Hello HN. Would love to hear your thoughts.<p>Yesterday we launched a very light version of pick.im. It is a marketplace for freelancers. For clients it is a way to search for freelancers in their area, at their pricepoint. For freelancers it is portfolio management, lead generation and (eventually) contracting and payment services.<p>We are focusing the search to be local (Designers in Portland) and not on specific cost (a 'competitive' search yields the ~65% of the market) This is much different than many other sites that really focus on bidding to the lowest cost in the world. We are not that.<p>Our broad statement is: professional tools for freelancers. Our shorter motto is: celebrate freelance.<p>We are working to build a site that allows search on:
Type of Freelance
Availability
Cost
Recommendations / Connections (linkedin connection)<p>In the next few weeks we are adding a simple contracting and payment option, essentially adding a 'buy it now' button to a freelance portfolio.<p>If you freelance and want to sign up put 'HN' in the invite code: http://pick.im/request/invite
So, the difficulty here is not being able to give enough feedback where it counts: the talent/portfolio section because Austin shows "empty". So to echo feedback already left, perhaps change it to operate like:<p>I need a [Designer] based in [Anywhere] and my budget is [Bootstrapped].<p>This would make it immediately more useful until you have critical mass on a per city basis -- and even then, isn't the trend being able to work essentially from anywhere? It's definitely nice to be able to zone talent by city, but in the end I don't really care if a landing-page rockstar is based in NYC if they fit the style and price I'm looking for.<p>Good idea though, keep at it. Look forward to this getting populated.
Two more issues I noticed:<p>* The keywords I enter on my profile keep getting re-ordered automatically by your software. It wants to put javascript first, but that's not my primary language, so I don't want it appearing first below my name. I've opted to delete it from the list instead.<p>* I'd suggest that the "time to complete" and "cost for similar" fields in the Add Project form to be optional. I prefer to not have this kind of information posted publicly, so I had to enter dummy values.
I like it, but I'd suggest an option for searching "anywhere" or at least by country. I freelance full time, but rarely work with companies near my physical location.
Hi Andrew. I've just registered, looks like a great service.<p>A few initial impressions: I'd like to be able to express my pricing in both an hourly rate and full project value. Also, support for multiple currencies would be nice, there will be plenty of users who want to bill in EUR or GBP.
Looks like a good idea. I like sites that base your location via IP, but when there is no results I think it is better to show at least the closest result so there is some context. I.e. do I need to put the next town over or do I need to put in the closest big city.
Looks great. It'd be nice if I were able to put in more than one website address for where folks could find out more about me.<p>I use stack overflow's cv publishing, but have my own site. Don't want the headache of keeping two CVs up to date.