Podcast Episode Details
Back to Podcast Episodes
The Hustle
Episode 21
In this episode Mike & Matt discuss the entrepreneurial hustle, focusing in on the online freelance game for web developers and designers. Segment 1 - Freelancing Online
- There are a lot of developers, writers, virtual assistants, and more that work freelance online
- As a small business, we have experience getting work from freelancing websites and other site resources, however, please note that we work almost exclusively in the web development/design segment of the business so your mileage may vary if you’re freelancing in a different field
- There are a lot of different websites and services that are set up for freelancers and their customers, most of them are basically job boards with full service solutions that contain various features such as:
- Portfolio Page: Set up a portfolio containing things like pricing per service, project showcase, history on the site (ie took successful jobs, their rating as a service providers, etc.), list of skills, and more
- Job Board: A list of jobs typically posted by potential customers, this job board generally has a bunch of topics ranging from app development to content writing. Customers can also post things like their budget, how much they’ve spent on the site with other freelancers - to judge how serious they are, and customers can also have a profile that proves how “legitimate” they are, or show off what other projects they’ve had done so developers have an idea of their expectations
- Payment Systems: A lot of these sites have some sort of payment system in-place that helps customers pay freelancers, and in turn, help freelancers get paid on time.
- Premium Services: Often times these sites are free to use, but have premium features that are for sale for customers and/or freelancers. Some of these premium features include: bidding for jobs (limited bids for free, freelancers can pay for more), premium job listing (appear at the top of search results)
- Services we’ve used include: Guru.com, Freelancer.com, Craigslist, and Kijiji
- Guru.com
- We’ve applied to a few jobs on Guru without much success, however, we have had success via our portfolio on the site
- Once we listed our skills and experience on there, we generated a few leads from people contacting us right from our portfolio page
- Freelancer.com
-
- This was the first freelancing site that we tried, it seemed really popular and active so we went in head first
- We tried starting with smaller jobs, $100 or less, and ended up scoring a low-cost small adjustment job which ended up being an entire mess of a situation - mostly because the customer had an issue with his account and because we didn’t take a look at how Freelancer charges for their services
- Kijiji & Craigslist
-
- In the very beginning we tried to get some free advertising going in the “classifieds” space
- We took a look at what other people were posting on there in the web development space, most were quick $500 or less websites that were all-in
- Following in their footsteps we released a few different ads at different pricepoints, listing similar packages on our website
- This resulted in one long-term customer relationship from a person that called
Published on 7 years ago