FEATURED ARTICLE — October 26th, 2020

How to choose a Freelance Platform to work on in 2020 – The Insider’s look at Talent Marketplaces

By Ksenia Larina

Let’s face it, good ideas don’t come selectively to tech founders. They are also not exclusive to people from high-density population areas where you wouldn’t have a problem finding a decent team of developers to work on your MVP. 

People hire freelancers and remote devs for all sorts of reasons: 

they prefer having a distributed team 

they can’t afford to hire someone in their area (I’m looking at you, Silicon Valley!) 

they’re bootstrapping and only have occasional tasks/projects they can’t handle themselves 

they’re overbooked but don’t know if they’d have enough work for a full-time employee yet 

they can do front end but they hate it (oof, this one’s relatable, isn’t it?) 

they need developers yesterday and traditional recruiting process is just too slow 

they need an MVP to prove their concept and test their market and it can be done without an in-house dev team

they’re a non-tech founder and have no idea where to start and how to vet programmers 

Whatever checks your boxes, you’re not the only person to be looking at the tempting freelance marketplaces right now. But how exactly do they work, and are there differences? 

As a marketing employee of one of such marketplaces, who had to study the space pretty closely, I’ll guide you through a few things you should know and consider when hiring independent contractors. 

I will mention specific companies for the sake of examples but will try my best not to give any biased opinions. 

So, let’s dive in. 

What are the differences? 

Bidding vs. Non-bidding marketplaces

So, if you’ve ever hired or done work on Upwork (Elance/oDesk for the old-schoolers), you know what... Read More