Looking for feedback: Personalized Freelance Report
For the last year I've been working on Lancebase.io, the database of freelance rates.
With my co-founder, I've gathered 400+ rates, and we're now working on something new: the Freelance Report.
Basically, it's a personalized report that compares you and your rate with similar freelancers. It also gives you insights into where you can develop further, and provides the names of relevant clients and potential contracts.
Now I want to check if this is actually useful.
So could I ask you to check out a sample PDF here and consider:
- What don’t you like about it?
- What do you like most about it?
- Is anything useful missing?
I'll use your feedback to consider whether to continue or pivot instead.
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Indie hackers selling to indie hackers?
Really curious to hear feedback on this one. Freelance rates remain an enigma and does not get shared a lot.
This is interesting, i've been looking at this market too, as its growing and growing fast.
As a complete side note, we're playing with our own MVP that tries to improve site-wide copy, we ran your site through it:
https://copybullet.com/reports/KfJL6ObK
Would love to know if some of the suggestions are helpful or not?
All the best with Lancebase!
Hey Daon, thanks for your quick reply and good points!
We're actually using a combined approach; there's a lot of value in getting personal answers from people, but for scale scraping works well too.
Longer-term plan, not sure yet. On the one hand I would like to sell to freelancers as I'm a freelancer myself, and I would like to make the freelance market more transparent (a bit Glassdoor but for freelancers). But often the best money is found if you sell to bigger companies.
And thanks for the suggestions on Copybullet! Cool product.
The suggestions are interesting to read, but could be more helpful. A number of them are too long for my taste (especially the CTAs and headers, I would like to keep those as short as possible), and make the text a bit verbose (see for instance the very last paragraph on the Copybullet page). But maybe it's a better fit for blog articles rather than landing pages?
Thanks for the feedback, yep, we've got some refinement to do i think on making the suggestions the same tone/style as the original.
re: freelancing, i'd been toying around with the idea of a much broader network of pages created for freelancers based on their LinkedIn etc. Still think there's a better play than Upwork etc. and seems like the main problem most freelancers have is attracting/finding more clients as just too busy/too expensive to do it themselves.
"We're actually using a combined approach; there's a lot of value in getting personal answers from people" -> definitely, you'll end up with a big network :)
This was valuable as a personalized deep-dive.
It reminds me of an annual macro report produced in the US, about the broad freelancing ecosystem, you might find it sparks ideas for you (it was a collab between Fiverr and Freelancers Union): https://business.fiverr.com/freelance-impact
A few other thoughts:
You could be more explicit about their next step for the rate (like "For your skills and years of experience, your rate is lower than average. Consider raising it."). Then you can give the tips on how to negotiate a higher rate. I think this content can be it's own linked page so it doesn't disrupt the flow of the report).
You can include years of experience on the table of data they submitted.
The visualizations are an opportunity to literally show where their rate is compared to the average.
simplify wording
Hey solo_claire, thanks for your thoughts!
Yes, we have a couple of blog posts on our website (also about negotiation) so we could insert some more links.
And good point about the visualizations, I think we could improve these further (they're quite basic now).
The report you mention has a branding goal, but I'm wondering if we could sell our report directly. Is it something you would be interested (hypothetically) as a freelancer to purchase?
hi jochemg,
I think it depends on the industry and if the report itself has actionable advice. You might find that platforms that cater to freelancers may want to purchase the underlying data you've collected more than individual freelancers purchasing the report (and are likely willing to pay more for it)!
That makes sense, thanks!