That is some excellent marketing copy. If you'd said "it's just a freelance job posting aggregator with a newsletter as its interface"[0], I probably would have closed the window pretty quickly. Instead, you spent that space talking about the value proposition it provides (maybe a little too in-depth), an only brushing on the features. It's not too vague that I don't know what I'm getting, but it's not too specific that I think "$40 seems steep for a mailing list."
I don't even freelance, and I almost want to subscribe. :)
[0] That's what I got out of the pitch, anyway; I could have misunderstood.
If this works as advertised, it's pretty cool! I have a few questions though:
How exactly do you find the leads? Did you write software to do it (and if so, how does it work?) or are you manually searching for leads?
Does everyone get the same leads? That is, if I were to sign up for the web developer leads, does that mean that every other person who signed up for the web developer leads gets the same 5-10 leads per day/week and I have to compete with all your other customers for them? Or do you have a big pool of equal quality leads and randomly select a small number to send to each person?
Also, friendly typo alert: "I'm an independent designer who's worked with startups, ad agency's" should be "I'm an independent designer who's worked with startups, ad agencies"
The emails are all hand-curated, meaning I find them by hand and add them by hand. Currently leads outnumber members 26 to 1 Fixing that typo now thanks =)
I signed up a few days ago. The leads are good, but there aren't that many (5-10 per day). Do you see the number of leads growing? Eventually the leads you send will get pestered to death the larger your list grows, unless you can scale your list as you scale your customer base. I can see that really biting you. Based on your pricing, I can't see it being viable unless you can at minimum 10x'ing your leads list.
Thanks for signing up! =) Price is going up soon (not for you of course). Particularly, once I start building this thing out ... and sending even more personalized emails and leads.
I'm curious about the developer package. Do you segregate your leads by language?
As a Python dev, I wouldn't have any interest in JS, C, Ruby, PHP, Obj-C, etc jobs. If you just pump all jobs into the same stream, I could see a scenario where a Python dev could wait days before seeing even a single relevant job appear.
I'd also start to think about how to capture the demand side of this market (clients looking for freelancers). Aggregation is nice but if you can scale up the demand side you'll have fewer problems getting supply.
Fellow SaaS founder here. How did you decide to increase the price? Just because you expect to deliver a higher value or somehow you had a perception from your clients that the price is low?
Interesting idea for a service. Not sure if it would've solved my problems when I freelanced though, since the biggest time sink wasn't finding leads, it was all the communication before even starting a project to determine what they really needed in the first place, breaking it down by scope, priority, timing, etc.
I solved this problem by charging for everything I do, be it a discussion, requirement gatherings, analysis, estimates, quotes etc. There is a lot of value in the early communication. I wouldn't go back to doing this for free now since it really set a different tone, and people actually care of the time you spend on their projects in that case, much more.
Could you say some more about this? I'm curious how early in the process you start charging, how you present that to clients or potential clients, and how you handle objections.
Looks pretty nice, however the $40/month seems a bit pricey to me in my current situation (3 month contract coming to an end - may or may not be more work, so I want to keep my options open). Have you thought about taking a commission of jobs you fill a la recruiters?
While this is a great concept, I am not so sure if this will help freelancers in the long run.
As this service becomes more popular, freelancing subscribers will be hurt from the success. More subscribing freelancers? More competition for leads, and once again the same problem of driving down the wage.
As the website states, the pool of freelancing opportunities are pretty limited. It'll more or less stay around the same. So I feel that this service will have same problem like craigslist, odesk etc, but even worse while paying $40/month or $480/year.
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I don't even freelance, and I almost want to subscribe. :)
[0] That's what I got out of the pitch, anyway; I could have misunderstood.
How exactly do you find the leads? Did you write software to do it (and if so, how does it work?) or are you manually searching for leads?
Does everyone get the same leads? That is, if I were to sign up for the web developer leads, does that mean that every other person who signed up for the web developer leads gets the same 5-10 leads per day/week and I have to compete with all your other customers for them? Or do you have a big pool of equal quality leads and randomly select a small number to send to each person?
Also, friendly typo alert: "I'm an independent designer who's worked with startups, ad agency's" should be "I'm an independent designer who's worked with startups, ad agencies"
Overall, this looks pretty cool. Good luck!
As a Python dev, I wouldn't have any interest in JS, C, Ruby, PHP, Obj-C, etc jobs. If you just pump all jobs into the same stream, I could see a scenario where a Python dev could wait days before seeing even a single relevant job appear.
Just curious.
That nit aside, the site looks nice. Good luck!
A software as a service business is more concerned about the software you offer as a service not the software you use.
/2cents
Edit: Also great marketing copy!
As this service becomes more popular, freelancing subscribers will be hurt from the success. More subscribing freelancers? More competition for leads, and once again the same problem of driving down the wage.
As the website states, the pool of freelancing opportunities are pretty limited. It'll more or less stay around the same. So I feel that this service will have same problem like craigslist, odesk etc, but even worse while paying $40/month or $480/year.