Sololance

by Ben

I’ve got a full-time job with benefits, and it’s a blessing to me and my family because it allows me to provide for them in full. We want for nothing, really.

However, I do someday want to start my own business. I have some ideas, but it will take time and even if I bootstrap and patiently build something worthwhile, it will still take money. I’ve been looking for small but worth-it side jobs to do to generate a little cash for a new business (e.g., purchase a license for basic developer tools, pay for basic hosting, etc). I’ve registered at a few of these “freelancer” work websites, thinking that if I fish around, I shouldn’t have much trouble picking up a job a month and netting an extra $100 or so to put away for a startup. Seems like a reasonable way to start bootstrapping something, no?

You know the sites: sologig.com, elance.com, guru.com, and most recently, werkadoo.com.

I’m entirely frustrated. Werkadoo looked promising, but since it launched it looks like a huge flop – I can only ever find one job listing, and it’s a very generic “send us your resume and we’ll be in touch” kind of listing. Not only that, but a full membership on Werkadoo costs $20/month. Sorry. Cash flow is the whole reason to do it in the first place, and when I really only envison doing 1 job per month, a cost of $20/month just to be there is not doable. Sologig.com? Just a feeding ground for employment companies and recruiters – which I’m entirely uninterested in. Sologig is a waste of time.

Don’t even get me started on rent-a-coder and get-a-freelancer and the like. Most of the projects are junk, and the employers that post non-junk projects are swarmed by bidders who can’t communicate, have no idea how to bid a project, or both.

Elance.com and guru.com are probably the best remaining options. Both have free membership options, but they limit your ability to bid and communicate with clients. They aren’t as bad as the other sites, but they still have their share of junk projects (you know the kind: “I need a complete clone of eBay for $500″). Those two sites don’t seem too bad, but bidding on a free membership plan is difficult because you’re not allowed to ask questions, and the projects posted are rarely detailed enough to elicit a complete bid. I’m basically structurally unable to compete because I’m not a paid member, but it’s not economical for me to shell out for a paid membership.

The other problem I have is that most of the software development projects are web applications. I’m not incapable of doing those projects (web applications are what I do for a living now), but the ideal project is one for which I can draw on my experience, and most of my experience is in distributed systems, clusters, backend server applications, systems programming, and embedded systems. Those projects are few and far between (and only on guru.com, as far as I can tell).

*Sigh*. Does anyone else have this problem? I want to find small, discrete chunks of work to do to make a little extra cash on the side, and in principle, the freelancing sites seem like a good avenue for finding such work, but in practice, they aren’t working well.

What is a freelancer with minimal availability to do?