Live data from Hacker News

I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich

blog.stetsonblake.com

151–160 of 264 posts

Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich

#151

I have not had any success on Upwork. 100% of the “leads” I got there were scams. Not 75%, not even 99%. 100%. Not one single honest job. Some were requests for me to participate in scams, but I don’t roll that way. I’m sure that my experience was unique, and that my profile must have had some “scam flag,” so I won’t write off the platform in its entirety. I heard good things about the site from friends, but every si…

[deleted]

Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich

#152

I have not had any success on Upwork. 100% of the “leads” I got there were scams. Not 75%, not even 99%. 100%. Not one single honest job. Some were requests for me to participate in scams, but I don’t roll that way. I’m sure that my experience was unique, and that my profile must have had some “scam flag,” so I won’t write off the platform in its entirety. I heard good things about the site from friends, but every si…

My wife is a very successful marketer on upwork. However, she's been on the platform for maybe even 10 years now, way back when it was odesk and elance. She has flawless work history and over a hundred clients - and she told me that recently the number of job invitations she gets are way down and that the 90%+ of the invitations are very fishy. My guess is that platform is now so popular that the quality of its audience is very low on average.

Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich

#153
post #150

I have not had any success on Upwork. 100% of the “leads” I got there were scams. Not 75%, not even 99%. 100%. Not one single honest job. Some were requests for me to participate in scams, but I don’t roll that way. I’m sure that my experience was unique, and that my profile must have had some “scam flag,” so I won’t write off the platform in its entirety. I heard good things about the site from friends, but every si…

I've spent over 50k over the years on Upwork working a heap of great freelancers. Once you get into it and learn to sift through the legit profiles vs the dodgy it becomes very useful. And it's great to get to work with folks around the world

Cool, but you sound like you have used it to hire folks; not find work.

It seems that it really is a great platform to hire people; just maybe not so good, if you want to be hired.

Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich

#154
post #39

This is a pretty good atticle, and the product is actually quite solid (maybe a tad overpriced), but this right here is a rookie mistake: > In January, 2019 I launched to HackerNews and some subreddits ... Really? That's a "launch" these days? At least scrounge up a few hundred bucks and throw up some Facebook ads. Reddit and Hacker News have some of the most cynical and thrifty readers out there. Networking and gett…

> Really? That's a "launch" these days? At least scrounge up a few hundred bucks and throw up some Facebook ads. Reddit and Hacker News have some of the most cynical and thrifty readers out there. Networking and getting the word out is half the battle. With such little effort put into the launch, OP could have been selling a dollar for fifty cents and no one would've cared. Eh, I tried exactly this for a "thought bub…

> There's absolutely zero chance that they all just happened to be female, nicely formatted [firstname].[lastname]@gmail.com addresses.

That makes you fraudulent these days? Man, my wife and I are screwed.

Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich

#155
The problem we have is market saturation of basically everything. The winners take it all. If I had a chance to do it all over again, I'd probably just learn a trade, like electrician, bricklayer or plumber. They don't seem to run out of work.

Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Really? That's a "launch" these days? At least scrounge up a few hundred bucks and throw up some Facebook ads. Reddit and Hacker News have some of the most cynical and thrifty readers out there. Networking and getting the word out is half the battle. With such little effort put into the launch, OP could have been selling a dollar for fifty cents and no one would've cared. Eh, I tried exactly this for a "thought bub…

> There's absolutely zero chance that they all just happened to be female, nicely formatted [firstname].[lastname]@gmail.com addresses. That makes you fraudulent these days? Man, my wife and I are screwed.

Apparently, you also need to be female; I am going to assume your wife is, but are you?

Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Really? That's a "launch" these days? At least scrounge up a few hundred bucks and throw up some Facebook ads. Reddit and Hacker News have some of the most cynical and thrifty readers out there. Networking and getting the word out is half the battle. With such little effort put into the launch, OP could have been selling a dollar for fifty cents and no one would've cared. Eh, I tried exactly this for a "thought bub…

> There's absolutely zero chance that they all just happened to be female, nicely formatted [firstname].[lastname]@gmail.com addresses. That makes you fraudulent these days? Man, my wife and I are screwed.

That’s clearly not what the parent post is suggesting. E-mail addresses on this format don’t make up 100% of all e-mail addresses in existence, so it’s suspicious when they make up 100% of your signups.

Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Really? That's a "launch" these days? At least scrounge up a few hundred bucks and throw up some Facebook ads. Reddit and Hacker News have some of the most cynical and thrifty readers out there. Networking and getting the word out is half the battle. With such little effort put into the launch, OP could have been selling a dollar for fifty cents and no one would've cared. Eh, I tried exactly this for a "thought bub…

> There's absolutely zero chance that they all just happened to be female, nicely formatted [firstname].[lastname]@gmail.com addresses. That makes you fraudulent these days? Man, my wife and I are screwed.

I’m not saying the email format alone means they were fake.

I’m saying that they were fake because all of them were formatted like that, registering within hours of being made available on the Play Store/AdWords, with zero external links and the app never actually being launched.

The odds are almost nil that they were legitimate users. It’s incredibly easy to spot, the email signups after the initial launch are far more “natural”, even those sharing the same format.

Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich

#159
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've spent over 50k over the years on Upwork working a heap of great freelancers. Once you get into it and learn to sift through the legit profiles vs the dodgy it becomes very useful. And it's great to get to work with folks around the world

Cool, but you sound like you have used it to hire folks; not find work. It seems that it really is a great platform to hire people; just maybe not so good, if you want to be hired.

As someone who got hired through it for years I can confirm this:

> learn to sift through the legit profiles vs the dodgy

It's also important to get longer term projects through it (either a client that brings you repeat work or short-medium term hourly contracts). It has got more and more difficult over the years imo as the various freelance sites merged and you had more crap to sift through.

Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich

#160
post #39

This is a pretty good atticle, and the product is actually quite solid (maybe a tad overpriced), but this right here is a rookie mistake: > In January, 2019 I launched to HackerNews and some subreddits ... Really? That's a "launch" these days? At least scrounge up a few hundred bucks and throw up some Facebook ads. Reddit and Hacker News have some of the most cynical and thrifty readers out there. Networking and gett…

> Really? That's a "launch" these days? At least scrounge up a few hundred bucks and throw up some Facebook ads. Reddit and Hacker News have some of the most cynical and thrifty readers out there. Networking and getting the word out is half the battle. With such little effort put into the launch, OP could have been selling a dollar for fifty cents and no one would've cared. Eh, I tried exactly this for a "thought bub…

> There's absolutely zero chance that they all just happened to be female, nicely formatted [firstname].[lastname]@gmail.com addresses.

That is my email address: [firstname].[lastname]@gmail.com

I'm not female though.

Post reply on HN