Ask HN: I made a site to help freelancers find work. Feedback?

by zaidf • 16 years ago

13 25 16 years ago

zaidf10• 16 years ago

I have been freelancing pretty aggressively off of Craigslist for the past three months. Through my experiences using CL for finding work, I decided to develop TekBob. These are the things I hope to fix via TekBob that I find broken with CL:

1. Craigslist is local. But most contract work can be non-local. 100% of the projects I have completed in the past 3 months have been non-local. TekBob does not emphasize city/state level location so much.

2. The most serious clients just want to get on the phone and iron out a deal. Almost all my projects involved a phone call to seal the deal. So I decided to cut the BS and just let clients connect to the developer. My thesis is that there are enough freelancers looking for work and won't mind someone calling them with work.

3. Craigslist is a hit or miss in terms of finding new work,(in my experience). I hope to provide a steady stream of leads, even if that means I charge a small fee per lead in the future. My thesis is that if TekBob can consistently send you $5,000 of work a month via 20 leads, you don't mind paying TekBob $100 for the month.(for example)

And now...

Where Craigslist kicks our ass(for now): they have people with projects and we don't. I have a plan on how to address this! I'll start working on it once we have 25 freelancers listed.

zackattack2• 16 years ago

how do you plan to innovate over craiglist in cater to people who have projects to post?

zaidf10• 16 years ago

Unsure at the moment for clients who'd like to explicitly post their projects.

I'm hoping the clients will do a search for "php" if they need a php developer and call up a few devs.

We'll see how that goes.

vgurgov• 16 years ago

Great idea and nice execution, congrats! My 2c:

I'd suggest you to focus at one niche and make it really great! Just as facebook started in one University and then expanded over others..

For instance now you have 4 Rails developers in your list. Why not make it place to go if you need Rails developers? Or Python? This way you can laser-focus all your marketing efforts.

Good luck with that!

ars• 16 years ago

Can I do email instead of phone?

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.)

zaidf10• 16 years ago

Yeah, eventually we'll add email. For now we'd like to focus on phone so we can cater to clients with more urgent needs.

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!

datapimp• 16 years ago

I don't know if I'd add email.

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.

toro• 16 years ago

Unfortunately I'm not in the US so I can't sign up. I be would interested in email or Skype instead of phone.

Also, a couple of small things I noticed:

* The background image on your header doesn't repeat which leaves whitespace on a wide monitor (change no-repeat to repeat-x in your css).

* ie. should be eg. for the examples on the Add my listing page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin_phrases:_I#id_est, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.g.#exempli_gratia).

* "dial your TekTim extension" should probably say TekBob on the Add my listings page.

zaidf10• 16 years ago

- added repeat-x to background

- good catch on "ie." :) learned something new.

- fixed.

Thanks a lot! Those were some great, detail finds.

I am still wrestling with the international issue. For now, I am mainly targeting this at US developers. Most of my clients(and profile of clients I'm trying to attract) want to work with someone within the US(even if not locally). They already get tonnes of emails from offshore shops and have a hard time making a decision.

netcan• 16 years ago

Focusing on quality of client could be an approach.

arn• 16 years ago

seems like a portfolio link and/or email address would be helpful.

I also don't like the phone-only thing. It's 3am right now, I don't plan on calling "Timothy" just to ask to see his portfolio, but I'd certainly like to look at it right now. Am I going to come back to the site tomorrow during the day? Maybe, but probably not. Would I email him right now to get a link to his portfolio? Sure.

zaidf10• 16 years ago

Fair points - thanks!

- Will add portfolio link. - Not so sure about email quite yet.

xel02• 16 years ago

Regarding the time difference you might think of offering freelancers the option to highlight when they ARE available for calls by setting up a) Calling times b) Their current desire for calls.

I.e Bob might be looking for a job and is willing to accept calls between 12pm and 1pm, but not at 3am.

Or Jane may already have enough leads and does not want to accept any calls (too busy) but normally is available between 3pm and 4pm.

pardo• 16 years ago

It seems that you have not implemented any in-page SEO.

* You have no description meta in any page (even at the home page). Help the search engines to show a good snippet of your page by adding it.

* The urls of the particular listings look like http://tekbob.com/freelancer/68573 Would be much better (and descriptive) if you had something like http://tekbob.com/freelancer/experienced-rails-mongodb-devel...

* I haven't found a single <h1> element in the whole website. Give some meaning to your markup, and start using descriptive tags. <h1>, <h2>, <th>, <strong> will help the spiders understand what are the important things in the page.

* None of your image seem to have an 'alt' or 'title' attribute. You should add these attributes to all your images, both for spiders, and for people that can not see your images.

* It would help your users (and the spiders) if you add some pages with all the tags or categories that you have. If they are too many, use at least a tag cloud.

* It seems that there's no robots.txt or sitemap.xml.

* Using YSlow on your page give also a number of hints of basic improvements to do (combine your js and css, enable gzip in your server, ...)

Also, there is no "About us", "FAQ", "Contact" or any of the usual sections that a user may want to check before posting a listing, or using your site, to see who is behind the site and whether you are serious or not.

Having a field that says when did the freelancer joined, how many contacts he has actually answered and whether he is active or not would also be nice, in my opinion. There's plenty of listing sites out there with a few entries that you do not know if are still active, or stale. They could have been entered 4 years ago, for all you know.

[Edited the format, to make it easier to read]

zaidf10• 16 years ago

I've my work cut out when I wake up. Thanks a lot for the thorough feedback. I really appreciate it!

mattmanser2• 16 years ago

Out of interest I typed 'c# developer'. It doesn't work, chops off everything to just 'c'.

zaidf10• 16 years ago

sorry. looking into it.

edit: worked fine for me. it didn't remove the #. can you give an example? thanks.

mattmanser2• 16 years ago

Just tried it again in Chrome, Firefox and IE. It's definitely not working in any of them.

http://tekbob.com/tag/c# developer

Also I don't think you're encoding the input properly, I can inject >, <, quotes and stuff into your html using the search box.

I'm not really a script kiddie so don't quite know what I'm doing, but if the search box isn't being encoded, are the input boxes?

Ask HN: I made a site to help freelancers find work. Feedback?

Related Stories