Watching @elaineellis pout after her car got peeped.
Why Do You Freelance?
If you are requesting an invite to pick.im you are required to answer the question “Why Do You Freelance?”
The responses have been inspiring.
One that really caught my eye was from Alex Aguilar:
Flexibility of managing my time.
Knowing that I’m in control of getting paid.
And the more efficient I am the more I can collect.
Not having to deal with traffic
My home office rocks.
For me, freelance was about the challenge. For many it is about the freedom. For you?
Day 1 Of Pick
What a day we had yesterday. I have written goal of 100 freelancers and 200 searches.
We kinda crushed that with 320 active freelancers and 7,971 searches.
We had three great press pieces. The first from Read Write Web “TechStars’ Andrew Hyde Launches Freelance Marketplace Startup”
Freelancers in fields like design, development, photography, copywriting, marketing and management can sign into Pick and create a profile to share their portfolio and contact information. More importantly, however, Pick asks freelancers to list their work availability and a price range. This allows clients to narrow their search to find freelancers in the specialty they need based on location, availability and price.
Spot on.
Our friends at The Next Web published Check Out The Newest Freelancing Hub Pick.im
What is Pick.im? A website for freelancers and people looking to hire freelancers to meet and do business on the level. It’s about as stripped down as you can think of, making the site dead simple to use and get started with. We like minimalism.
We like the minimalism too.
Where we sucked:
- We launched with a database of zero
- Because of this many of our searches yielded zeros results (pushed a fix for this)
- Our signup process doesn’t focus on defining why it is important for freelancers to have projects
- Many css issues (most resolved)
- incompatible character encodings: ASCII-8BIT and UTF-8” exception, which made errors for every freelancer with a non standard character in their name error.
Where we rocked:
- One hell of a first day
- Met a ton of really quality freelancers
- Captured some great data
- Helped five (that we know of) freelancer land work
- Our page load times averaged .09 seconds. Quick!
Thanks for the support and checking out Pick.im (you can call us pick’em)
Minimum Viable Product
Pick launched yesterday (hooray!) and we now have over 200 freelancers with quality portfolios. Goal is 1000 by the end of the week, so please keep reaching out to freelance friends. The site gets really interesting when we have about 10 freelancers in the same genera in the same area.
We launched early, way earlier than anyone was comfortable. We launched with the least amount of features that we could get away with. Now we have freelancers using the site, we can prioritize what to release next.
What is on Pick right now is about 1/3 of the features the site needs to really tick. I have a good guess on the 2/3 of the features, but the last 1/3 is going to come directly from listening to our passionate freelancers and clients.
We are pushing features and launches daily, so keep checking it out.
