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What happened in the early days of oDesk?
31–36 of 36 posts
Re: What happened in the early days of oDesk?
#32I didn't care much for Ries' "The Lean Startup", but one thing that did stick with me about it was the example of just doing stuff 'by hand' to see if there's a market for it, without worrying about creating some super-cool highly automated and perfect system from the get go, as would be our inclination as hackers. The oDesk story seems to indicate that they did something similar - putting people in touch very much '…
I think it's important to understand the difference between hacking the problem versus hacking the solution. One will get you to product market fit while the other will get you to your minimum viable product. Reminds me of the old Zappos story where they would actually purchase the shoes from Foot Locker and shop those out.
Re: What happened in the early days of oDesk?
#33I wanted to here more detail about how they want from a curated marketplace to the free-for-all it is today. TopTal and Matchist have launched in the last few years, and are aiming to be curated jobs marketplaces (TopTal vets coders, Matchist vets clients). When I first saw them, I thought it was a great model, but this article suggests it's something oDesk tried back in the day and didn't work out. Anyone have any d…
The short story is that hand-curation does not seem to work at a very large scale, so we need to create tools for automated discovery (e.g., search, recommendations, controlled skill vocabulary etc.) and automated but credible signals of ability and trustworthiness (e.g., feedback system, skills tests, verified identities etc.). In a nutshell, the challenge is trying to take the things Josh was doing by hand and turn them into data-driven features.
Note: I'm the staff economist at oDesk & I'm on the research/data science team.
Re: What happened in the early days of oDesk?
#34Build a global meritocracy - a person's geographic location should not inhibit the work that they can do. Great Quote!
you mean like: we should pay 2 dollars for slaves regardless of their location. I wonder.
Re: What happened in the early days of oDesk?
#35I think in the end this has result in a lot of cheap and bad work going live every week in the world (what does that say about the quality of the web). I have seen rates so low you can have that guy working all week, and just hope that he finishes before your 100$ budget is over (for a site as big as say an ebay.com clone). There should be minimum wages, per continent if needed.
Re: What happened in the early days of oDesk?
#36I wanted to here more detail about how they want from a curated marketplace to the free-for-all it is today. TopTal and Matchist have launched in the last few years, and are aiming to be curated jobs marketplaces (TopTal vets coders, Matchist vets clients). When I first saw them, I thought it was a great model, but this article suggests it's something oDesk tried back in the day and didn't work out. Anyone have any d…
I'm also cofounder of matchist.com, and wanted to weigh in here. This is somewhat of a Jason Fried question...do you want to scale as quickly as possible? Should every business strive to be the biggest or greatest? Or is it more important to find a niche and just do that one thing really well. That's our philosophy building matchist...we don't plan to be the one stop shop for freelancers.