iFreelance

Over the last few years, new services such as ifreelance.com have sprung up, and revolutionized the way people who need sites, find people to make them. Be mindful of the buzz-word “revolution”. As an experiment, I signed up for the service to give it a solid evaluation. Here is how the system works. A freelancer, pays a small fee and lists themselves in a category. There are 15 categories, and you can buy all of them if you choose. I signed up for one category, and every day there are like 5 new projects.

…in software development, design is undervalued. Often no user interface design is done, or it’s considered a formality. - Jeff Knooren

How The Service Works

New projects are presented to you, and you read the description someone has posted about what they want. This person, is referred to as a Buyer. You, as a Bidder, fill out a form and give an estimate of what you think it will take to do the project, and you quote a price. Bidders will see their bids as either won, or lost. In the last three weeks I’ve bid on 100 projects. As of today, my record is one in seventy one. That is, I’ve officially won 1 project, and lost 71. If this were boxing, I would one win above a punching bag like Mike Tyson. To the right you will find a graph showing most of my bids, are comparable to others using the system. So far, I don’t think this is the best use of Bidders or Buyers time. Here is the breakdown:

Replying with my estimate took twenty minutes at the very least:

• 100 bids @ 20 minutes = 2000min (or 33 hours)
• 1 Win @ $500.00 (Project took 17hrs to complete)
• 50 Total hours / $500.00 = $10hr

So, in other words, it took me 50 hours to win a single project and do the work. That averages out to $10hr. But also 33 hrs in providing free quotes. The ratio of wins/losses needs to be 2hrs, and not 33hrs to be worth it. Again, it’s not the price of $10 membership, and there is no shortage of projects to bid on. It’s the time wasted in bidding that is the real cost of using the service.

As a Bidder, no matter how much time you spent preparing, or how accurate your estimate is, a buyer is gone with one mouse click. Why? Was it something you said, were you overpriced, didn’t give enough info… there is no explanation. Sometimes Buyers do complain that Bidders didn’t give them enough info. But most of the time, even the most well thought out responses go nowhere. As a Bidder, it isn’t practical to give anything more than cut-n-paste quotes, because you’ve got 4 other projects to bid on.

From The Buyers Perspective

Shopping for computer services online is nothing like the real world. In the real world, you’re encouraged to “Come down to our showroom for a free quote”. Because whatever the business is, knows you’re more likely to buy when you’ve taken the effort to drive to the showroom. Or, gone to three other showrooms, and all the prices are pretty much the same.

If this were boxing, I would one win above a punching bag. - Jeff Knooren

On the internet, the buyers want you to bring the showroom to them, with an unlimited number of bids or price quotes. I can see why this is convenient, but everyone looses. The automated bidding process has turned into competition, like for a home mortgage. That system works for mortgages, because they’re one-size-fits-all solutions. The buyer is not in a better position with 100 project quotes. You should need no more than 5 quotes personally tailored to you.

Summary

Services like ifreelance.com sound like a good idea. Honesty and transparency must be at the heart of how a Bidder prices a project, and what a buyer expects to get for the price. But the only way to win bids, is to lie about the prices and timeframe. Spending an hour to prepare an estimate, along with 100 other people isn’t a productive way to do business. And too many quotes result in a lot of portfolios to look through, and references to check, and time wasted weeding out the ones who can’t do the job.