I Launched My Startup Yesterday, This Is How The Hectic Day Went
Here's some feedback, take with it what you will.<p>I like that you're starting yet another freelancer site, simply because I <i>hate</i> the other ones. They're full of often sub-quality contractors spamming the boards hoping to hit one and take some money. The other bids are from nations where the exchange rate makes my yearly salary make me look like a king. I take what I do seriously, I like serious clients, and I've find next to no success on these freelance sites (I may have found a few projects where I could make $100/h, but the volume of those jobs is small). I have no way to sell my skills on these sites. I'm not saying I have the answer, I'm simply explaining why I hate the other freelance sites.<p>Looking over your site, the first thing that jumps out at me is "City, State". I am from Canada, where we have provinces. Are you an international site? Your registration form could do with a bit of tweaking, I make mental jumps between "Persona", "Security" and "Location" a number of times. OAuth would have been nice.<p>The profile setup drop-downs are not obvious what they do until I interact like them, I feel like it is missing the down-arrow to the right. Nice-to-have if the category drop-downs didn't allow me to reproduce things, or I could leave one empty, add more, etc.<p>Next is who I've seen already-- Someone wants a full website for about $300, that's a critical issue with other sites. There's no real negotiation going on, the customer feels like they only need to spend $200, which, even for someone charging $25/hour means "do it an a day." Something like the sports site isn't scoped out as a massive endeavor, but it's bigger than the asking price. Yet out the other door, someone is asking for someone to scrape an XML feed for emails every hour for $500. Again, I'm not sure how to deal with these things, but these are reasons I'm not a fan of these sites.<p>The "More" position on the job posting makes me think that there is more text in the description simply because "more" at the end of a paragraph everywhere else on the internet means that. (more)<p>Your next challenge would be getting heavy traffic. I recently started blogging and my traffic looks like this: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/WuPOC.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/WuPOC.png</a> . Some articles I posted to reddit's programming, some I posted here, and I really learnt that I'm dealing with different audiences, reddit was more interested in my walk through of a project-euler solution, hacker-news was more interested in something on self-improvement. Most of my articles haven't hit the right-spot the first few had that brought me lots of traffic, this is three-fold. First, I'm not posting them in the right places, most people who are programming simply don't care about a number of hand-wavy concept things I talk about (but a good number of people do, just not the /r/programming or HN crowd). The second factor for my drop in traffic is I simply did not put the extra effort, that final 10% into my posts that I did with my first few. My big-traffic posts I had easily put through three or four drafts, let them sit for a week or two while I reflected on them, I just put more work into them, covered more corners. The last factor was my website usability, which was totally awful and I'm attempting to hack blogger templates to fix a number of things that many of my readers are pained by.<p>What I'd apply to you from what I learnt was that you need to find the right place to sell this, I'm thrilled to see you've launched but you need to put your product in front of people with a sales-pitch that brings them in. You need lots of people who want feelancers, and you need slightly less freelancers. If I knew the best places to target those people, I'd tell you. However, I'm sure if you did find the right place, 400~ hits would seem like an anthill.