Re: LocalSolo
I appreciate what you are trying to do. I subscribe to a lot of job boards (Zerply, Media-Match, LocalSolo, Wooshii, etc. I’ve also tried Freelancer.com and I’m even paying for LinkedIn Premium to have access to ProFinder. Some of these I pay for, e.g. Media-Match, because they’ve yielded a job in the past and I can justify (and expense) the cost. I’m hesitant to pay for others because there’s no way to know what’s going on behind the green curtain. Wooshii, for example, yielded a couple of good gigs a couple of years ago but has been on life support since then. They took a cut of my first gig (through them) and the client and I worked directly on the second gig, so Wooshii was out of the loop. That model means revenue on new client/freelancer connections only and might be why they aren’t useful to me at the moment. I think they’ve tried to operate as an agency since then, handling the money to get their cut, but I’m not sure.
The bottom line is that I will pay an annual fee if I think I will get at least one good job a year through a board. I don’t really care about the cut either, but that’s something that happens once, before your client/freelancer go prancing off without you, right?
I operate as a freelancing individual but also as a mini-studio providing solutions — so both employment-based and project-based. The service I find most valuable is the one that puts me, as a solution provider, in front of somebody with a project. What if you got a free job posting up front and then a free job posting or two for every LocalSolo job that completed and then shifted costs to the freelancers on a per project-basis? I pay finder’s fees gladly but paying for a chance to be found is different.
