Show HN: A Freelancing Site for Student Freelancers

http://www.commence.io/

by matthewarkin • 12 years ago

2 5 12 years ago

Great idea -- there are obviously lots of capable student freelancers, and that talent has yet to be properly channeled, I think.

Another idea, why not include/add a platform to connect students to allow them to get together and form team for startups? This is something that could be shopped around to universities, and you can sell the university essentially a platform to allow their students to innovate. Then, they do the work of fostering innovation in courses/etc, the students go to your site and connect.

matthewarkin2• 12 years ago

Thanks, as a student I think its a bit hard to get work. Going to the big sites is hard because you're competing largely against a workforce that will charge less than you think / know you are worth. Also developing a portfolio is hard because well you're a student you don't tend to have much work despite having the skills.

That is a cool idea, I was thinking of ways to best organize groups of students to work on client projects, having that platform work on its own so the students can work their own projects is interesting. Would it basically be some sort of profile system with some sort of collaboration tools like phabricator / gitlab / group chat built in?

hardwaresofton2• 12 years ago

Yeah, it's a weird catch-22. But I think there are a lot of smaller businesses (maybe mom & pop shops) that would be totally fine saving on cost to employ a student (and depending on the student getting some pretty good results). Tons of students are already the "computer kid" (or something similar) that all tech support/website help gets funnelled to...

Maybe give students a way to submit leads? Like if a student has a family member that wants to make a site, but they don't want to do it themselves, you can give them something (not sure what) for submitting it to the site?

Yeah, basically -- you should be able to run a ton of it without building it yourself (for speed, and of course tons of open source tools already exist), but the idea is basically for different types of students to find each other.

When I was thinking about it, I roughly broke it into some of the types of roles you have in a startup

Engineering/Programming

Design

Business

X-Factor (for those that don't fit in the narrow categories I've suggested)

Then students can sign up, add their resumes, and post ideas that they want to collaborate/get help on, and see if they can attract interest from other types of people.

The site would then provide collaboration tools (gitlab for code, general chat/team management with phabricator for example, etc) to the group.

fiatjaf• 12 years ago

What is the difference between students and real people? I don't see why this website cannot be for all programmers, or why students cannot use other freelancing sites.

If there is a problem of proper filtering of talents and budgets, adding such an arbitrary filtering criteria as `isStudent` is not going to solve anything.

matthewarkin2• 12 years ago

I don't necessarily think there is a difference between students and programmers in general. What I'd like to accomplish is a more curated freelancing site, where qualified programmers don't necessarily have to compete with people offering services at a fraction of the cost. In addition a place where students can learn a bit about freelancing, so if a freelancer has a question on how to handle a certain type of client or how should something be done, we'd like to provide the resources to help the freelancer. Kind of a mix between an agency and just a freelancing site would be my goal as of now.

Show HN: A Freelancing Site for Student Freelancers

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