I wasted some time testing those sites: freelancer, odesk and elance

here is my conclusion: whatever you do, you will always end up having problems with those kind of site.

Either the escrow can be reverted, or the site side with the "employer", how about installing that odesk thing that take a screenshot of your desktop every few minutes ? and on, and on, etc.

I worked as a freelancer without such web sites for 10+ years (both in France and UK), either solo by networking etc. or via an agent that was finding clients for me in exchange of a 20% commission (yes that's not a typo) and this was 10 times better that any freelancer web site.

So what is the real problem ?

you (the freelancer) are actually the product

so called "employers" can play the game "let's find the cheapest product" (eg. let's hire a freelancer that can work for $8/hour in some other country)

you can not do any margin with a competition toward "cheap" either you invoice per hour, so even if you do the job faster than someone else you just invoice the actual hours, or you bid on a fixed price which is also a race to lowest amount of money.

It is absolutely a no-win situation

as an individual or a company wether you're building web sites, applications, mobile apps, etc. all those things have high values it is absolutely OK to invoice more that the time it took you to do it eg. make a margin to make a living

also those sites tend to concentrate "bad clients" eg. the one who don't understand technology, why it cost so much to do this, why you can not build something complicated in 10 minutes, etc. exactly the kind of clients you try to avoid at all cost

odesk's time tracking app seems extremely scary ( watches keystrokes and takes screenshots ). Can't believe people actually install that thing.

I occasionally hire on Odesk and never require or even ask that the contractor use it. I refuse to use that feature. It's degrading for the worker. Digital slavery in a way.

Not extremely, but yes, it's unpleasant. It counts the keystrokes and mouse clicks to prove activity and it takes one screenshot every 10 minutes which you can delete, at the cost of the corresponding 10 minutes not being billed.

I try to stay away from sites like that in the first place, because I see wasting a lot of time building a reputation before getting actual work. It just never made sense to me.

The sites like Freelancer and oDesk are saturated with highly competitive, cheap developers from Asia anyway. It's annoying. Nothing against Asians, but I wouldn't try to dive into a pool of them to get work. It's unrealistic in most cases, because they eat up opportunity like machines -- in large numbers.

Better off just cold calling.

How do you cold call? Who do you cold call?

I worked for a medium-size web agency who used a third-party marketing company. That marketing company cold-called companies on their database, kept track of things like when they last had their website rebuilt, what technology they used, the features, the name of the decision-maker or person responsible for procurement, etc.

I believe the marketing company were on retainer by a number of web agencies, and when they found a lead, they referred it to the most appropriate agency (for a percentage commission) - the agency then continued the sales process (e.g. with a pitch, an RFP response, etc).

I suspect there are a few reasons this model worked:

* The marketing company maintained their database over the long term, so they could discuss previous developments, plans the customer was making, etc.

* Providing leads to a number of web agencies (rather than each agency having a small in-house telemarketing team) gave the marketing company a greater economy of scale, which meant they could afford to invest in tools and training that were specific to telemarketing.

* Providing leads to a number of web agencies allowed the marketing company to generate revenue (commission) from a more diverse set of needs, e.g. sharepoint projects to one agency, wordpress projects to a different agency, etc. If a small agency were doing their own telemarketing, their conversion rate would generally be lower, because they would end up missing out on potentials leads, from not having a particular specialisation.

That remark was mostly meant to be understood as a joke, but since you asked:

Depending on what you're doing, you can Google businesses that need help, get their contact details, and go to town. See a business with a busted site? Check for their contact details, call them up or email them, try to get a response, convince them of why they need you to build them a better site.

Cold call.

Just find a local web design agency, for example, and send them an email introducing yourself and asking for work. There's plenty of resources about this, shouldn't be a huge mystery.

Freelancer is awful. In fact all of those sites are. I made my living off Freelancer for a few years and I can't count the number of times they severely screwed me. I move to Elance which, although much better, has it's own issues. I try to find long-term clients on those sites and move the business away from them as quick as possible and that seems to work well.

ODesk is the least bad of the general sites. There are a few niche networks that are decent also, e.g. TopTal.com.

I agree. Odesk is decent.

My experiences with Freelancer.com were awful:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5177951

Does anybody have any experience with TopTal? Somebody (I guess a recruiter had just sent me an email inviting me there?)

I have worked with both elance and odesk. I shifted to Odesk after some issue with elance and never looked back.

What went wrong with Elance?

Without being rude, what sort of income is possible from those sites?

It's tough. Personally I know that I severely undervalued myself but it allowed me to work via email and not have to interact on the phone or in person with people which I had trouble with for a few years. I was able to make enough money to 'get by' In other words I just about covered my basic living costs for a small city in the UK. We're talking about £800-1300 per month which was fine as a single college aged guy. Eventually I got a few long term clients from those sites (I've been working with one guy for 3 years now) who I gradually raised my prices with until I was valuing myself fairly. I've moved off them completely now and am working in a startup which I much prefer (although I've kept on that one long-term client as the work is easy and he's easy to work with). I've lost the tremendous freedom freelance work gave me which I'm finding difficult but I don't have to stress about where my paycheck is coming from.

Thanks for your honesty.

When you say you undervalued yourself, what was the rate you were charging on freelancer?

I charged a price for the whole project. At the end of the day it probably worked out to $10 per hour. I started this when I was 18 so imposter syndrome was a big deal for me but over the next few years I gradually increased prices. At the end of the day though if I had bills I needed to pay I would take whatever work I could get and sometimes that meant bidding lower than the other guys. Eventually I got better at selling myself and convincing people that although I charged more than other bidders I was worth more. I think my biggest mistake as a freelancer was not charging hourly. I screwed myself quite a lot taking on projects that ended up being WAY more work that I thought.

I know a few hundred dollars here and there doesn't sound like a lot, but if you are doing it while living in a country with a favorable exchange rate (say, Brazil or Argentina), it becomes an easy way to earn a decent living. I've done it myself.

Even with favorable exchange rates, living in most metropolitan areas in Brazil is very expensive and you are likely to earn more working for Brazilian clients - right now unemployment is under 4% in general and almost inexistent in IT so wages are up.

The situation in Argentina is good if you get paid in cash because the black market pays twice the official (and artificial) rate. I guess it is not so good if you are being paid through a prepaid card like payoneer.

I assume you mean PPP ratio.

While PPP is probably most important exchange rates matter too. Most people tend to bid/pay in USD. So for me when the GBP/USD was right I could charge the same as usual in USD but that translated to more money in GBP.

When I was freelancing, I tried similar sites and stayed away. It is largely a race to the bottom in terms of prices, and writing unique cover letters consumes a lot of time.

I had much much better results with a monthly 'looking for a freelancer' thread on HN, and instead of writing the cover letters there, I spent time on studying and improving my skills.

This is Rishi, and I am the Co-Founder at http://dreamlance.io/

We are starting Dreamlance, a curated marketplace for projects and professionals.

Here are 3 ways how Dreamlance is different from all other “curated” marketplaces:

1. The Dreamlance Team actually vets each project that gets posted on our boards

- We make sure the project description is complete - We make sure the project deliverables are crystal clear - We make sure the project cost matches the effort required

We put in all this effort so that you don’t have to spend a third of your time qualifying leads. We qualify, prepare and polish them for you.

2. We provide a hassle-free & secure payments platform via escrow

- You begin work only when the project owner funds the agreed upon milestone - Once the conditions for the milestone completion are met, we release the funds to you

This way you don’t have to worry about chasing down unpaid invoices

3. We provide highly qualified assistance in resolving conflicts - In the event of a conflict of opinion between you and the project owner, we step in and provide unbiased arbitration - We ourselves have seen sticky situations in the middle of a project, and we believe our arbitration expertise will be of immense value to you

For these premium services, we would be charging you only 7.5% of the project cost, an industry low.

I strongly believe Dreamlance will soon become your preferred platform for professional freelancing.

To sign up with us, please visit http://dreamlance.io/apply

And we are happy to have your referrals :)

If you have any questions, please feel free to email me at rishi@dreamlance.io

"40% of all freelance projects end in dispute."

What is your source on that stat?

it says "7.5% of the project cost. Payable by the project owner and the freelance professional"

Does that mean that the freelancer and the project owner both pay 7.5% each?

"This fee needs to be paid by both the parties before their service contract commences." So I have to pay you to do work if I'm a contractor. Sounds like a great plan.

/sarcasm

Wow, that's a lot.

I own a company and have been using ODESK for the last six years. I have spent nearly 35,000 on above average programmers, their normal rate of pay is anywhere between 15 and 65.00 an hour. At first, i selected this site because it was a good source of low paid talent, but then I realized there were some really solid developers/programmers using the service.

I only really had problem with 2-3 guys who said they were good, but you know during the job they were Googling answers to the problems I had and had no real experience, but for the most part, some great programmers there.

I recommend ODESK, as a buyer, I am super protected from people not following through, so i have some confidence, aside from hiring locally for temp/programming work, I always use Odesk.

$35,000 over six years.

This is why if you're a programmer of any substance, you should avoid oDesk.

Actually any type of freelancers should avoid if possible. Though if you need to accumulate portfolio and get paid even a little bit it's worth a try. Also I saw some burnt clients only look for local devs for higher rate which is still miserable compared to the price you would pay on the ground.

You are assuming he hired programmers full time. Where did he state that?

"but you know during the job they were Googling answers to the problems"

LOL, what an asshole.

I had to laugh too

sarcasm?

As a western developer, is it possible to earn six figures (US) from any of the bidding sites? Which would be the best to focus on?

Anything is possible, but keep in mind you'll be competing with people (individuals as well as companies) who will happily bid very low (even down to $5/hr or so, possibly less). You will also be wrestling with clients who see pages and pages of projects (with accepted bids) along the lines of "Build me a Facebook clone, I have a budget of $250" and think its normal. So not only do you have all the marketing issues of a freelancer, with all the time sinks that go with it, you are targeting an audience of clients who are unlikely to pay well.

In other words, these sites are sites where a specific commodity--dirt cheap developer labor--is bought and sold. You'll almost certainly do better in the commodity market of well-paid, but not as plentiful, developers in your home country.

Does anyone have a good alternative? Like many people commenting, so many people are willing to do insane amounts of work for next to nothing - where do those who provide value-added services look to outsource or tender?

I've been thinking about forming a co-op for a trusted network of freelancers, to handle the crummy parts of the job (sourcing, selling, collecting) while encouraging the good parts (building, branding, partnering with quality colleagues). I had similar experiences being left with fake jobs/bad credit through freelance markets.

Thanks for sharing! I generally take longer-term gigs, so consistent dealflow isn't as big an of an issue for me. OP, what are you planning to do to fix your offline-network problem?

Hi, I have started investing time in trying to identify local businesses and niche market segments via other methods including advertising. I am also planning on trying to get some tie ups with startups which want prototyping services. It is too early to comment on how effective it is but I definitely feel that it is a much better approach in the long term.

I think gun.io has pretty decent projects although I've never actually worked through them. They seem more properly screened and to hold their talent to higher standards. At least that's the impression I've received.

I don't know anyone that actually were able to work on projects advertised on gun.io. These were freelancers with a high hourly rate to lower hourly rates. The experience of gun.io is frustrating because you send out a proposal and you often have no idea what is happening to it. Let alone that the given set of requirements are esoteric enough, there just doesn't seem to be any available jobs that end up happening through the website.

I've unsubscribed from gun.io and can't really recommend it because you won't find any work on it. The experience has been consistent across many freelancers and it's not at all what it is advertised to be.

So I think if you're going through the trouble of curating the freelancers you allow to bid on jobs, then one of your rules should be that job posters must reply to proposals.

It might make sense to limit proposals to one at a time,so the job poster must reject a proposal before he can see another one.

I tried getting projects on gun.io and never heard back from a client. Perhaps I need a better opensourcing profile - https://github.com/flipflopapp . Did anyone ever hearback from a gun.io client?

Yep, a friend of mine applied to 3 jobs on there and never heard a peep back. One job was only 20 miles away from him too so they could have had a great collaborative experience.

Use your Freelancer portfolio to get contract work with agencies. They tend to fancy themselves one stop shops for clients and you can capitalize on that.

This, quality work is going to be brokered through an agency, not an eBay for freelancers.

I had pretty difficult experiences with Freelancer.com. I even documented it in this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5177951

To summarize: I had a big project, that was not delivered after a several milestones, so the developer canceled the project, took the escrow, and I couldn't even leave a feedback!

A freelance marketplace is always full of cheap and mindless people who are not able to deliver anything. They place random bids and produce crap.

Unfortunately most of clients don't realize that it's not possible to get a quality work for $20 per hour or even less. They get frustrated and disappointed in a whole idea of hiring a freelancer.

P.S. If you need a reliable person for your Python or Javascript work – just drop me a line ;-) http://careers.stackoverflow.com/msamoylov

I disagree, it is possible to get quality work for U$ 20 or less... but it probably takes so much time to sort the actual decent bidders from the busts than it should not be worth it.

I know of several good developers that started out on those sites, but were quickly snatched full-time by companies that realized they were good.

I could agree about prospective juniors with extremely low rates. But, a SUPER DUPER FULL-STACK DEVELOPER with a decade of experience for $20/hr doesn't make much sense. Most probably he has no idea what he's doing. His communication skills and the results of his work won't be impressive.

I always wonder when I hear these sort of stories out coming out of odesk, freelancer or elance, if the sort of highly qualified developer is actally their target market. Now I am not saying that people on freelancer are incompetent but like the original post said they now don't have a network outside of freelancer which is far more imporant for an actual freelancer web developer as opposed to someone in india or the phillipines were freelancer.com or similar is their only opertunity for work.

Me myself living in small city in Europe. So it was a good starting point to kickstart my skills in programming, and hacking stuff together. Though the projects are mostly involving wordpress themes and etc. so it gets boring quite fast.

> But by growing within freelancer, I had neglected forming my offline network.

You can't advertise the work you've done through freelancer.com as your own?

I did quite a bit of work on vWorker. I enjoyed doing it and got a very good reputation but I ended up making about $1 an hour

> Had similar issues with oDesk, which is now as I know is owned by the same company as freelancer.com

Are you sure? Elance and ODesk "merged", but I thought they were still competitors with Freelancer.

Sorry my bad, tried all of them stuck with oDesk, at one point in my freelance career, cause they had time tracking quite nicely integrated, then decided that working with clients directly on one hand it's harder to find one outside of the system, while on the other the hourly rate is worth the additional effort. Though I miss badly time tracking capability with screenshots outside of any system where I could share screenshots and work done with my client.

Odesk and Elance merged. Freelancer is different. They IPO'd in Australia.

oDesk and Elance are owned by the same company, but different from Freelancer.

Well, a platform like freelancer is designed intentionally such that you can't, or at least shouldn't, build contact with clients off the platform. Otherwise you and your clients have no use for freelancer.

When you starting to work on project getting e-mail is just matter of receiving/sending deliverables for the first time. If the client is good usually he/she proposes to move away. As when people find devs/designers etc. which they can trust, usually they stop looking around for new ones. Except you are getting on board with some shady company which makes cheap websites for small businesses

Some people would still prefer to use the platform as protection, with their escrow-like payment service.

There is no protection against fraud on Freelancer. If a buyer issues a charge back on his credit card after the project is paid and delivered, you are screwed. Freelancer declines any responsibility for cases like that.

Unfortunately this is the case. I hear that Skrill is safe in this regard. I have had bad experiences with Paypal as well. Do you have any recommendations on what is better way to get paid?

I've had luck working with Creative Circle, even found full remote stuff. The rates aren't high since they take a cut, but you can sit back and let the jobs roll in. Very passive freelancing.

This is why we need a distributed system like OpenBazaar.

Stay away from any website that acts as a marketplace. Their incentives are not aligned with you the Freelancer. Their aim is to get as much money as possible through the market in order to boost revenues from the commission.