Elance, Fiverr, People per Hour - which one's best?

[Bobsmyaunty]

Since I've been on mat leave I've been helping a few friends with projects for their businesses (managing development of an ecommerce site, setting up their business - that sort of thing). I'm doing it for free as they are close friends and I'm enjoying it. My background is project management and I've set up my own business previously.

However, I'm ready to go back to work now & am actively looking. I'd like to put my existing projects through something like Fiverr/elance etc so that clients can see what I've done and testimonials etc. any recommendations on which one to hedge for??

The projects are just in the beginning stage so it's not a retrospective bid or anything.

Any recommendations/experiences appreciated!

Do you mean you want to create testimonials that you can add to a fiver etc profile? Or do you mean you want to invoice your friends through the system?

As far as I know all will take a charge for you doing that.

I personally like PPH. I have "won" a few projects ( where my skills/experience closely match the requirement) and I found lots of good freelancers on there (designer, web person etc).

Thanks Margo.

I was hoping to set myself up on one of them and have my work for my friends (and friends of friends) show up as completed successfully so clients can see my track record. I was hoping to be able to pseudo invoice ifyswim so that there was no real charge.

Great to hear that you've had success on PPH - there's quite a bit of work on there so that's hopeful.

Elance is the best imo. But what you are suggesting is dishonest. Better to score a real job and get feedback. Or are yout talking about 'carrying over' jobs? I don't think you can do that. On Elance, you would have to start from scratch.

Wouldn't your friends have to set up as clients as well? I don't think it's 100% honest either, although I do see where you're coming from.

Ah ok. I think I'll just include extracts/reference to it in my profile then as I'd rather not do anything construed as underhand.

Great to hear feedback on Elance too. I'm thinking that's the one ill go for.

PPh - All I can say in my experience is they can attract a lot of con artists; you buy a service and make a deposit. When the service does not match you still end up paying despite the Escrow promise of paying for jobs that meet customer's satisfaction.
"People Per Hour" is nothing short of a con site I have experienced and a quick google search will confirm this. Either way, if you buy or not the freelancer's service, you will be stitched up.

I am a web developer and I have found that eLance beats all the other web project portals hands down. I've gradually built up a solid quality customer base with great feedback, repeat custom, and people contacting / hiring me off of the back of my eLance profile. The profile initially when started properly, means getting certified through validation checks. There has been the odd timewaster project, but the good far outweighs the bad.

PeoplePerHour and Freelancer on the other hand are just plain hard work. A lot of the people posting projects expect the highly complex work done for nothing (projects like eCommerce websites with hundreds of products that should cost at least a couple of thousand pounds given the work involved, they want for a couple of hundred pounds). In my opinion it's mainly urealistic timewasters that populate PPH and Freelancer.

On eLance I will normally pick up one or more clients with every 20 or so pitches. On PPH and Freelancer I'm lucky if I get even a reply within 80 pitches.

So I know this post is old now, but I would advise using elance.com for both posting projects and pitching on projects.

Maybe it's my bad luck, but I have all kinds of trouble with elance. Not with elance itself, but with the people who hire there.

Multiple jobs come through where people want magic and miracles for free, and 90% of the jobs I bid on I find go to the lowest bidder, which is usually someone from India who evidently can work for 1/10 of what the job is actually worth. I have built up a perfect rating and get "Invites" frequently, which is where I get most of my elance jobs.

Just as a side note, when I started on elance, and I was also finding jobs elsewhere, I asked people to hire me through elance just so I could build up my elance profile. I still was getting five-star ratings from people I met on elance, but the others I already knew who were hiring me through elance helped build up the profile, which at that time I viewed as worth paying 9% of my job for.

I wouldn't honestly expect any better / different from peopleperhour and DEFINITELY NOT from fiverr (fiverr is a slap in the face to freelancers: how can someone design a professional logo for $5?)

Elance's good side is that they seem to be a stable company with an A+ BBB rating, and that I always get paid. It's not all bad, really, just hard to swim through and find the clients who really want quality work and not just cheap.

My views only. Hope it helps!

(IMpasto Animation Studios)