Freelancer Protocol

Yesterday, precisely 4 weeks after launching Outcode to address the trust crisis in freelancing, I closed my first contract.

This small validation feels really good as I was entering the Trough of Sorrow (https://bit.ly/2kYllhN) this week, after the excitement from a somewhat successful Product Hunt launch had worn off.

This means the growth game starts now ! I guess the goal is to try and grow that number by around 7%/week as of now.

A few things learning from my past 4 weeks:

• Minimal tech will do. After originally launching with a rather complex web app with whole platform side of things, I redid the site from scratch last week, making it a very simple landing page. Turns out it converts better.

• Intensely try out niches for a week at a time. Because it’s actually difficult to tell the difference between promising niches that take a bit of time to show some traction and niches that are not for you and on which you’re losing your time, the trick is to focus deeply on a single niche for 5-7 working days.

• Pick your favourite 2-3 marketing channels and stick to them. There’s no way you can do SEO, fb ads, google Adwords, cold emails and calls, social media presence, etc. and not go crazy, so just pick 2-3 of those. Fb ads and cold emails and calls personally suit me.

Thanks a lot for reading, hope to see you on Outcode.io !

It started with a very classic mistake: I got the idea for Outcode, and started coding right away the features that I imagined would be core to the product.

So I spent two months (and some money so that a freelancer could help me out) building a platform :

• where clients could log in and submit tasks, which would then be dispatched to freelancers
• Freelancers would do the task and then upload the deliverable to the platform
• The clients could 'accept' or 'reject with comments' the deliverable, and would have to pay to get the source code
• Etc, etc.

But then I launched, and something terrible, (yet to be expected) happened: nobody even completed the ‘Create a task’ journey. Out of 4000 website visitors, not one legit person completed the steps. I had built out this whole platform side of things for nothing.

At this point the code had become ridiculously complex considering that people never left the front page, and it showed: some pages took a while to load, and the css was inconsistent across the site.

So I woke up last Friday determined to re-do the whole thing from scratch. I inspired myself from the notion.so design, and made the homepage way smaller: people now have little other choice than leaving their email or leaving.

After deploying new version of outcode.io, I bought a couple of Fb ads to confirm my hunch: the new design now converts at leat 3 times better, and actual people now complete the new journey.

So my advice is:

• Keep it super simple and minimalistic: if you show less to the user before they perform some kind of conversion event, the more you can experiment on that little information you’re showing to increase conversion. If you have a huge website to begin with, it’s harder to know which sections ppl like and which sections they don’t. Minimalism is also a great way for the user to have to focus on the CTA.
• Don’t try to re-invent the wheel at this stage. Take a good template or copy the design of some website you admire.

Do you guys like the new website?

Glad to announce Outcode is now on PH: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/outcode

Outcode is a different kind of freelancer marketplace. Our project managers handle your project from A to Z: they find freelancer that best fits your needs and make sure budget and deadlines are respected. The great majority of our freelancers is from the small & talented community we're building in London.

If you like the project, thanks for upvoting ! 🙏🔥

I'm launching on all the traditional forums right now, so will make sure to follow up soon with my learnings.

After 2 month full-time on this, I’m excited to be launching today with this post. 2 months may seem like a little while, and it’s true I’ve spent a bit of time:

• iterating on the value proposition by talking to people ( a good thing !)
• coding the MVP ( a not-so-good thing : I now think I should’ve launched with a more basic website than what I ended up to it/ Even though I (barely) have the skills to code first version of the platform myself, it’s more than often not worth it to spend 2 month coding something solely based on intuition and without some kind of validation… )

So what’s it about ?

If you’ve ever hired freelancers for software projects, you probably have had a reliability issue: whether it’s the availability of the right person, their coding or communications skills, ability to respect deadlines or budget, honesty, etc. Outcode enables you to reliablyresort to freelancers for your project by acting as a trusted middleman.

You only talk to us (ie designers and project managers) and we take care of finding the best fit for the job and of managing the project for you, while keeping an eye on budget, deadline and code quality. Then we simply come back to you with the deliverable done. :) We charge less than traditional freelancing platforms (and they just enable you to hire a freelancer through them. )

What do you guys think of the value proposition ?
If you have an idea you want to have built, I’m here for you and will make sure to see it through to completion myself. You can benefit from 50% off on the fees with the code IHLAUNCH for you first task, no matter how big.

Thanks for checking it out, I hope to see you on https://outcode.io !