I would follow startup framework and try to think about what an MVP would be just to test and make sure people would really, actually pay for this instead of just taking their word for it. I had a similar situation with my project (matchist) where freelance developers were really excited about the idea, so my partner and I put our heads down, built it and then realized we spent way too much time building and not enough time getting feedback all along the way and making something much much more basic.
I'm also cofounder of matchist.com, and wanted to weigh in here. This is somewhat of a Jason Fried question...do you want to scale as quickly as possible? Should every business strive to be the biggest or greatest? Or is it more important to find a niche and just do that one thing really well. That's our philosophy building matchist...we don't plan to be the one stop shop for freelancers.
that's good to know. another difference is that GT works with teams (correct me if I'm wrong) and matchist is currently one developer matching per project
My understanding is that GroupTalent works with bigger companies to subcontract freelance talent. We are not working with large companies, but entrepreneurs/agencies/smaller entities.
That's great feedback. We are not really a jobs board...think of us like a recruiter who is technical and actually does their job right. Recruiters take upwards of 40% for project matches...that are pretty bad.(from what I've heard from talking to other freelancers)
Hey Joe, these are great points. As startup people, we all take risks on new services. Innovation would never work if people didn't take risks and only used what they were familiar with. You can look at the founders of the company and see that we have good experience: I'm an entrepreneur who's used to working with devs (founding member of FeeFighters) and my partner is a developer who used to be freelance and would have loved this service. We speak technical and understand the challenges. 2) We are working on building our reputation and will only be as good as our matches...especially in the beginning. I'd be happy to chat with you (or anyone) and clearly explain everything that goes into matching...it just all doesnt fit on a landing page!
Those are all great points, but I want to differentiate matchist from "these sorts of services." We focus on making quality connections to people you would otherwise not meet (whether geographic barriers, time limits, etc). Services in the past have worked on automating these interactions and end up in a price war towards the bottom: we get to know devs as people and only give them projects they would pick themselves. We want to streamline freelance so that freelancers do what they do best instead of being in meetings all day.
we have about 100 developers signed up so far, and our success hinges on our ability to make awesome matches for developers...so the more freelance devs sign up, the better the matches will be :)
Check out balancedpayments.com. I haven't seen anyone else with an escrow and payments solution that is robust (i havent used them, just doing research for my own projects)
as i've been talking more and more to developers, i keep hearing these same complaints about recruiters. I'm finally trying to make a difference by launching matchist.com, which will be a different kind of recruiting. we'll be catering to freelance developers by vetting projects they want to work on. we think the process is simple: tell us what projects you want to work on, what kinds of clients you'd like, and we'll send them your way.
in a perfect world, everyone can learn from books. i know that my learning style is MUCH more interactive and i only really learn in a classroom setting. Having done the spring dev course for Starter League (then codeacademy) I can tell you how amazing it is to have material presented, then challenges with pair programming right in class. TAs walk around and help you when you get stuck, thereby teaching you how to deal with error messages. learning from a book can be such an isolating experience, whereas classes are much more about community.
Congrats to all parties involved! I was part of the Spring Dev Class at Code Academy and couldn't be happier for Neal, Mike, Jason and the rest of the hardworking folks who made this possible.
Particularly, I applaud the emphasis on using the Starter League as a springboard for starting a career and/or lifelong relationship with development. Too many programs sell the idea of launching a startup from 3 months of beginner coding which is ridiculous. Even the rebrand "Starter League" emphasizes the commitment...perfect. If anyone is interested in my perspective on the class, here's a post I wrote soon after: http://entrepreneursunpluggd.com/blog/should-you-do-code-aca...
This discussion is the reason why I'm starting a site to send freelancers better projects. Check out matchist.com...we're going to start the developer beta next week. The idea is to be Hollywood agents for freelance devs. Any feedback is appreciated!
As an alum of Excelerate Labs, I can tell you this data is nowhere near accurate. For example, FeeFighters exited about 4 months ago and we had about $1.5 million in funding and 8 employees...none of that is listed here. The information is incomplete or incorrect for the majority of companies who went through Excelerate.
Alas, I cannot although I wish I could. I was not interested in working for a big company post-acquisition...hence the name "startup stella." I do hope the guys respond as we always respected the HN community and depended on it greatly. Whatever happened, hopefully the situation can be rectified.
yep I'm the only woman who was at FeeFighters and I respect Ayn Rand but I've never said anything about objectivism publicly...in fact, I would never recommend any philosophy for entrepreneurs as it is in fact, against my philosophy. So maybe you're getting me confused with someone else?
would love to chat with you more on this. we want to build something that fits exactly what freelance devs want. if you email me stella at matchist dot com maybe we could set up a quick chat?
Working on a site that connects freelance developers with quality projects. We would do the vetting for you. Right now, wondering whether there is demand on the developer side for this.
If you have 10-15 minutes to chat and give some insight, I would really appreciate it.
if you take a look at the site where this is coming from, you'll see that i actually talk to the "next generation of entrepreneurs" on a daily basis. the whole point of this post is to caution young entrepreneurs to build meaningful companies that solve real problems instead of trying to make a quick and successful exit
this was a great post, and the fact that much of the information is repeated elsewhere in posts indicates that 1) there is a scalable strategy for pr that works and 2) not enough people are using it! i covered some of my advice for pr for startups here, as an extension to my post on mixergy on pr for startups http://startupstella.com/2011/10/14/dos-and-donts-of-pr-for-...
I totally agree with you. There are huge business development advantages to having all of your potential partners in one place for a few days. My point is that the environment doesn't really breed creativity as opposed to collaboration.
As someone who has been doing PR for a startup for over 2 years, this article was spot on. The only point I'd bring up is that the author is speaking from the perspective of a local tech beat. Getting the attention of national reporters is much more difficult and takes a lot of effort before you have any news at all. PR is a lot of work...which most startups don't realize.
i did a stint in insurance sales...you grow a thick skin pretty quickly! one point: try to keep a measure of your success to failure ratio for calls. that way, you can know that if you make x number of calls, you will land y number of meetings. in insurance, they followed the 10-3-1 rule: 10 calls, 3 meetings, 1 conversion. So if I'm looking to hit a certain goal, I know the rough number of calls I need to make to achieve it.
Those are great points, but the question becomes a matter of the stage of the company. Clearly, the author still benefits from making cold calls, whereas in most cases, this starts out as a reality but becomes less and less as the company grows.
Also, we know our ebook is a potent conversion tool. I think it stills comes down to the question of industry marketing practices: we've found inbound marketing to be much more effective because of the saturation in cold calling.
great article. we ran an experiment over the summer with cold calling as well, as many people thought it would be a successful sales strategy for us. being in the payment processing world, we knew business owners were constantly being cold called and most likely did not want another point of contact. however, we wanted some data to show people who made that suggestion in the future.
our hypothesis was correct: our conversion rate was nill, even when tinkering with the sales script. i think the variation is due to the fact that the target customers in this article were not as heavily cold called as our target market. so, it made them more open minded. here's a link that shows our data: