and meeting templates are the only unique pieces to each vertical.
Since most of our customers are technical, the non-visual demo is not a concern. We are more concerned with distracting ourselves away form focusing on the platform or outsourcing things that shouldn't be outsourced (ex: strategic, long-term impact decisions should not be outsourced. Co-founders should never be outsourced).
I would say the same about eBay. Would you rather bet on eBay or Amazon today?
> given their size, I trust them over some smaller operation
Fair enough, but "trust the biggest fish" is a dangerous assumption.
> P.S.: I read the OP’s naive writeup. He didn’t follow the platform rules and was surprised that it went against him. Shocking. $400 is a lesson to do more research next time. Maybe the platform rules suck?
Any self-respecting professional would think the random screenshots thing is creepy. If talent is vetted and to be trusted, the screenshots/camera thing should be unnecessary.
I mention what I think is necessary for a platform in any vertical to work. We just happen to already be doing it for our vertical.
> how is it really a race to the bottom?
- Just about everyone has a 4.5+ star review, so the cheapest 4.5+ star review looks objectively better to a Co trying to cut costs. Just like any review system, it can be gamed.
- Customers get preferential treatment. That's not a fair two-sided marketplace -- that's a race to the bottom, for whoever keeps the customers happy, including the bad ones.
- Look at average salaries/hourly fees for different fields and look at UpWork. That should be the clearest "race to the bottom" evidence.
> Maybe the vetting process could be better, but Upwork is the best contract to hire marketplace for a variety of work, IMO.
They're the biggest. That's about it. Read OP's write-up, ask other freelancers, ask other customers. UpWork is a lame excuse for what part-time, remote work has the potential to become in the economy.
(1) Great talent, (2) great customers, and (3) an easy to follow process (platform) are critical for making freelancing work. UpWork typically misses at least 2/3.
It's hard for any "we focus on everything" platform to get the specific needs of each vertical (customer + talent side) right. It's why TaskRabbit (focus on everything) never reached the scale of Uber/Lyft (press a button, get a ride).
I'm not deep in the Data Science world, but hopefully there's a platform focused on vetting customers + freelancers and providing a platform for working together easily, fairly, transparently (without the creepiness). Platforms should also decide what kind of work is fine to outsource. Long-term/strategic work the company has to live with for many years (i.e. a core prediction model or fundamental backend arch) shouldn't be outsourced. People who will see the benefits of their work in 5+ years should be the ones working on stuff that'll benefit the company in 5+ years.
I appreciate the mention of Turtle (https://www.turtle.dev/) in this thread already (I'm one of the founders).
For freelancers, Turtle: - Makes sure customers are vetted (just as freelancers are). - Pays for all hours billed (even if customers don't pay). Freelancers are trusted to enter all hours manually. No creepy screenshots. - Provides an easy-to-use platform for task management, chat, video, payments.
We're specifically focused on React, React Native, iOS, and Android dev now. Front-end/mobile is easier to compartmentalize. I'm not sure if that's possible for many forms of data science.
Part-time work is an important part of our economy and will become more important as the world further globalizes (ex: "Remote" now being a hot topic) -- but the infrastructure is seriously lacking. UpWork is a sloppy solution attempt.
I encourage freelancers, customers, and platforms to be honest about what should and shouldn't be outsourced, to make sure there's quality on both sides (great freelancers and shit customers fail), and to make sure there's an easy process to follow (great freelancers, customers, with shit process still fail).
100% remote. Startups can hire a vetted, high-end dev on Turtle for as little as $2K/mo. Freelancers say what tech stacks & hours they prefer. The magic is in our app (task manager + chat apps) and how we're able to help freelancers split their time between teams.
At this time, Turtle is geared towards Software Startups (mostly in the US) working with Freelancer Devs (mostly in South America and Europe). We will expand over time.
Freelancers SEEKING WORK: https://www.turtle.ai/freelancers Startups SEEKING FREELANCERS: https://www.turtle.ai/startups info about our app/process: https://www.turtle.ai/app-demo
Word-of-mouth is huge. Don't expect to get all your great devs at once. Hire a few, do right by them, and they'll help you reach others. Word-of-mouth has been our strongest referral engine yet.
Think about where your devs are most likely to be. Meetups? Conferences? Freelancer communities? Schools? Co-working spaces? Get there or find someone on the ground who can get to them.
A few tips:
(1) Be clear about why your work will be interesting. (2) Set up a process for flexibility (remote devs really value this). (3) Pay well. Mimic benefits in the markets you're hitting (example: if you're targeting Mountain View, consider giving your devs meals at restaurants serving better food than google).
Don't think of remote as a disadvantage (sounds a bit so from your post -- and from you jumping to advertising). Know that remote is seen as an advantage by money devs.
There are also a few remote job boards and twitter accounts but finding great devs within 20 miles or 2000 miles isn't all that different. Have interesting work, great process that doesn't get in the way, pay well, give freedom.
We absolutely have a hurdle with convincing most companies that output = output and that remote work is ok. Companies still put an unreasonable amount of value on butt-in-seat, 9-5 work.
Why? How can we get hiring managers and companies past this?
We try to convince with logic. We show what companies spend on hiring their own devs (20K+ hiring cost, 10-20K/mo salary). Startups tend to go hire-crazy after raising, but it's rare that they need to go 0 to 1 with full-time, local hiring. Going remote can save them a ton (on hourly and on not paying a salary for someone to twiddle their thumbs or show up before a boss does).
Our "easy way out" is to find companies who are already remote friendly. I remain convinced that this is a cultural hurdle we'll get over, but I'd be a liar if I told you I had timing perfectly predicted.
This is like the 10th time the news catches up to a surge only after there's actually been a quick drop (like today. BTC, ETH, LTC all down 5-6% over 24h).
The volatility itself (in crypto) creates amazing short turn-around opportunity for those willing to take some risks and set up basic limit buy/sells (gdax makes this very easy).
SaaS companies already pay for customer success / help -- if you can really offer help as low as 0.50 per minute, can't you just sell that to the SaaS owner?
I'm sure you've done your research and asked both sides, but that stuck out at me first. If I'm on Zapier and want help, I'm much more likely to reach out to Zapier to get help than to pay a 3rd party freelancer on Zapier to help me.
Do you mind if we start sharing this with the customer side at http://turtle.ai/? We have many non-tech customers and we teach them best practices for product management and working with developers -- a lot of your course content would be really useful for them as well.
> We think personalizing content is key. We customize the content that users see and make it game-like to encourage people to spend more time on concepts they’re struggling with.
Would it ever be possible for organizations to pre-define some content / content suggestions for their users? For example, we would want non-tech customers to get certain content and more technical customers to get different content. For freelancers, we'd want the content to be more product management / project management / communications focused.
Let me know if you have any plans to partner with companies who want to outsource some of the education of their customers. We think education is critical to our success or the success of any companies in our space (freelancer marketplace). If we can outsource the education component to a trusted partner, we would love to (and would pay for custom content or to supply our own content).
There should also be a discussion section.
For example, I see: >Can't find good replacement for expensive accounting/bookkeeper service
I'd love to recommend Bench.co (use it and love it) and avoid someone wasting their time. It's much more affordable than 500/mo.
I do love the concept though. @OP: I'll share this with the https://turtle.ai/ developer community and see if there is any interest.
Our customers are technical and non-technical. There is a lot of web and mobile app development work, but we've had some interesting projects on there already (ML, AI, even an app to stop your cat from locking up your keyboard when you watch movies.... haha).
I really like your focus. It's ridiculous that the infrastructure doesn't exist for a professional making 400K / year to make 100K / year for 25% the time (assuming skill is stagnant. if it improves, rates should adjust).
Drop me a line if you ever want to chat -- vlad (at) turtle.ai
Good luck!
Rephrased:
Isn't Gigster a seemingly more efficient way to build software? Why aren't there more companies like Gigster? Competitors to Gigster?
There should be. It is a more efficient way to build software. The market will reward Gigster, MoonlightWork, and Turtle.
We're in a similar space and more companies like yours need to exist.
I'm one of the cofounders at https://turtle.ai/
Our average paid out hourly rates have been lower than yours, but we make it REALLY easy for both sides to work together. We've built our own task manager and chat app that makes customer and freelancer lives easier.
We have a lot of PhD students and full time developers doing 5-15 hours per week on Turtle.
Good luck and we'll be looking out for you! More "alternative work" options need to exist. The 40-hour, butt-in-seat life needs to go (or other options have to at least exist).
Check out http://turtle.ai/
We've focused on building software that makes it really easy for "plug and play" software development work. We think 40 hours isn't perfect for every kind of engineering job. We even have some software developers delivering customers value in just a few hours per month.
You do need to be able to clearly say "here's what I'm doing, and here's when to expect results", but we also recruit customers that buy into our vision. Also, our software makes it really easy for both sides to keep smiling :)
There are solutions popping up that make freelancing much easier. UpWork is hit or miss, but an option. I co-founded https://turtle.ai/ -- we have a bunch of PhD students, developers with full time jobs. There are even a few people doing just a few hours per month.
We need to unlock ourselves from the mentality that "40 hours per week, butt in seat" is the only way to do work. The future of work is remote, flexible, results-driven.