Ask HN: Need for freelancer website for developers in emerging markets?

5 points·nurik··4 comments

I was wondering if there is a need for a freelancer website targeted at developers in emerging markets? With sites already outthere like elance etc. would that be something to help people find work in those countries? For sure there are talented developers in lets say Africa or in the Middle East. But I just can get my head around it if would be a smart idea to build. What do you think?

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Focussing on a niche works sometimes. But in this case it might be a tough fight. In any marketplaces your fighting fires at two ends, the buyer and sellers.

Here your basic problem would be to get sufficient number of jobs for providers to signup. That'll be hard given elance and others already do that and they've already taken care of one-click payments across the globe). Infact most of the devs on elance are already from 3rd world countries, and the first world people find it hard to compete with lower pricing.

Infact going the other way might be lucrative(hypothesis!), i.e. cater to a projects in niche domains, or setting a lower limit on the project/hourly price. This way you're not competing on price, and focusing on quality. There's a dearth of those marketplaces right now.

Aren't odesk and elance already mostly popular amongst emerging countries?

Maybe you should focus on the opposite niche: European freelancers, American freelancers, Australian freelancers...

Exactly. Always felt like it's the other way around. Most of those freelance websites are overflowed with people from emerging markets.

Thank you guys for answering and you are totally right! A site like Coding Made in the US or Coding Made in Australia or Coding Made in Germany etc... would sound just great. I also agree that this is an uphill battle.

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