yet another job board idea...
Hi all,
Looking to see what others think of this idea that was born from my own personal frustrations with sites like Upwork.
Due to Covid related issues my software company has lost one of my biggest clients which is in the healthcare sector and reliant on contracts coming from hospitals. This has led me to look at sites like Upwork to find new contracts, but boy has it been a frustrating experience.
Some of the immediate problems I'm facing are
#1 - Experience and long positive history with clients don't seem to account for anything. There's too much focus on history only within Upwork. So, therefore, my profile doesn't show in searches etc.
#2 - The whole bidding system is geared towards either those paying Upwork so you can see competitive bids or for those who are happy to accept next to nothing for the work.
#3 - There's no control/realism in what some Clients are asking for, e.g I've seen Clients posting job descriptions stating they are looking for only experts and willing to pay the highest rates, e.g. the '$$$' along with a list of required expertise longer than my arm, e..g AWS, NODE, C++, Java, Python, Machine Learning, etc. etc. And then you see the project budget set at below $50. It is totally unrealistic that anyone who is truly an expert in ALL those technologies would spend a week working on a project for $50 - the fees of course! Which brings me to my last point...
#4 - Fee's, I find Upwork fees to be very high.
So perhaps there room in the market to produce an alternative to Upwork which attempts to address these issues.
One idea is to utilise existing data on the low, average and high rates for certain skills. So this data could be used to show Clients realistic figures what they 'should' be paying, to prevent the problems with my point #3. The more skills you require, the more you will be expected to pay. Depending on the level of expertise for each skill.
There could be less focus on those with work experience only within the platform and allow candidates to show/list more of previous projects. There could be a secondary system where these projects can be vetted to ensure they were developed by the said candidate.
Of course, there are many job boards out there, but maybe we do need something new to try and bring the monopoly away from the subpar service of Upwork.
Nice idea! As a Freelance writer, I can confidently say that Upwork is shit. In fact, I've had to leave there because it's pretty annoying. Apart from everything you've listed there, one of my major problem with Upwork is the fact that clients want so much for very little. Plus, when you end up doing your calculations along with Upwork fees, then, you'll realise that you're left with very little. So, please go for it because I think there's a market there. To help a bit, there was a time I thought of something like this, I went to a Facebook group and posted it. The responses were encouraging as they showed that people were indeed interested in it. So, yep feel free to give it a try.
there's always room for someone who builds and ships. so, go for it.
I did some research in this area, but ultimately I decided it is not worth pursuing.
I was asking EMPLOYERS about their upwork experience and in general they seemed to be satisfied ENOUGH.
Meaning: there is certainly a problem on the developer side, but there is no reason for employers to switch from upwork. They are satisfied with quality and in general were able to find good freelancers there.
After hearing this I decided to move on. Unless you have some kind of idea how you would incentivize employers to switch to your platform, given that they will probably pay on it more than on upwork.