Freelance websites — help or hinderance?

Is an invite-only job-board the answer, or does it pose more questions for freelancers and clients?

Lately, there’s been an upsurge in websites offering to be the link between freelancers and clients. Many of these websites aim to connect clients or agencies needing to outsource work, or to provide a job-board for freelancers to view, apply for and manage projects.

Don’t get me wrong, the message behind these websites is a good one, and it provides a lot of freelancers and agencies with a trusted site through which they can win and manage projects. However, a lot of these websites can cause a lot of confusion, for both the client and freelancer, which at the end of the day, they are meant to eliminate a lot of that.

The idea and concept behind many of the sites varies between sites, and follow one of the following points:

• A private community for designers to refer and/or receive work from each other.
• Client-focused sites, allowing clients to find freelancers and professionals in a certain field.

The first example has most recently been explored by Juiiicy, a private invite-only community conceived by Julien Renvoye, Jeremy Marc and Drew Wilson. The site is a great-looking, trend-heavy site where invited designers can post work enquiries they get from Dribbble, their own portfolio and the like, and post the job on the Juiiicy board for other designers to apply.

Now this is a good idea… to a point. I think the idea of sharing out your enquiries, especially when some of the more well-known designers get more than they can handle, is a good idea. What I’m not a fan of is two things. One, is the way privacy is handled within the community. And two is the whole concept of how invites and membership is sorted.

The first point focuses on their system of posting job enquiries. Now, say Will Robinson receives an email off Bob Smalls for a website, with a budget of $10000. Now, Bob has looked and looked and looked on sites like Dribbble, Forrst, and Dunked for a designer he feels is in tune with his idea and concept. He puts off emailing the designer for weeks, thinking about the cost, the timeframe, about everything. He finally sends the email, awaiting a reply with baited breath.

Now, Will gets a lot of work. Either he’s employed full-time and can only squeeze two or three projects in in his spare time, or he’s a freelancer working on several large and small projects at any one time. All the while he’s working on stuff, he continues getting enquiries and emails. Some of the best, he promises the client he’s available in a few weeks, can they wait, but for all the rest, he would normally answer along the lines of, “I’m sorry, I’m fully booked up right now, but let me ask around for you.”

With Juiiicy, Will now has the chance of posting any work he doesn’t want or have time for on the job-board and let other designers apply for the jobs. During this, if the project goes through he earns a nice little 7% of the overall budget, which is good for essentially doing nothing.

Now, we go back to Bob. Bob wrote that email with all his soul and passion, and wrote it with only Will in mind for the design. Bob suddenly find himself inundated with replies and enquiries from designers that have applied to Will’s posting of the email on Juiiicy. At last count, Juiiicy had over 600 designers that had passed the vetting process. That’s 600 designers that Bob didn’t expect his email to reach. Now, if that were me, I’d be pissed. I’d be annoyed at Will for not only not contacting him directly to say he couldn’t do the work, but also the fact that the details of the private email have been shared with over 600 designers.

That, for me, is a major downside of the site like Juiiicy, where the idea and concept may be sound, but the application is not. Are the clients contacted prior to posting on Juiiicy, or is the idea of just wanting to clear your plate of enquiries and earn a nice little commission on the side more important?

The second downside for this is, again, client-focused. Picture now a typical client/designer relationship. It goes something like this:

Client emails designer > Designer accepts project, requests deposit > client pays deposit, waits for work to be done > Designer sends final designs, requests approval > Client grants approval, pays outstanding amount > Designer and client are both happy.

Now, for the sake of easiness, I’ve left out a lot points in that sequence, but you get the general gist. Nowhere in that sequence is there anything hidden, or anything above and beyond the original quote and deposit. No fees (past usual taxes if applicable), no commission, no middle-man.

With a site like Juiiicy, once the job has been posted, the privileged designers can apply for the project, and the client chooses one. Now, this is where the process differs. Instead of hammering out the details between one another and exchanging contracts and bank details, everything is now done through Juiiicy. The fees, according to the site, are 3% added onto the final invoice and another 3% goes to credit card processing fees, with the remaining 87/7 going to designer/referrer.

If I were a client, and I had $10000 to spend on a project, I’d want the money to go to the designer doing the actual work, otherwise I’d only have a budget of $8700. The same applies if I were the designer — I’d want to see as much of the $10000 as possible. I know there’s a cost to everything, and that you can’t get anything for free, but to lose 13% of the budget to cover Juiicy’s cut, credit card fees and to pay someone for doing nothing, I think, would suck a little. As @oliveirasimoes wrote, getting money for “copy/paste is pretty impressive, don’t you think?”

Another point on this is the legality of it, if anything went pear-shaped. We’ve all heard horror stories of client going AWOL after a payment is due, or equally as bad stories of never-ending changes expected to be within budget. How does Juiiicy, and sites like it, cover these eventualities? Their FAQ states that payment is taken via escrow to cover everyone involved, but if the money is safe and paid for, what’s the process for when the client plays hardball and dismisses the design as “rubbish” or requests multiple changes beyond the project scope?

The second major point I have with sites like Juiiicy is their method of accepting designers and dealing with invites. Now, I’m sure sites like Juiicy mean well when they states things like, “We are really picky for now as our clients come from top notch designers.” But that’s feels like a wet kipper to the face, and potentially ego-destroying for less confident designers. I’m all for a gate to stop the level of quality dipping below a certain standard, but when the admin feel as though they should cull designers that have been invited in because they deem them not good enough, I think is shady and unethical.

What standards are they comparing against? Many of the designers that apply or have been invited are from Dribbble, and many of whom are fully-fledged Dribbble members and even Pro account holders. Is it down to a specific criteria, or is it that they simply do not like their style of work? They have stated that they look designers with “experiences in both web and mobile.” Why does an applicant for a website need mobile experience as well, ignoring responsive design? The vice-versa applies too — how many app designers can compete with the very best web designers?

This excuse is flawed, and makes me believe that the criteria is merely down to the admin’s choice of whether they like the work or not, and not whether the client does. In a similar manner to Dribbble, Twitter and Forrst, there’s a clique operating and woe betide anyone who doesn’t meet their standards.

The second example is client-focused websites where, more often that not, the site contains a list of designers that have either been cherry-picked or invited into the site, and listed as a “for-hire” professional for clients to contact, or to advertise their job on the site and wait for the applications to come in. Ooomf is one of these sites, and is pretty good at doing the above.

Ooomf promises that you can find the right design/development/copyright professional within the site, get your project done quick and easily, and save money. While this also seems a good idea, again, there are complicating issues which make it hard for freelancers to secure projects and hard for clients to actually find a designer to work on the project.

A couple of times a month, maybe even a couple of times a week, Ooomf sends out an email containing projects that clients have submitted and designers, developers and copywriters are free to introduce themselves to the client via a quick message on the site. Upon receiving these messages, the client is free to decide on a person from these messages and select them for the project. After the client has chosen the person right for them, then comes a round of discussion whereby you can discuss the project more at length, discuss timeframes and expectations. All good so far, then.

Then comes the complications. After the above process, the designer then submits a proposal and a scope for the project, including budget.

Hang on, I thought we’d already decided on the budget when I applied for the project?

There’s one complication. I understand it as that if the client is proposing a $5000 budget, then it entails that they have that to spend on the project, so why give the designer chance to charge more? And, don’t forget the little disclaimer:

Remember, this is the amount YOU WANT TO BE PAID. The project owner will see a budget 15% higher because of fees.

Another complication. A client has $5000 in mind for the project, and the designer agrees to that amount for the project. Add another 15%, which makes it $5750. Adding up isn’t it? And that’s not forgetting that when you submit a project to Ooomf, it may be free to submit it, but when it gets accepted, then that’s another $50. So, that’s $5800. The $50 may be refundable if you’re not happy with the work or you don’t find the right person for the project, but it’s still another cost.

And there is another point. The site states, “If for whatever reason you aren’t satisfied…” so this gives the chance for a designer to work his ass off on a design, and the client to go, “Nah, it’s not for me. Thanks anyway,” and walk off, possibly with a head full of ideas, colours, and typography choices from the designer. And what was the contractor paid? Nothing. Zilch. Nada.

There’s three complications, and nothing has been spoken of actually transferring funds to Ooomf, something which seems to be a common problem with Ooomf clients. A few have stalled or been confused when the time has come to submit funds to Ooomf for safe-keeping (escrow), believing they are paying the client, not the middle-man. Clients are notoriously suspicious of delivering payments without any proof of work, and so to hand over the entire budget allowance for “safekeeping” is something I don’t think clients want to risk.

Ooomf’s terms and conditions are quite clear and concise, and cover most eventualities, but one phrase stood out for me.

Contractors agree that there is no guarantee of payment for Fixed-Price Contracts.

Wait a minute? So, in plain English, that translates as, “if you do the work, there’s no guarantee you’ll get paid.” Hang on, I thought that was the whole point of sites like this, to give security to both sides and stop the ever-growing problem with chargebacks, PayPal disputes and spec work. That, for me, feels like a massive kick in the teeth for designers, developers and copywriters, and make me feel as though all loyalties are with the client and not the one doing the actual work. This is backed up in a later sub-section.

For Fixed-Price Contracts, the Client may terminate at any time but may not recover any payments made to the Contractor unless mutually agreeable. The Contractor may terminate a Fixed-Price Contract at any time if no payment has been made

There you go then. The client can choose a designer, discuss the project, sign off on the project, let the designer do the work, but as long as no money has changed hands, the contract can be cancelled at a moment’s notice. This might before any work has been seen, but I can place a healthy bet on a lot of the work being cancelled is when the client is unhappy with the work, as is their prerogative. But when that prerogative treads all over a designer’s work and livelihood, it doesn’t look so good on Ooomf or the client.

Consider as well, that for ease of communication, conversations about the project will take place outside of Ooomf and on Skype, via email or phone. Ooomf’s rules state that everything must got through their site, but realistically, what controls do they have to make sure that happens? A contractor, surely, is not going to snitch on a client for having a Skype conversation with him, nor is the client going to complain at the chance of doing the work direct and paying less.

Overall, I think it’s a good move seeing more and more sites popping up offering to connect freelancers with work. A lot of a freelancers’ time and energy can be spent on finding more work once the current lot dries up, so anything that can help them, the better. Looking at the current offerings though, there are a lot of improvements to be made in terms of protecting the freelancer rather than the client, and making sure that the freelancer is treated equally in comparison to the client and to fellow freelancers.

Gone are the days that Elance and 99Designs seem like the only way for freelancers to get work, but more time and energy needs to spent on making the current crop of websites — Ooomf, Juiicy, FiftyTwo, Dapper et al — more accessible to freelancers looking for work, not just the popular ones who already have a lot, and protecting all parties involved.