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In my experience, Craigslist has much a much more valuable asset than Upwork to my freelance career
Was you by any chance living in USA at the time?
In my observation Upwork (oDesk) don't want to ear money. They make everything to stop using the service.
My solution was moving to Payoneer directly (They have really AWESOME and simple partnership program) and time tracker I'm using hubstaff (Yes, $5 per freelancer).
In result with direct payonner partnership and hubstaff, the total overhead of payments to my freelancer is less than 1%. JUST 1%. Thank you upwork, you helped me to realize that there's more one solution, even if at begging it was scary the output worths it: saving money, simplify team management, AWESOME support. I'm really happy!
In my experience, Craigslist has much a much more valuable asset than Upwork to my freelance career
Could you please tell more about your experience with Craigslist?
I learned how to code through codeacademy and just tinkering on some projects, then started to go to Craigslist looking for random tech/programming jobs to see how viable it was. And there were in fact many programming jobs ranging from beginner computer jobs for random people needing help to companies needing short-term or irregular contract work. There are also many normal job postings looking for beginner/intermediate/experienced programmers located in the city too.
The best part about craigslist though is the informalness of the dialogue. I would just send each poster a few sentences saying basically I'm a programmer in the local area who knows html, css javascript php, etc. And here are a few of the projects I have worked on (list my own sites). Some postings require a bit more elaboration but usually not by much. This means it's easy to apply to several very quickly. It's a numbers game at the end of the day.
Also, it's possible to apply to jobs from all the local cities or really wherever. Some will require you be local, but most can be done remotely (phone calls, skype etc.).
After a while you begin building up a list and portfolio of clientele and basically keep taking progressively higher paying gigs while substituting out the lower paying ones.