I've spent the last couple of weeks looking for work on Elance, things have been pretty slow. There are some good people there (one of my old co-workers introduced me to it), but it's easy to lose them in the mass of offshored firms. It doesn't help that most people who post bids there only care about the price and will go with the cheapest one, which is the offshored firms.
I got my foot in the door on one job by charging the minimum for it ($50) because it involved changing one line of code (guy sent me the script for review before I bid). I'm now revamping more of that for a little bit more. But every other bid I've placed has been declined and they've accepted people who must work for $15/hr or less.
Elance is a totally depressing place, but all of our clients have us on hold so I'm looking everywhere I can.
Thanks, your musing gave me a great idea for a site. I just registered the domain name igi.gs (if only you could do 2 letter domain names gi.gs would have been awesome). My idea is invitation only freelance site where members have to invite new members and new members have to have a proven track record, its real loose in my mind right now, but I think I am on to something, all the other offerings in this area are a crap shoot. Maybe some form of bare minimum rate as well so it does not become a race to the bottom.
If you want to share them, I am all ears. I am working on how I would seed the site now. My initial thought was to target reputable blogging freelancers and make them the initial group. I was also thinking that maybe also allowing open enrollment, but only allowing open enrollment individuals to bid for extremely small projects (under $500, so if the minimum allowable rate is $50hr then 10hr projects) this would allow them to build rank slowly, as well if a member uses them for services they can up them to an invited status. As well I have formulated the idea that a member is forever linked to their invites. If you invite someone to the site and they do good your recommendation rank goes up, if they are bad your recommendation rank goes down. If it gets too low you are no longer allowed to invite people, as it gets higher you are allowed to invite more people. This has no bearing on your abilities rank (which is what gets you gigs). My other thought is new members get feed smaller projects and as their ability rank grows then they are feed larger projects. As well, I think I would go with pure rank not a pure customer satisfaction indicator one bad project can ruin an otherwise good freelancer on the site and lets face it at some point for whatever reason, you are going to run into a bad project. I think the site could make money by being a paid verification service where we would charge a fee to certify that the code is of good quality and we act as PM's to make sure the project is tracking to the schedule.
I got my foot in the door on one job by charging the minimum for it ($50) because it involved changing one line of code (guy sent me the script for review before I bid). I'm now revamping more of that for a little bit more. But every other bid I've placed has been declined and they've accepted people who must work for $15/hr or less.
Elance is a totally depressing place, but all of our clients have us on hold so I'm looking everywhere I can.