The design of your website heavily impacts your business' perceived credibility. That stock image of the guy grabbing money instantly erodes any chance of appearing credible. Also, photos of people looking straight at the camera cause the viewer's eyes to look at their eyes, stealing all attention from everything else on the page. Look at the results of this famous eye tracking study that show that eyes go where eyes go: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/Vr1xOi8.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/Vr1xOi8.jpg</a><p>It took me a second to work out why I'm turned off by this site but in large part it's the color scheme. You're rocking a color palette inspired by a wasp and it screams "danger danger"!<p>In spite of the fact you're appealing to tech savvy people, if you're handling money you have to appear as credible as a bank. There's absolutely no way a bank would appear like this and I don't trust you because of it. This is something you need to work on as a priority IMHO.<p>I strongly doubt a one page site with a call to action that only requests an email address is sufficient. What happens next? I have no idea. How do I get paid? No idea. Can I use this if I'm outside the US? -shrug- How do I pay you? I have absolutely no idea and I wouldn't dream of using this service if I had to use PayPal.<p>Also, you might consider offering a free trial, or if this isn't possible, do what Stripe does and offer a way to kick the tires with a dummy account. Give people the option to convert that into a live account.<p>There are other barriers to trust, including lack of contact information. The details here matter because I'm trusting you with money.<p>Also, why aren't you running all connections over HTTPS when you're asking for contact details?<p>In short, you're an escrow service that needs a lot of polish, attention to detail, and hints that people should trust you.<p>(Side note: I don't understand why your main site looks so incredibly different and polished, but this page looks like a rough first draft.)
Why would I pay money for someone to <i>withhold</i> my money from me? I ask for 50% up front from clients (and <i>get</i> it) without paying $100/m + 1.5%. If I want easy payment processing, Stripe is pretty simple to setup on my own site (and I'm sure it wouldn't be hard for other developers, your target audience, to figure out).<p>Does this service perform some sort of automatic notifications/reminders to clients to pay up? I could see that maybe being useful. Often times the problem I have is after submitting an invoice and needing to follow up to receive a payment. Often those emails are stock messages that could easily be automated at set intervals so I don't have to think about it myself. Not sure I'd pay $100/m for it though.<p>For this price-point I'd expect something like Basecamp in terms of features and polish, not something that holds my money for me and skims off the top.
As a fiduciary you'll need to add a lot more content to your landing page to build trust. While the idea sounds great you're asking someone to put a lot of faith (and there paycheck) in your hands.<p>I'm also curious - what's to stop a client from never releasing payment? Who resolves disputes?
This site follows a pattern that I've seen before in programmer-driven startups: take a task that might intimidate someone, build some forms around it, and charge for it. In this case the task is to ask a client to prepay.<p>Maybe it's playing into programmers' belief that if some website asks the client for payment then it's more legit somehow and less scary. "Look at the website, client. See, prepayment is part of a normal, well-established workflow."<p>And maybe programmers will pay for this confidence booster. I guess that's what matters.
Is the fiduciary model a common thing for freelancers? I'm not sure of that.<p>I was wondering how hard is for a non US contractors/freelancers to open a US bank account and then use something like stripe to collect payments. Or maybe collect the money through the bank. That's a real need: a way to easily get paid without using Western Union or the like.
What's the deal with international payments? I often work for clients on other continents, and I need to get paid in the UK.<p>Amazingly, Paypal are working out to be the cheapest option for me so far. Are you cheaper than them, including exchange rate?
It seems like you changed/pivoted your business model ? Have seen quite a few posts from matchist earlier about matching freelancers and clients. You don't do that anymore ?