Aug 8, 2017 · 2 min read
Hey Mark, I feel the pain.. appreciate all the efforts. Some thoughts:
- You could potentially charge freelancers instead of companies. For example, I have a personal assistant I pay $7/hr in Philippines to go and check my mail, linked in, job posts etc since it’s too much noise. It’s quite a big problem for freelancers and there’s no such thing as an agent or a representative similar to agents for actors, etc.
- You might want to consider focusing on a particular niche and become the best at that so that you can compete with more generalized job boards. E.g. Become THE job board for just writers, or just iOS development or just producers, etc. Then once you are known for that it’d be easier to expand. E.g I think these guys just had content people in the beginning or some small subset and now they have a lot of stuff but only after they became known https://www.cloudpeeps.com
- Give a reason for freelancers / employers to share your site, e.g. Make the best profile builder so that freelancers can for example share it as their online resume, it’d be easier with a focus too since different things might be highlighted for different professions
- Consider focusing on a particular geography to start with since having distributed work force is not necessarily good because local freelancers would compete with remote freelancers and the price point becomes not competitive. You could split up offshore jobs and local so that it’s clear
- Referral from freelancers might not work well because if you can’t explain to companies what the benefit is then freelancers can’t either. Right now the problem is as you said, you have a good system / community but not great, and people by default would only refer great things. make it unique and you’ll get shares and pr for free.
- Kudos for posting this to everyone. I’m sure it was super hard to do since you’d inevitably get some negative feedback. I’d also suggest get on the phone with some folks, send out surveys with pivot ideas so that it’s easier to quantify answers. I think it’s very impressive that you got such a number of users, especially taking in account that a lot of them didn’t even benefit from the platform yet and they are still there and replying! It shows that even with all platforms out there there are still a lot of problems to solve. Now you just need to figure out which one would click with the user base. All the best.
