Why trust in freelancers is so low? | Hacker News Reader

Why trust in freelancers is so low?

1 pointVladimirCcrrr28 comments

When I tried freelancing it took me months to land first client, the job was around 30$ so I gave up soon after that.

I took another path and ended up in startup world. Long story short my startup grew to the certain point at which we had some issues in operation and development so we decided to go with outsourcing.

I was definitely up for hiring freelancers to do the job but my co-founders did not really support the idea, they preferred to go with an agency as more reliable option.

Since the company was funded we had that option to pay extra buck for some decent outsourcing company to do the job, I was still voting against it, but we end up paying 6 figures for ridiculous stuff. I know, it sucks... I could hire 100 amazing freelancers for that amount.

The project end up failing and we had to throw the towel in. That 6 figures left the scar on soul :) everyone left the company and I ended up with the product in my hands but it needed major overhaul since the digital agency and my co-founders ruined it.

With my last money I decided to hire some freelancers to help me do the job as I couldn't complete it alone.

I even took a major move and moved to India to cut the cost of life and development. I met a lot of freelancers on my journey, and I successfully assembled the small team of freelancers who did a great job with the product! A 100 times better than the overpriced agency. I managed to sell the product and exit with some decent amount of cash.

Could we do it better with the company and went with the freelancers at first place? Yes. Was it better to give 5 figures to freelancers instead of 6 figures to an agency? Yes. But why people have so low trust level that freelancers can not complete major projects? I would try to solve that question with my new startup, so lets see how it goes...

Any unemployed programmer or designer can call themselves a freelancer and start trawling Upwork and Fiverr. Customers usually can't evaluate skills and choose based on price, so they get what they pay for. And the freelance marketplaces teem with low-skill/low-cost people from around the world, along with plenty of scammers. That creates the trust problem.

I have freelanced for almost 15 years. I work through a reputable agency. I have never used a freelancer marketplace, relying on word of mouth and reputation, and the higher-end customers the agency caters to. No trust problem for me or the other successful freelancers I know, but I understand why businesses approach freelancing with skepticism.

I wrote some articles about freelancing and working with freelancers on my site typicalprogrammer.com. Free, no ads or popups.

The word freelancer seems to be wrapped in this gig thing, when you say freelancers to people they immediately think of low cost few days job.

Yes it's true that web is flooded with tons of random people calling themselves freelancers and they are ruining the reputation of others by upselling low skills for low price.

I am working now on a platform to actually build trust in freelancers and enable them form teams to take on bigger projects as teams so let's see how that will work out.

Incompetent and unscrupulous freelancers don't ruin the reputations of others, but they do poison the well - Gresham's Law in action. Once a customer has a bad experience or two they very reasonably hesitate to make the same mistake again. Most of my freelance relationships started because the customer needed someone to take over and fix the problems left by the last crew. My reputation improves in contrast with the other goofs out there.

I have seen so many proposals for freelancer platforms that try to ensure trust, I don't know I'd even look at another iteration on that idea. They always get gamed, or they fail to reach a critical mass of freelancers and gigs. I think the agency model works better but it has its own scaling problems.

Disclaimer: 10X Management (agency) represents me in my freelance work.

The problem with agencies is they are overcharging, once you hire an agency you have to pay for their rent, their utilities, their overhead cost. It's all included in the hourly rates of the person you hire. So instead of paying 10 things I would rather pay just for a skills of a person.

In the past 5 years I work with multiple freelancers, I helped numerous companies hire reliable teams of freelancers. Right now I operate with 15+ freelance teams, but yes, when you build the trust scaling is the problem. That is exactly what I am facing right now, how to scale with the trust.

I will try to figure that out, and thank you for sharing your views it will help me a lot.

I meant specifically an agency like 10X Management, who represent freelancers like me. I contrast that model with outsourcing firms, or (less charitably) body shops, that have people on-staff or on-call to throw at a project. If your main contact, as a customer, is with a sales rep or project manager rather than directly with the programmers and designers, you're dealing with an outsourcing firm/body shop.

Having worked in both environments I prefer the agency model. I deal directly with my customers and can choose which projects to take on. The agency provides marketing, legal, billing and payment, additional resources, and will resolve issues with the customer if necessary. Otherwise they just connect me to the customer.

I always tell my customers that I don't charge for work I can't deliver on as promised, or work they aren't happy with. And I don't charge for fixing problems I caused (bugs or other mistakes). That forces me to spec the work out in small-ish tasks with clear deliverables we can agree on, because not having a definition of "done" can kill a project and a relationship. I always work incrementally so my customer can see progress and we don't have a big surprise delay or misunderstanding over requirements near the end. I also rarely take on ground up/green fields projects, because I've run into too many minefields of unclear expectations and requirements. I prefer legacy systems and code that almost works but needs help.

I never work on spec, instead offering a guarantee. I have never had to do a lot of work for free. My freelance relationships last years, in a couple of cases for over a decade. I see it as mostly building a relationship, which has to include trust, on both sides. If you can figure out how to scale that and manage it with remote freelancers, great, but it seems like a big problem to solve.

So that's what I am trying to build, the relationship where customer talks directly to a freelancers but as a marketplace we will provide billing, legal, payment processing. I want to enable freelancers to work in teams, and gain trust of big clients instead of few thousand bucks gigs.

I love how you described most of the agencies as a body shops, they truly are. You talk to a salesman instead of the team you want to work with. That would be the reason for many projects failing and being overpriced.

There's a very special skillset to working with freelancers, and not every one has it.

Also the best freelancers either start their own outsourcing company or get snapped up.

Yeah I totally agree, but there seems to be no trust in freelancers when it comes to big projects.

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