Upwork

“And so I just started saying, okay, like each of these categories is going to get picked off one or the next Five-year window, let's say.”

“When we go in to post a job, I will not take the low end bids on Upwork at all, because I just, I don't think the quality's gonna be there. So if we post a job and we get a 40 dollar an hour bid, or a bunch in the thirties and forties, and we get a bunch in li…”

“The primary issue with these labor marketplaces like Fiverr is disintermediation. If you If a business hires somebody on Fiverr and has an amazing experience, eventually they're just gonna go direct because they build up a lot of trust, and it's very different…”

“Platforms like Upwork or Fiverr, because that's a place where there are so many business ideas hiding in plain sight. So many people needing jobs done, having to automate things. There's so many ideas on these platforms”

“Generally we're estimating two to 5000 people make at least a thousand dollars a month designing thumbnails across all different types of platforms. Meanwhile, there are over two million YouTube creators that are in the YouTube partner program, meaning they're…”

“If I were to look for ideas, I would use, I think, Upwork would be a great place to find ideas, because you can go there and see what people are looking for to build. And maybe if you can translate that Into a known solution to offer to other users. I think th…”

“Technically it's very, very small angel round, which is just like friends and family. It was nothing significant. We burnt it all in Upwork developers in like three weeks.”

“Anything that is not relationship oriented like you can go on Upwork and like get all these one-off jobs. I think AI is a much better tool because the relationship doesn't matter there.”

“That was how it was built basically all through Upwork through contractors. And then as all the features were built out, we scaled the size of the team down and just focus more on the marketing and sales side of things.”

“But I think it's an easier sell when you're replacing something or doing something better than like existing software could do.”

“The first one I did for 750 bucks.”

“Automations is also a good keyword to look for because you can turn most op automations into an app with a front end.”

“If it's a simple enough app, and it's 2500 bucks, right you could go ahead and build the prototype, and then in the proposal, send it as a Loom link of you, like, demoing it for them, which I've done, and it worked for the first one I ever did.”

“I would say, like, solo dolo I think you could easily clear Five, 10 K a month, just without any outside help. definitely building apps, but even just like if you consult on the right kind of product projects surrounding like a specific SAS.”

“OpenAI put out a new study about software engineering tasks and whether or not LLMs can pick up random software engineering tasks off Upwork, and what percentage of them can they complete? And it's only something like 40%, and crucially, LLMs can fix bugs, but…”

“If I'm doing a full-time, you know, W-II employee hire, we go through Dynamite Jobs remote-first recruiting, just because finding full-time people is so time-consuming. But if we're hiring part-time, we tend, we being MicroConf Tiny Seed, And even, you know, b…”

“One Upwork method I would recommend for anyone considering hiring off of there, hire like five to 10 guys to do an hour or two of work. And then stick with the best guy. That tends to work very well.”

“Usually what I do is I do all of the UX myself, and then I'll hire someone either on Upwork or some somewhere else. Now I know a lot of talented designers, but in the past, that's what I would have done and have them make my bad designs look a lot prettier.”

“A lot of self-published authors are like, I'll go to Upwork, or I'll hit up my designer friend who puts together PowerPoints, and I'll pay them 500 bucks. And it always results in something unremarkable. You have to pay an artist, a book-covered designer speci…”

“A week before we launched Bolt she went onto Upwork and listed this project and said, Hey, I want to build this product. Da da da. Asked for quotes on the thing. She got a quote for 5000 dollars from, I think it was Dev in like Ukraine or something estimated t…”

“With no code tools and with Upwork, you can build these apps in less than a month.”

“There are people that have Upwork accounts that have built with accounts and 20 bucks and you can have all three million Shopify stores contact info in your inbox.”

“Upwork has like, I don't know, Three or four billion dollars of GMV every year of people basically paying for tasks that get done in Upwork.”

“I sat on a board at a company called Elance, which became Upwork with John Doerr years ago. He was always the first person in his seat at board meetings. He was always on time, always read the materials. I also spent some time with Mike Moritz, who was also, n…”

“You have to recognize when you run marketplaces that many of the changes that are most consequential create winners and losers. And rolling with those changes is about recognizing whether the winners you've created are more important to your business view than…”

“There was software that was out there at the time that we could have paid for to just use for Morning Brew's referral program, but instead, we found a developer on Upwork who was in Ohio, and we paid him 500 dollars to build Morning Brew's referral program.”

“I'm a content creator. I know a thousand content creators. Not one of them would go and put their job profile on LinkedIn or on Upwork and be looking for jobs there. So it's just not that they don't, you don't find creators in that same typical way that you wo…”

“So we had to, I think, recreate over a 100,000 pages with like Photoshop and InDesign where we had to hire a team of designers on Upwork yet again. To essentially like eyeball these pages and redesign them in Photoshop and InDesign, and then we had to convert …”

“What I do is I put filtering in place and I click on the most expensive hourly rate. And I pay 10 people to do the same task. And then I look at the work quality and then I use the one ongoing, which would, who gave me the Best hourly rate for the best value o…”

“That is the mistake most people make is they give the project out and they go and try and find someone in the middle or the bottom price point, just hire the most expensive, but it's still way cheaper than a 300,000 dollars San Francisco engineer.”

“I wouldn't go and hire developers on Upwork. That can be one of the hard things just because I started there, but then it became really popular looking at that there are many, that there's a lot of jobs and that the market is booming. So everybody that was a W…”

“This is a great way to find great talent, because you put up the same project, so you have a design spec, To 30 people on Upwork, you pay them all their rate, you collect all the designs, then you pick the best one.”

“He is. His team. So he's got a team of three or four people that work with him. Very reasonable rates for that team. And they got rid of everything else about a year and a half ago, so they, that's basically our design team.”

“It has never been easier to build a product because of the acceleration of technology and the low cost of building any new product. Finding talent to work on your product is easier than ever because just You know, amazing marketplace that exists online for fin…”

“And today, fast forward, we're a public company. We have about 2000 team members. 75% of those team members are freelancers. They are distributed around the world. Our team is in 86 countries globally.”

“It's 95% freelancers, and yet our attrition rate on the team is less than five percent.”

“In fact, we have more than 350 freelancers doing remote development for us on our core mobile app, our web apps, and this has been a huge part of how we've scaled our business over many, many years.”

“When I became the CEO of our company in January of last year, I had a very audacious goal for us to go from being a single product company to having four products, and it was our remote development team that included so many of these freelance developers that …”

“And so we also see that in the data, professional freelancers actually do more to upskill themselves constantly than captive employees do. That's just a fact.”

“Last year, we set the goal of rebranding and changing a bunch of our, ah, marketing assets, doing a big launch. We did this in about half the time, changing 900 assets in our company. So much faster than we would have been able to do with just an in-house team…”

“Unlike your employees, who might only be onboarded fully and delivering ROI for you after three to six months, your freelancers, you can onboard in a few hours, and they're delivering ROI for you in a few hours, which is amazing, because they are very fast and…”

“We have a practice where our virtual teams do get together once every year or so for a two-week agile, like, meetup where the team is, you know, in Czechoslovakia or Mexico City or somewhere, and they do have team building in person. The rest of the year, they…”

“We've been doing charge up days, which is a day off for the company, or two days off for the whole company, we pay the freelancers to also take that time off.”

“Bringing freelancers in forces that clarity and has forced us to really get good at understanding for every effort, like, what are we trying to achieve? If we can articulate that first, then we need to pause and not just start putting bodies against the effort…”

“They also said that any companies that provided a required meeting as part of their process actually significantly correlated to delays and slower project finish times, and so they even built a synchronous video conferencing product into their offering, and 57…”

“We start we start in April, May, April, May, and in November we had the MVP.”

“One of the issues with like Upwork and whatever is like, if someone is terrible, they can be great for a little bit and then they can be terrible. And then yeah, If they're really bad, you can sort of burn their ratings or whatever, but they could just start u…”

“Morning Brew's referral program progressed from starting on Kickoff Labs, us finding that was not flexible enough. We then had an Upwork freelancer build it custom for 500 dollars, and then we ended up giving it to our in-house engineers to rebuild and build i…”

“And so one of the kind of conundrums that you face when you're building a marketplace is you kind of almost have to bet am I a marketplace or am I a SaaS business? There's very few examples of people doing it well at the same time, and so, you know, you might …”

“We're not trying to disrupt Upwork or Fiverr. Those are sites where you get a logo or a website We're looking to build large, you know, and facilitate building large software platforms, big, big projects, multimillion dollar projects that could never touch a m…”

“And the other drivers really is that if you look at the freelance market in general, is it like Still happens outside of online marketplaces. And so the Fiverr and the Upwork and so are really competing within these existing six percent right now.”

“We're being used by, we have Upwork that's doing services. They use us. We have Yelp.”

“So we started Bullhorn in 1999 and we were originally We were a online service, kind of like if you've ever used or seen Upwork or Fiverr, we were an online marketplace and specifically we were focused on creative talent and it was really too early for that bu…”

“We're shooting for more of a 50% margin range versus the 10% up work range.”

“We found that the average developer was being paid about 200 dollars on the leading freelance marketplaces like Upwork. And they had to 200 dollars for a small widget project. Okay. And so they would need to take at least 10 to 18 of those projects in a month …”

“We do have a screenshot feature similar to Upwork and the, that's great. And but I don't actually feel like that's the future. Like I say, I think the artificial intelligence part is the future because you can more accurately determine what What's actually goi…”

“We started with enterprise selling. We were able to attract Customers like Sephora and Glue Mobile and Upwork”

“I have there's a website. It used to be called Odesk. Now it's called Upwork. And I would just hire people for two dollars an hour to build it for me.”

“So the other sites, Upwork, Elance, Freelancer, they all charge a percentage of a project. So if you're going to be spending, you know, five to 10 grand on a project, that's, they're going to take, you know, anywhere from 10 to 40% of that.”

“You can go to Upwork and you can hire somebody, but you're going to, Generally, from what I've heard, have a really bad experience as a client.”