Anybody else regularly uses Freelancers / Virtual Assistants? QUESTION and POLL
First post which is my own experience followed by a question to the community.
If you regularly/semi-regularly employ freelancers, VAs and contract work then I hope you can help me out with a question as to how do you manage such recurring, regular/semi-regular orders and workflows.
My experience, current method, and some issues;
I commission a lot of work on Fiverr, most of it being repeat orders. Needless to say, the platform is not the best setup for such repeat orders or even project tracking beyond a simple doing/done for the one ordered task.
To manage the freelancers I have hacked together a system which is constantly evolving and currently looks as follows:
- Trello for project definition and task management
- Fiverr for freelancer search and task awards e.g. scrape 100 entries
- Fiverr for communications with the freelancer
- Google Calendar to remind me of task due dates and need to schedule and award subsequent recurring tasks
- Google Sheets and Airtable for the freelancer to update with record of what he/she has done
- Fiverr for payments
- Fiverr for awarding subsequent/continued project tasks to the same freelancer e.g. scrape the next 100 entries
The above system works though leaves a lot to be desired. Off the top of my head, here's my top 3 annoyances:
- Not set up for recurring orders or ongoing collaboration
- No easy, simple way to create projects and repeat tasks - and link payments to milestones etc
- Manual onboarding of every new freelancer / virtual assistant (templates for this are now fairly well established but can still be a pain)
A SaaS idea is brewing in my head to streamline all of the above into one remote work management app - together with G Suite Integrations + Stripe/PayPal and others.
Can think of it as Plutio (only recently found this awesome product via this forum!) meets Trello meets Service Provider Pro, and with a UI much more simple to use than Asana.
Thoughts? Poll below 👇
Also, would be great to connect with IH'ers who regularly employ freelancers!
Can you give an example of recurring job orders? Your tool might be an overkill for some simple tasks.
I recently commissioned a lot of semi-regular work to do with data gathering, cleaning and entry and this inspired the idea for the remote work management app.
Am thinking that initially the target audience would be micro/small enterprises such as niche content/marketing/lead gen agencies.
Could also be used for small dev projects requiring e.g. 3-5 milestones and incorporate auto milestone payments. I haven't come across a tool yet which could do this in a simple and reliable way.
I think people who commission regular work could find this useful, the issue probably has to do with the size of that market. The reason I stopped trying to commission such work was that the freelancers couldn't get the job done independently so I ended up spending more time dealing with them than I would have doing the work myself.