Ask IH: Would you like someone to pick a freelancer for you?
I'm currently working on an upcoming extension to RemoteML.com - a on-demand Machine Learning freelancing platform.
I want to fix what Upwork and co. are doing wrong (I never got lucky with ML hires there) and would like to do a slimed down version of it.
Two questions that have been going around in my mind are:
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Do people want to pick their own freelancer (we will interview them beforehand, so they are all skilled) or should we pick a suitable one for them (and also take care of the discussions, price etc.)
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Do people want to have a fixed price upfront or pay by the hour in case the requirements change?
I would really like some insight on these things.
As someone who has hired freelancers, I would prefer to pick them myself BUT I would like a way to weed out the people who are legit from the people who post a lot of BS on their profile. Upwork is terrible at detecting when freelancers are scamming (why can't it detect when a profile is just a copy+paste of another profile) and is going out of its way to hide important information, like their location and previous job ratings.
I would also prefer to have a fixed price upfront but I know that that is not always feasible.
Nice idea, though I've come across services that do this. However, I think in the general sense you are barking up the wrong tree for real feedback. Most of the indie hackers here would probably either skip the freelancer part and do it themselves or they would want to personally pick them since its a 1 man show or a couple of friends at most.
I think you should pull out to a less intimate setting and target more of the "established" startups and long-running companies or if you want to target B2C find an audience that is more business and less tech-savvy in general to get the most honest and unbiased feedback as that is likely your target market.
But back to the more direct questions:
Personally, I'd prefer to pick my own for most things if not all, but given I'm sufficient out of my league and trust the service enough (reputation is everything here I think) I might be willing to offload, but only at a later stage and scale. I think terms and price discussions would still have to be done by me as a final step and this approach would only work for very large corps or a faceless dev service where you hire almost ghosts to get the job done and I just agree with you on the price.
The second question also heavily depends. Individuals will probably always prefer the fixed price as it gives a sense of safety in terms of direct money for value transaction. Per hour is a bit vague and can be +-20%. However for businesses, it's the opposite, for the most part, you will want an ongoing relationship, also most projects that are done on a fixed budget either break the budget or the deadline or quality suffers so per hour seems more reasonable. Also, billing is much easier on a prorated hourly price where you just do X billable hours * Y price * Z people = XYZ money to pay per month and that's it.