Have you found any success with Elance?

17
Nov1

Your Writing Dept has made several attempts to use Elance to gain new writing projects, but after submitting proposals only to be hit up by buyers to see if we would be interested in drastically reducing our bid amount, or just simply being passed over for a lower bid, we decided this just wasn’t our market. Too much time was being spent combing through poorly written and vague RFPs that it just wasn’t worth the effort. And we just didn’t want to be categorized as a low-budget writing business that would get sucked in by the lure of easy money

We would like to hear from writers who have either made the system work for them, or those who have an interesting failure story.

Jessica Mah has a good post, Why Elance Failed and Odesk Succeeded as the “eBay of Outsourcing”, that includes comments from those who have succeeded and those who have turned away from Elance.

Share your thoughts with us.

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1 Comment

Jessica Mah
8:12 pm on November 18th, 2008
Hey there,

Elance isn’t for everyone… it has a high cost to use — in time and expected value of services. While it’s certainly cheap to hire someone via Elance, the associated costs of doing so may be high.

For example, the many weeks it takes for a cheap Elance programmer to provide a service may be worth MORE money than hiring an expensive coder who would take only a week to do the same thing.

Just something to think about.
Jessica

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