Success in Sweatpants

There are loads of online project boards on the internet, but many of them are not really worth the bother.

While the premise is simple—buyer post and buy, sellers bid and accept—getting a good population of each takes time and business savvy on the part of the site owners. Quality begets quality, and it doesn’t just come naturally. High quality, reliable providers will only stick around if there are high quality, reliable buyers, and vice versa.

I am one of those high quality providers. My concern about buyer quality made me extremely cautious when I first considered the online route to bring in business.

Having experienced the bottom feeder phenomenon in my offline business, logic said that it would be magnified at least a hundredfold on the internet, where sellers from around the world would be throwing their hats in the ring. Bottom feeders are not high quality providers, and are not therefore going to attract high quality buyers. If buyers online were only interested in price, they were not buyers for me. I therefore entered this world with caution; I felt that I could at least cover my subscription cost, so it was worth a shot. The rest is history, and is what this book is about.

My success has almost everything to do with timing. As I have already noted, online project boards have a big challenge to overcome to attract the buyers and sellers that make the model work and grow. It took several years for Elance, Guru, and other boards to build that kind of clientele. By the time I arrived on the cyberscene, word about the value that these boards offer businesses seeking services and started to permeate my market. Therefore, when I began posting bids, there were buyers there who were looking for quality and reliability rather than simply price. I think if I had come to the scene much earlier, it would have been a different story.

I urge you to remember this when considering what boards to go for to bring in work. You won’t build a 6-figure VSB through a board that is relatively new, has a low volume of projects (many of which are probably made up to attract bidders), and are free.

In a way, you get what you pay for; free online boards will attract the wrong kind of provider and, therefore, the wrong kind of seller. Paying some kind of subscription fee creates a barrier to low quality providers (who don’t want to pay to play) and will result in project posts that are worthy of your time and effort.

I recommend concentrating your resources—money and time—on the big guys.

This is such a new business model that leaders and losers can change frequently. Of the current leaders, Elance and Guru are the two I have personally used, and of those two, Elance is the board that I have used and still use to build my VSB. I have a steady flow of projects, and the buyer quality is high. Quite a few buyers, in fact, have become long term clients.

There may be other contenders for your consideration–Outsource Heaven seems to be determined to pursue quality–so it is worth doing some research and evaluation of your own to decide where to invest your valuable resources.