What's interesting about the timing of this story is that I have recently been playing around with Upwork for some freelance work and the issue I am having is actually a different one.

I have come to realize that there is a fundamental problem with the marketplace itself. I don't think it matches clients to freelancers properly.

I did two exercises. I posted a few positions as a 'buyer', and I got a lot of spam (i.e. non-personalized, crap postings to my position/gig/job that was obvious they never read it). I got more than I expected, which makes it difficult to weed through and find a freelancer I want to work with. Granted, I didn't want the typical "low-ball" freelancer. I was looking for a freelancer that knew what they were doing. Alas, I was unsatisfied with the results and ended up not finding what I was looking for.

I also responded to gigs as a Ruby developer. What's remarkable is that it is literally very, very difficult to get any work, much less the type of work I would like (high-value work with a handful of clients, potentially doing on-going work).

I first started off with a relatively high-ish hourly rate for UpWork ($80/hr for someone with 8 years of Ruby & Rails experience and 15+ years of web development experience overall). Because I had no 'history' with the platform, that didn't work. I filled out my portfolio, and responded to each job in a very custom way detailing the specifics of how I would tackle each job I was submitting a proposal to. This took much longer than just spamming, and was more mentally taxing, but I figured I could make up for my non-Upwork-track history by putting more into my proposal. No dice.

I then dropped my rates (down to as low as $40/hr) just to test, still no dice. I didn't even get responses.

Then, I assumed that maybe my proposals weren't robust enough or maybe I wasn't communicating my capabilities in my portfolio properly enough, aka I was being hit with a 'portfolio tax'.

So to get over this, I decided to actually bid on fixed budget tasks that were very specific in what they want and overlapped with specific stuff I have done in the past -- specifically "B2B Lead Discovery" or "Website Scraping" for something.

I recently have been playing around with scraping websites for different types of leads, particularly B2B, and so this suited me perfectly.

I then started applying to some of these with not just the specifics of what I have done, how I would tackle their specific task, but I would even send them sample results for similar leads to what they were asking for. So say someone was looking for wedding planners from each state (an actual job posting) where they would need the $CompanyName, $Website, $Email, $PhoneNumber, $Address. I replied telling them I have experience doing exactly this....in fact, I recently did this exact thing for accountants, so I replied explaining what I have done and how I can help them and I sent them a CSV file with a list of sample accountants, along with a picture of my script producing those results.

In one case, I crawled the specific website they wanted crawled and showed them pictures of the script doing that and then I gave them a suggestion based on what they were looking for and what I found. There was a disconnect between what they wanted, and what could be technically scraped from the website (they wanted email addresses for all users on MySpace to be exact). So I informed them that unless MySpace has an API that gives out this information, and unless you are looking for email addresses that people post within comments on the music throughout the site, this is a waste of time and I provided proof from my script.

Suffice-it-to-say, I did a lot of work on each proposal. I did about 7 - 10 of these specific proposals for scrapers, and about 15 - 20 other specific but not as specific proposals. I also didn't change the price they asked. So if they said their budget was $10, I replied with all of the above with a $10 budget. This is crazy, I know...but I did it just to experiment.

The results? Not even 1 reply. Not even 1. You can see screenshots here [1].

Yes, my portfolio on Upwork could be weak (although I doubt it because I think it looks pretty robust), and my profile could be a deterrent (because the language I use is a mismatch to what these clients are looking for) and my rates could be high relative to the rest of the marketplace, but the real issue is just an overall non-response from ANY of the 20+ proposals I submitted over the period of a week.

Something feels fundamentally broken with that, especially when considering my experience with the other-side of this experience.

I believe that there is some middle ground between the "elitist" Toptal and "broken" UpWork. So, I would like to try an experiment.

Do you have any high value ($30K+ -- note this is a floor, just to weed out inappropriate clients) development projects that you would like done? Either generic projects where no tech stack is specified or Ruby and Rails jobs for starters. I won't specify the types of projects, but something where you would prefer a "high-quality" developer help you see it to fruition rather than the cheapest developer you can find. Perhaps you have tried other developer services/gig boards and are unhappy with the process.

Do you want a product manager to help drive the entire process for you, from beginning to end?

If this sounds interesting to you, please send me an email to: marc+hnexperiment@mymvpblueprint.com.

If I can find a pattern for how to find these types of projects consistently, I would love to work with other developers to fill these needs. Until then though, let the experimentation begin!

[1] - http://imgur.com/a/MjHYk