Freelance Inbox

by cordite • 12 years ago

59 45 12 years ago

serf2• 12 years ago

How about a 1 day trial or at least an example email on the page? The concept is great, but i'd be more comfortable spending the money on the subscription if I had some idea of what I should be anticipating in my inbox the following weekday.

keslert10• 12 years ago

It offers a 30-day money back guarantee, so you can try it if you want without any worries. Shoot me an email though, and I'd be happy to give you a look at some sample leads. kesler@freelanceinbox.com.

*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 :)

webmaven2• 12 years ago

There is an example email on the page (look for the text 'View sample email').

serf2• 12 years ago

Oh, must have missed that. Thanks.

heeton• 12 years ago

Also checkout http://letsworkshop.com/ I've used them and can highly recommend the service, I got a few great leads over 2-3 months and the quality was high.

EDIT: Didn't realise it hadn't also been posted to Hacker News already. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7901640

robwilliams882• 12 years ago

Thanks for posting this link :) Can confirm founder is a subscriber of my service, Workshop. http://letsworkshop.com

speg• 12 years ago

What happens when they send the same lead to all of their customers? Now you've got to complete against the rest of the subscribers to land the job.

webmaven2• 12 years ago

Huh. Pre-qualified leads are all very well, but how many people are receiving the same ones? If I am competing with 100s of others (essentially the problem with design competition sites), those 3 leads may not be worth very much to me at all.

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.

jarrett• 12 years ago

I would love to hear from the founder of the service about this. I'd seriously consider paying for a high-quality lead-generation service. But if, as the above post asks, the same smallish pool of leads is being pursued by a bunch of freelancers, it's hard to consider those leads high-quality anymore.

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.

taude• 12 years ago

I wonder how companies like Service Magic manage this for the constracting/home improvement business? Maybe each gig only gets to have X number of qualified people submit a proposal?

keslert10• 12 years ago

Founder here.

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.

mttsn• 12 years ago

Interesting. Is this in someway a reboot of tinyproj? Or totally unconnected?

keslert10• 12 years ago

I'm actually completely unfamiliar with the project...

alt_f4• 12 years ago

The problem with services like this one is that your interests (getting more subscribers) are intrinsically unaligned with my interests (less competition for jobs).

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?

keslert10• 12 years ago

I agree with you, but I also realize that if the service is to be valuable, it can't grow too large. I've intentionally set a cap on the number of developers that can be part of the community so it can remain valuable.

Each member also gets to specify what leads they are interested in, so that spreads leads around as well.

lupin_sansei2• 12 years ago

Later on why not auction the developer spots off rather than charge $29? That way you can keep the developer cap small, but not have to limit your profit. I would happily pay hundreds or even thousands if I knew the cap was small and I was getting real value from the service.

desireco422• 12 years ago

This reminds me of Workshop mailing list. Probably inspired by this service.

My experience with Workshop was that leads were good, just not for me. I really needed more solid and fatter clients.

robwilliams882• 12 years ago

Can confirm founder is a subscriber of my service, Workshop. http://letsworkshop.com

desireco422• 12 years ago

As original service, I wish you all the best. You deserve it.

kenrose• 12 years ago

One part of the site mentions:

"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?

keslert10• 12 years ago

Thanks for pointing this out, I'll fix the typo. The real time is 10:30am (PST).

jph• 12 years ago

Love the idea. My suggestions:

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.

keslert10• 12 years ago

Thanks! Appreciate the solid feedback. Will you shoot me an email with more information about #3? kesler@freelanceinbox.com

MrFoof• 12 years ago

Database development needs to be another option.

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.

Rodeoclash• 12 years ago

I can't speak for everyone but I've found if you're good at what you do, and you have some skills in networking (e.g. the ability to meet for a coffee and demo some of your work) plus the ability to recognise good clients then leads are generally the least of your problems freelancing.

lupin_sansei2• 12 years ago

Exactly. Actually doing the work is the hardest part of freelancing!

smoe• 12 years ago

Looks great! Client has $300+ budget, doesn't say much though. I'd prefer to set an hourly rate or a minimum budget.

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.

meraku• 12 years ago

Any plans to add .NET to the type of leads?

keslert10• 12 years ago

Yes, I have been thinking about adding .NET. Just want to be sure that there are enough leads. Shoot me an email and I'll let you know when/if I roll them out.

ozh• 12 years ago

Also, "WordPress", not "Wordpress".

eric_bullington• 12 years ago

I'm not sure this would work well for the user, simply because you're distributing a limited number of jobs to a large number of developers. Even if you cap at 150, and only 20% of those are Pythonistas, that's still 30 people after the same job.

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).

muhuk3• 12 years ago

I agree that lining up the incentives right is very important. But from a business perspective making a commissions based strategy work is tricky. Especially if you can get rid of the bottom feeders. Then there'll be a good incentive for both the employee and employer to grab that $1500 (a 10% commission on a 15k job).

Then comes ridiculous measures like the screen grabbers and the 3rd party holding your onto your payment etc.

gedrap• 12 years ago

I like the idea. It's nothing new and sensational but well presented. [0]

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).

keslert10• 12 years ago

Haha, couldn't help but crack up on that last line. Glad I at least went 2 for 3.

You raise a lot of good points. I'll be in touch.

muhuk3• 12 years ago

5 leads per week is an interesting way to package it.

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?

dueprocess• 12 years ago

See also Freelance Funnel. It's very similar and has been around for a long time: http://freelancefunnel.com

ryanSrich• 12 years ago

If anyone is interested in something similar for full-time jobs I distribute a somewhat weekly newsletter[1] for free.

1. http://devjobs.io

dieg0• 12 years ago

Love the idea, the example e-mail has offers looking for local developers, and only from inside the US. I wonder if that is a common requirement.

muhuk3• 12 years ago

I love the idea.

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!

zyxley• 12 years ago

Yeah, that's a crazy-low budget amount. I've done entirely pro bono web projects that've still had a higher base budget than $300 (domain name, web hosting, software licenses, etc).

dyadic• 12 years ago

I'd be really tempted to sign up for this but at the moment the languages available aren't what I'm skilled in. I can understand omitting languages less popular than Ruby because it will be harder to hit the 3 leads / day, and the limited number of memberships prompt me to sign up now, but it's hard to justify it when it's currently not relevant to me.

Also, a slight nitpick, the audio bell on the "Contact Us" is a little bit annoying.

keslert10• 12 years ago

Due to the overwhelming response tonight and your feedback, prices have changed. I look forward to addressing more of your feedback in the near future.

joelhumphrey• 12 years ago

Customer here.

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.

CaveTech• 12 years ago

You changed your price from $29 to $69 within 9 hours of posting here. There goes any faith from me towards your product.

Freelance Inbox

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