Show HN: A place to buy and sell services directly from each other

I'm sorry I found it all very confusing. For me personally it failed the 5 second test - what is the site primarily about, and how can I extract 80% of its functionality quickest?<p>I clicked on the Buy button and was no further forward.<p>The design is very slick, but there's too many words on the front page, no obvious action button/s and no immediate examples of how this could benefit me.

Holy buzzwords, Batman!<p>Seriously, I hate them. It makes it seem like you don't have anything substantial when you use them. They appear as filler for a weak product. Talk to me like a human. Given that I'm trying to find other humans for work, I would rather trust something that felt honest than something peppered with marketing-speak.

A few things:<p>1. Congrats on launching!<p>2. You have an explanation video hidden somewhere on the site (like literally I saw it then got back to the homepage and couldn't recall which link I had clicked to find it). Having that front and center would really help.<p>2a. Don't use the robot voiceover for the video. If you're not comfortable doing it yourself find somebody on Fiverr.com to do it for you.<p>3. It would be very helpful to have some extremely simple examples of what you are providing. Along the lines of: "Jim wants to boost sales, instead of hiring a costly salesperson he can request getting leads." (which is something I think you do).<p>Looks like you're off to a good start.

This is what I understand 1 minute after perusing your website.<p>1 - This is some sort of a marketplace where you can buy and sell expertise. Kinda like a Air bnb for odd jobs. Reminds me of a similar startup that tried that, but I cannot remember their name.<p>2 - The landing page's layout is a little confusing. I clicked on a couple of links and landed on your about page[1]. When you have a 90 second video explaining what your product is, why would you not put that on a landing page ? The call to action would be very easy for me. Click on the video and know more about you.<p>3 - Although you meant for people to click sign-in on the landing page, that action was not very obvious to me. You should look to prioritize 'Sign-up' not sign in. The fact that they are both green buttons that look alike does not help.<p>4 - Your key customer sign-up categories appear to be a buyer who gets services and a seller who markets his / her services. You might want to streamline signups to reflect that.<p>5 - The text overlay on the image is not very visible / readable. Have you considered switching the images to color on mouse-over ?<p>6 - Where is the submit button for 'Suggest a feature' under watercooler ?<p>7 - I don't quite get the watercooler part. Is it meant for users to share insights and that becomes part of the news ?<p>8 - What is your pricing ? Where can I see what cut you take and what I get in return ? What are people signing up for ?<p>9 - When I sign up, its not very clear to me that something happened on the screen. Its great that I am logged in, but the UI needs to do more to inform me about what just happened.<p>10 - A short tutorial on signing up would be great. The app asked me to add funds and I don't understand what for.<p>I like the idea. The presentation and the user flow could use a little work. Gather the feedback you get here and fine tune your site. Nice work.<p>[1] - <a href="https://www.workio.com/about/" rel="nofollow">https://www.workio.com/about/</a>

Could you please explain how you will address:<p>* quality: How do I know the quality of the work will be good? What happens in the case of disputes?<p>* reputation: How will you keep track of reputation of the workers? Odesk, Vworker, Ebay are marketplaces that do a decent job at filtering out spammers and bad guys. Where they lack is determining the difference between good and great. Everyone gets FIVE STARS or close to it for every job, unless it's completely bungled. This also creates a perverse pressure on the contractor. If an employer complains about the contractor publicly, the contractor quickly lose all work. Workers are thus pressured to satisfy out-of-scope employer demands so they get a five star rating and maintain their sterling reputation.

<i>All</i> of your fonts are too small. <i>All</i> of your text colors are too gray. I'm in my early 30's with fairly good eyesight, and its just way too hard to read anything on your site. I tried signing up and going through the Sell services bit, but just gave up because the whole thing gives me a physical headache trying to read anything.

Interesting, and nice design.<p>I'd like to be able to add my github and behance.net profiles as well if I can. Those would reflect my skills a lot better than would my facebook.<p>Also I don't really like that my username seems linked to whatever my email address was -- I should be able to display my real name, and if I can change that I haven't found where yet.<p>What is the user ID for and why is it listed in my profile?<p>I would like to know a bit more about how you're handling payment, and dealing with conflict and arbitration. Can I connect my paypal account? Is there some kind of escrow thing like elance uses?

I am sorry but I am confused to what your site does. It looks good, but what is it that it does as I am confused. This is not to slam you. I hope to help you. "Global Expertise, On Demand &#38; Delivered Online" is just buzzwords and does not concisely tell me what you do or what benefit you provide.<p>For instance I go to planscop.io and I am told "Project Management for Contractors - Planscope is a simple tool that helps you build better client projects and close more deals.". I know it is for contractors for managing projects.<p>NewRelic.com - "A DEVELOPER’S BEST FRIEND - See how we help 25,000+ customers monitor their apps." I know it is for Developers and it monitors my apps.<p>Risks.io - "Track Your Project's Risks, Assumptions, Issues and Dependencies Online"<p>Basically I think work.io does is "Work.io connects employers and knowledge-workers together for highly-skilled one of projects."

As many others have pointed out, I'm confused. Here's a good starting point for your pitch/value proposition:<p>1. What problem are you trying to solve? (It seems like you're trying to solve many problems at once, but state these with more clarity)<p>2. How are you solving this problem? (What part of your solution solves the problem and how?)<p>3. How is this different from the competition? (When describing how you are solving the problem what do people do today that you do differently for the customer)<p>Also, it appears there are two sets of value propositions - one for Buyers and one for Providers. You'll need to clearly explain both to each audience.<p>Edit- Oh and good luck! The technology itself is extremely impressive and good job looking for feedback....now iterate!

I created a profile (which was quick and easy, well done). I wanted to connect it to my LinkedIn profile, but apparently you require access to 1. my profile 2. the email I use for my LinkedIn account and 3. my connections.<p>I can understand 1, but not 2 or 3, and I'm not willing to provide them to you without a good explanation of why you need them. I imagine other users will feel the same way. Why not just require access to my profile? It's much less threatening that way, and you'll get more people connecting their LinkedIn accounts.

Pretty design, and nice concept overall but there doesn't seem to be any way to add certain kinds of information other than connecting social networking sites. I don't want to do that.

I think the design of the site and the product conflict. The design looks like you're selling the person, not their expertise, especially from the front page. I'm sure any of these people can do multiple things, but I don't care about that, if my goal is to set up shop in Asia, mention that. I am in no way able to know that just seeing Sophie Song's face on your front page.<p>Also, for sellers to solely use social media as a verification system just rubs me entirely the wrong way.<p>I really like the idea though, good luck!

This looks very good. But I can tell it's still early days yet.<p>One UX/UI bug you should fix is to make it possible to see draft offers in one's profile. I did a save and continue, and had to dig through my browser history to get back to my draft offer.<p>I also got a 403 notice in the UI when I clicked the Save and Continue button.<p>I do agree with some of the posters here that you need to clarify the value proposition to first timers.<p>I'm excited to see a marketplace for consulting products like this opening up, and intend to make use of it.

I think the problem here is that you're doing EVERYTHING. If you tested out a single vertical (e.g. legal work for startups), and connected it with a market of, say, well credentialed lawyers who're interested in working for themselves, then I would know exactly what your site is for, and how/when I might use it.<p>If you tell me that I should use you for everything, I'm probably going to use you for nothing. Give the verticals their own websites.

The editor is pretty fancy, dragging stuff around when you create a new document works really well. Will give it a try

Like the others have said, the design is good but I just don't know what I am getting from the site on first approach. I also don't like how the home page main call to action is Sign In, what am I signing into and why should I?<p>I expect the homepage to tell me how you are going to help me, not for me to find out how you can help me?

the replay-mode of the editor just rocks :) I'm offering consulting-serives about Facebook-platform there, + you can ask me a free question about platform as well :)<p><a href="https://www.workio.com/u/NTU0MT/michael-kamleitner" rel="nofollow">https://www.workio.com/u/NTU0MT/michael-kamleitner</a>

Great domain name you have there!

just 3 spontaneous impressions:<p>1- The site (front page) is not bad. Anyway it addresses the one big problem of buying and selling the desired jobs. 2- The name and position of "Watercooler" is interesting and invokes curiosity about the site. 3- The presence of Linked-in as a login option is bad, because the Linked-in is bad. I've deleted my Li account after a crazy frustration upon their wanting me to become a paid member just for me to send a message to a member! No need to link to a doomed site such as that.<p>That's all.

Great design.

The design seemed really familiar to me... is there any connection with <a href="http://www.systemone.net/" rel="nofollow">http://www.systemone.net/</a> ?

reminds me of this classic<p>Ronald Coase - The Nature Of The Firm, 20 pages <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0335.1937.tb00002.x/pdf" rel="nofollow">http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0335.1937....</a><p>summary <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm</a><p>btw. great design!

Which browsers did you test your layout in?<p>There's overlapping text in the boxes on the frontpage in FF, Chrome and Opera. That's all I tried.

There are many grammar errors throughout the site. Pay someone to copy edit it.

so how exactly is this any different from vworker, odesk, elance etc?