I wanted to get the site up and running quickly so I used a combination of WordPress plugins to get the functionality that I needed. I would have liked to have coded everything from scratch but I have a very limited amount of time between a full time job, training for an IronMan, raising two toddlers and planning a wedding to actually spend working on a side project.
So armed with the wp plugin repo I made an MVP that had authentication, a job board and a private messaging system in under 5 hours, I was pretty proud of myself.
The only issue at the moment is that I don't have a way for the site to generate income. The next task will be to implement some sort of payment/escrow system where users can approve a dev to fix their issue and purchase. Once the dev has fixed the issue the user can then approve and the funds can be released to the dev minus a fee.