Inexpensive Doesn’t Mean Bad in the Freelance World
I often farm out some of the work for my business using freelance services such as Get a Freelancer and Rent a Coder. I find that by doing that with some of the more time consuming or mundane jobs, it frees me up for the ones which I can’t have done out of house, such as customer service and marketing. I do hear many times from people when I tell them what I farm out, that you get what you pay for, indicating that the service is substandard. I couldn’t disagree more.
I decided to prove this to a point in the last job I listed. I always write a VERY descriptive accounting of what needs to be done, almost to the point of discouraging bidders. I would much rather get 5 bidders who know what they are bidding for then 100 who have no idea. It saves both time and money in the long run. I find sometimes that with such a long description some people don’t bother to read it and then disagreements arise later in the process. I decided this time to add a single line at the end and request that people reference it in their bid so that I can be sure they read the entire description.
What followed surprised me quite a bit. I should first state that the “bid range” for this job was set at $100-$300. There was a clear division right away where around 15 providers bid $300 and another 15 bid $100. Out of the high end bidders, only 3 out of the 15 referenced my code phrase proving they had actually read the entire description while 14 out of 15 of the low end did reference it.
I was amazed to see how many high end bidders didn’t even read my requirements. Now you can analyse that all kinds of ways, for example, that they probably bid high and a lot knowing that they will definitely be able to do it and once they get it can dedicate the resources to it. I have another suspicion though and that is that they bid high and if they aren’t able to do it, farm it out themselves to the $100 bidders and keep the profit just for acting as the middleman.
Personally, although I agree to the You Get What You Pay For philosophy, it has not been the case when it comes to freelancers. In fact, many of the people I have hired through a service to do one job, have continued to work for me on other projects. To me its about communication and as long as I can get my point across easily, my experience has been positive so I will continue to judge people on their work and communication, not the price they charge.
Comment by Johan a.k.a. T0PS3O
Posted on July 12, 2006 at 10:50 am
I had some great work done on GAF (Get A Freelancer), very cost effective and if you pick your coders like you pick staff then it can result into great mutually beneficial relationships. Communication is the key and your ‘longwinded’ descriptions is exactly what I do. I HATE it though when I put up a simple data collection job and you get the standard copy/paste “Hi am Shahabala Patel and am experienced in C++, Java, C Sharp, PHP, Oracle, Design Patterns, Object Oriented Coding” etc. etc. and more of that useless shit, totally not relevant ot the job. So, I like your sneaky hidden sentence, I will adopt that to filter out more people I won’t like from the word go. Thanks for the tip!
Comment by Mike
Posted on July 12, 2006 at 6:35 pm
I use scriptlance a lot and I probably worked with over a hundred programmers, coders, writers etc.. and at the beginning it was hard to find good programmers. There’re indeed quite a lot of complete newbies and time wasters, that keep saying they can do anything, but once you choose them and set up an ecrow, you understand that they’re so useless. In fact most of the freelancers are like that…
But since then I’ve found few excellent programmers and I use them for all my projects. So I guess the best way is either just to choose someone with loads of positive reviews, or find good coders and stick to them..
I agree though, price doesn’t always mean quality
Comment by Jason
Posted on July 13, 2006 at 8:43 am
I typically PM back and forth with the potential coders maybe 5-6 times. You can usually tell pretty quick if they are competent or not.
Comment by Mike
Posted on July 13, 2006 at 10:40 am
Yeah, I usually even ask for a demo before I choose the right programmmer and usually I get to see a full featured working demo even before selecting a winning bid - it was worth becoming a certified webmaster for this
The worst type of freelancers though is the ones that like to put it off and keep making some weird excuses to explain why you need to wait another week
Comment by Dave in Thailand
Posted on July 15, 2006 at 3:01 am
The best job I ever got on a freelancer site was “almost the cheapest” .. a Perl script that worked 100% (and is still working 100%) for $50 .. from a Russian coder.
On one job I posted, the range was from $300 to $11,000.:)
Comment by John_loch
Posted on July 21, 2006 at 5:06 am
The embedded phrase is a great idea..
I think I’ll use that in the future
Cheers,
JL
Comment by Mike
Posted on July 25, 2006 at 12:04 pm
I believe in outsourcing, definitely. It gives talented people worldwide a chance to prove themselves. And saves a lot of time and money.
Comment by Blonde Jon
Posted on July 31, 2006 at 4:22 am
I’ve never used a freelance site, but I have had freelancers that I’ve found on forums do work for me. I’ve also had a so called professional company do work for me. I’ve had better luck with freelancers by price and by quality.
Pingback by www.webpuffs.com » Blog Archive » Finding A Freelancer Part 2
Posted on August 6, 2006 at 3:51 am
[…] Well, I’ve officially hired a freelancer to do some work for me. By the time I picked one of the bidders, I had 18 bids. getafreelancer.com is definetly the way to go to get a freelancer. This is my first experience with hireing a freelancer. My biggest thing that I looked for was I wanted to make sure whoever did my work had good reviews. I made sure that the reviews mentioned how well the person communicated. I also looked to see if they did work related to my project. One person who bidded on my project had 20 reviews, but 2 negative reviews. I won’t go with anyone who has a bad review. At GAF, they have escrow services. This is nice so neither party gets burned. If you are lacking in any area of expertise that is hindering you to start your web business, and you have money, I suggest going with a freelancer. Here’s an article that I thought was interesting and helped persuade me from my do-it-yourself attitude. Inexpensive doesn’t mean bad… […]
Comment by Blonde Jon
Posted on August 6, 2006 at 3:55 am
Well, I just hired a freelancer from GAF. This article inspired me to do so. So far everything is going smoothly. Keep up the great articles.
Comment by Jim Westergren
Posted on August 28, 2006 at 10:57 pm
Good post and good point!
I have been using outsourcing quite a lot in my business and I can tell you one thing, price is not a measure of quality. Usually the biggest difference is wether or not the person bidding has an established company or not. The company needs more money but not a single person working alone. Another difference is of course the location. A bidder from india don’t need the same amount as an american as the USD is about 7 times greater in India compared to USA.
Comment by Motorcycle Fairings
Posted on September 4, 2008 at 2:24 pm
Mike, can you gimme some more info about how to become a certified webmaster? Thanks