The Time Has Come - Freelancers Need Better Options to Connect With Clients

Kinaba — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 17:00:00 -0500

The time has come. The current options for freelancers to connect with clients are inadequate. And most likely, any freelancer who reads this knows exactly what I mean without even reading beyond this sentence.

There are a number of well-known sites out there, and I don't wish to knock any of them for their efforts. And each has at least some strength and "pro" to off-set the "cons". But across the board, the "cons" are too many.

So let's take sologig.com as an example. I don't know why this site even exists. Regardless of the intention, the way it is used is for almost everything but contract and freelance work. Do a search. Take a look. Employers post regular jobs there that they should be posting on other conventional sites, where they can pay and "arm and a leg" to advertise a position. Of course, not all of the posts on sologig.com are for "regular jobs". Many of the rest are for shady MLM schemes, get-rich-quick schemes, and a myriad of other worthless postings. And a small percentage of posters are using the site as intended. But it's too small a percentage for a freelancer to take the site seriously.

Ah, but Matt, there are other sites aren't there? Sure. There are. And if you have sufficient patience, you'll be able to use those sites just fine. So in the area of technology and internet-related fields, these "other sites" include RentaCoder.com, GetaFreelancer.com, Guru.com, and Elance.com along with several other decently sized sites. And with each of these sites, there are a range of issues for a sane person trying to use theses ites, including among them: poor search functionality, poor user interfaces, ridiculous pricing schemes, etc. Each of them does better in some areas than others. But as a whole, if you don't mind spending hours browsing instead of minutes search; if you don't mind finding that you can't bid on 90+% of projects as a freelancer because you didn't purchase the super premium plan; and if you don't mind being nickled and dimed to death just to get one or two bids in a month on a decent-sized project, then you'll be just fine.

Oh, and did I mention that in at least some cases, you'll have to choose between categories where you can have a profile and bid on projects. So beware if you are a freelancer of many talents. Either open up your wallet wide or pretend you only have one skill.

Part of this post is due to some personal frustration I've experienced with Kinaba. As we gradually market our services, I thought it would be "brilliant" to supplement the starting period with some freelance work. This lead to serious disappointment when I found that I takes more patience, energy, and time to use the freelance sites than it does to keep putting this company together.

So I looked at Craigslist which has some "Gigs" sections. That wasn't a terrible experience in some cases, but one does have to deal with a lot of spammed content and ridiculous expectations of buyers. Some freelancers will laugh here because it's already a joke in the "Craigslist freelancer underworld". It's a bit like those books that publish poorly written student esssays where unintentional grammar and spelling errors are quite hilarious. Some freelancers on Craigslist like to joke about the utterly ridiculous requests that get posted at times - the ones that go something like: "Please help me create a program and website that will take over the world, I'll pay you 4 cents an hour to build it, and of course, you must have 39 years of experiencing building such a program". ("slight paraphrasing included by moi").

So, I think what we're going to have to do now is create a new site that will hopefully make it a little easier for hard-working freelancers to connect with clients. Freelancers, please feel free to post comments on what you would like to see.

consulting

The Time Has Come - Freelancers Need Better Options to Connect With Clients