New system aimed primarily at matching newer sellers with buyers
So now it seems I have to wait two hours before I can bid for a job. This is extremely unfair. Not only do experienced creatives/designers have to compete with an unfair playing field, ie people offered to do a job for £10 when it is clearly worth £100, we are now not allowed to bid for jobs as soon as they appear on PPH. What kind of system is this?!
Awful. Unfair. Unprofessional. Discriminatory.
Regards
C. Howe
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One big issue here is this notion of curating freelancers. This is expensive to do. To do it at all you need to make the income high enough to cover the cost. At the start you have no income but all of the cost.
I think the curation aspect may be a big mistake. I think it's probably a mistake for PPH. The real barrier for skilled freelancers is job value. On PPH the lack of any real backstop to job values has allowed low-value, low-quality freelancers and chancers to become dominant. If a client can't tell the difference between a quality freelancer and a rubbish one during the proposal stage then thequality freelancer is doing something wrong.
PPH are addressing this dominance via curation, when they should really be addressing it through job values. Worse still, they are competing at low-price levels with PPH freelancers through DeskDonkie (Oops, SuperTasker), which does nothing at all to bring quality freelancers to PPH.
It's the six-poundland nature of PPH that's the issue not curation. As a freelancer I will compete with anyone but not for low-value jobs and I suspect many good freelancers are the same. We then leave the door open for low-value freelancers because PPH provides no backstop to job values that will support western freelancers.
This isn't a racist thing. There are plenty of quality providers in the east, able to do good work at lower price points, but they are not the majority and they can suffer from small budgets too.
As an aside, I have noticed some appalling budgets attracting proposals from people quoting their hourly rate as (say) £50 an hour, yet they make proposals for tiny job budgets that sometimes wouldn't even give them half an hour on the project at their stated rate. How odd this is, but prevalent.
I have to say that this notion of having to provide a real image for a profile is mad. Many existing PPH sellers use stock images and I suspect that will become rampant. I don't want to use my picture on PPH, there are enough ridiculous images and I'd rather people not care about my image (unless I decide otherwise) .
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@Paul
Here we go again (I guess this is the same Paul I had a discourse with back in July). High job values make for quality work? I’ll let you in on a little secret, at the risk of becoming repetitive. Not every job is a big project.(Paul, this is a repeat of what I’ve said before, so you can skip to the next paragraph if you want).Many quality buyers have loads of little jobs that they would very much like to outsource. If a minimum job value is set at, say, £50 what will happen to a potential translation job which has 250 words to translate and requires 20 minutes of work (canned proposal, escrow payment, no back-and-forth but cut-and-dried job completion, simple invoicing and quick payment)? At a good rate of £40/hour, that job should be priced at £15, £20 max. So you’d want that job to be priced at least at £50? A bit cutthroat, wouldn’t you say? With your principle, it would never be headlined on your ideal site. You lose a buyer and will lose the freelancer that can’t fill his/her work roster.
Basically you feel that a day’s pay consists of part of one job (or perhaps one whole job), so you calculate what you need for a day’s pay and the overheads incurred and what, look for a job match? You (or was it Julian?) inferred as much a few months ago.
There are similar small jobs in graphic design, writing, proofreading, editing, heck even many aspects of IT. The truth of the matter is that much freelancing work comes from temporary overload of an environment, if not the buyer will employ someone full-time. Some may be return performers, some not. In Freelancing-101, I learned not to shrug of the small jobs but use them to either gain momentum or to keep afloat, but most of all to have the freedom of choice when it comes to taking on a task. Nothing too small for me? Oh, there definitely is! If the job value bothers me, I pass it over.
I agree with solid pay for solid work. I agree with an income for a sustainable lifestyle. I agree with quality over price. All within reason. The decision of whether it is okay for me is mine. I don’t think the idea of minimum job values is a sensible way of doing things, and most importantly it won’t upgrade the quality of the work done or quality of the buyer/job offers. In the first instance, anyone can propose a higher price. In the second anyone can go fishing for the cheapest bidder, and or provide poor descriptions. It doesn’t solve anything if a minimum value is required for a given job. The low quality bidders will still undercharge.
What you do may not fit every freelancer. And what you sell may not fit every buyer. If there are that many quality buyers with big enough projects then surely you can find them still, even on PPH? Don’t consider those that do smaller jobs to be low-quality bottom-feeders. They may be providing highest quality work to demanding and satisfied buyers and earning very well. The small jobs ring more eyes to the market place which, in turn, brings those eyes back when they want to outsource something bigger, something you’d be interested in.
If PPH puts a backstop in place via job value it would be a further defeat-ure. Suggest a different way to curb rampant sweatshop labour, one that doesn’t discriminate by job size or value. I’d love to hear it.
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I think there's a big gap between £50 and £6!
Yes, low quality bidders will still undercharge, but at least the job levels will give better quality providers a chance to operate and stop buyers from thinking they can get work done for £6.
Low value jobs aren't funding an operation such as PPH well - the ratio of overheads versus income is too close, so a leaner operation would do well to not service low job values. If you have a £6 job, get it serviced on fiver and let PPH or Maven get the higher rewarded turnover.
If we're into subcontracting, lets recognise that that may work for a company where getting rid of low-value jobs is convenient, but we're talking about establishing a higher-value market not a bargain basement as we have now. We are trying to escape the bargain basement.
Pass over your tiny jobs to fiverr, or PPH and let Maven raise the marketplace from the gutter.
We'll agree to disagree.
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I think there's a big gap between £50 and £6!
Last I looked, there is! So what is a prime job value?
Low value jobs aren't funding an operation such as PPH well
Probably not. But that's PPH's problem, not mine as a seller.
We are trying to escape the bargain basement.
I'm all for it. If there are jobs around that will be placed on whatever platform. This not wholesale, this is retail and by definition that means there's less volume per job.
Pass over your tiny jobs to fiverr, or PPH and let Maven raise the marketplace from the gutter.
Let's see what Maven brings us in terms of buyers.
We'll agree to disagree.
I think we will, but not on everything. I DO agree with much of what you say, just not with your solutions.
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http://www.peopleperhour.com/job/i-need-a-tuition-website-designed-581804#
Catch your fancy Paul? :)
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Yes, but that still leaves the problem of people bidding £50 for a £1000 job. As discussed earlier in the thread, the worst example of a bad buyer a lot of us have seen was offering £300, for a £30,000 job.
Also, I do not see that PPH have such high overheads on low value jobs. On a typical £10 job the seller is going to be paying the high rate fees so they will make £1.50, and their costs are extra server load and bandwidth (negligible) and the risk of having to provide dispute resolution (but, from everything I hear, they tend not to spend a lot of time on resolving disputes over low value jobs).
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I do not see that PPH have such high overheads on low value jobs.
I think they do. I still think their payment systems are manual, they still have to do their security checks, or whatnot and they will have a customer service cost, as you say.
There's definitely a sweet spot for PPH related to the higher fee rate, but higher rate jobs mean that the standard fixed costs remain the same but their overall profit (in real terms, not a percentage) is higher.
I have a feeling that low-cost jobs are probably more prone to dispute. I know I have far more demanding clients as the job values drop - they are intent to squeeze as much as possible from the low budget.
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I have a feeling that low-cost jobs are probably more prone to dispute.
I don't know about dispute, but small jobs are often more clear-cut than big ones.
I know I have far more demanding clients as the job values drop
Job value=Job size? To me, that is explained by the mere fact that the smaller job usually has a single focal point, while larger jobs have many highlights to dissipate attention.
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@Geoff. Good points with which I can agree, thanks. I am off-shore and it seems to me that PPH does do browser user agent and geolocation on the IP. There are many ways around that for those so inclined. To my mindset, the missing element is the moderation in particular, and as pointed out, too costly to be done right.
In essence, I feel that the best way around this is to have buyers pay a membership fee, but that's another can of worms...
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Job value=Job size?
In the PPH twilight zone, low job value (as in budget) often equates with clients that change their mind, don't know what they want and assume that things they didn't ever mention will also be included.
It's not always the case, but as the job budget goes up I find clients get more reasonable and more knowledgeable - professional if you like.
I'm not tarring everyone with the same brush. I have done quicky, low-value jobs that are perfect, but it's often likely that the buyer will actually require a lot more work than I ever anticipated. I often regret taking the small, low-value jobs.
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but it's often likely that the buyer will actually require a lot more work than I ever anticipated. I often regret taking the small, low-value jobs.
I'm sorry to hear that, particularly as it is the exact opposite to my experience - so I may have been lucky. I am very precise in the proposals, so maybe that has saved my skin. Some work-types won't permit that level of definition, I know.
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Reading the last few posts I wonder if there was a bit of confusion over 'low value' jobs and 'low budget' jobs.
A small job that nets £6 for 5 mins work is low budget but high value and I would be happy to do those jobs all day, even if PPH has a min comission per job, don't know if they do or not.
A job that takes an hour and nets £6 is low value and nobody UK professional should be looking at it.
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Blimey! I was considering posting a comment on here about how quiet things had got!
This might seem obvious, but reading all of these comments:
1) The new site is obviously in it's early stages, so at least give it a chance. It ain't going to be the best thing since sliced bread overnight. (no offence intended)
To the creators of the new site, I would say:
LISTEN AND RESPOND TO YOUR USER BASE, NO MATTER HOW MUCH OF A MINORITY YOU THINK THEY ARE (something pph doesn't appear to do)
MAKE IT SIMPLE TO PROVIDE FEEDBACK AND ENCOURAGE IT
To quote from Deb:
Same here, I am just a follower who has registered and am ready to give someone else a chance. For obvious reasons the freelancers behind Maven can't exactly stand up on here and shout "It's me!" although I'm sure they would love to. We will all see on the 1st exactly what it's like and should be making our judgements then
Don't think I could have put it better myself :)
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I am not a brilliant designer and have yet to prove that I'm brilliant at writing in English, but from times to times I have some cool ideas and the ability to inspire other to bring them alive, as a team.
One of my suggestions for the Maven site, based on my experience as a trainer and coacher, would be to assemble a few simple tools to promote teamwork. This is important because will drive healthier competition, building of trust between freelancers and added size and value to projects.
It could also be a distinctive feature, although in that respect I must submit my ignorance to this discussion because until today PPH was my only experience as an online freelancer (signed up on fiverr just about now to be able to compare).
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i've just seen on Twitter that Maven have delayed their launch due to a problem they found during testing. Good on them for having the guts to do that rather than rush to launch something that hasn't been tested properly and blame it on 'teething problems' like some I could mention.......
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Look what I've been invited to make a proposal on:
http://www.peopleperhour.com/job/research-database-excel-583847
How LUCKY am I!!! I get the chance to do ALL that work for £6!!! YAY!
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I LOVE this job
http://www.peopleperhour.com/job/i-want-to-set-up-a-freelancing-job-portal-579133
You just know PPH must be quaking in their boots. Especially in the clarification part when she says she is looking for the cheapest possible portal! lol
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