Status: Archived
EverClients
Curated Leads for Freelancers, and Supporting Community
Summary
EverClients was a web application designed to collate freelance job opportunities from a large number of job boards and provide a filterable feed and work notification system for beginner freelancers.EverClients took me ~6 months to build, and my launch was a moderate success. Over the course of the following 6 months it garnered a few hundred paying users, which mostly left.
I believe this app & community would have flown, had I been in a better place. For now, it rests on my servers 🙂
Tagged: Data Acquisition, Entrepreneurial, Freelancing, JavaScript, PHP, SaaS, Web App, WordPress
Pain to Solve:
To find leads for digital freelance work reliably, and in a controlled, sustainable way.
Tools/Skills Used:
- Data-Acquisition (scraping, analysing, profiling, organised worker-bots)
- One-page JavaScript app front-end
- PHP LAMP on AWS
- Bootstrap
- WordPress for knowledge sharing
- Stripe for payments
- Campaign Monitor for email marketing
- Custom SaaS platform, including billing
How it went:
Achieved some momentum, but ultimately got shelved as I ran out of cash and energy. I’m happy that a lot was executed well. EverClients reinforced to me that launch timing is important, that I’m not super-human, and that it’s hard to educate and sell, (especially alone).
There have been many side-benefits from this project, apart from the experience, such as a solid SaaS code-base, a fuller knowledge of AWS, and Stripe.
Things that worked:
- Email Funnel – the course of articles guiding freelancers to better bidding was really well received, with many replies thanking me
- Branding – created a short memorable name and achieved reliable style narrative which people repeated (Assisted by Miz Rahman)
- Data-acquisition – The app worked, absorbing the first ~1million leads fairly quickly
- SaaS Platform – I wrote this from scratch, using various scripts I’d written over the past few years. This was a solid test of my self-taught coding 🙂
Lessons Learned (Post Mortem):
- Team Up or keep it small – One-man SaaS is heavily reliant on that singular person & their state of mind
- Six months is too long – … of a dev cycle pre-launch (high risk, lack of energy when feedback actually arrives)
- Lower hanging fruit – Building something that has to educate as well as deliver makes things harder
- Perfectionist – I have the tendency to want to perfect things I make myself
EverClients Homepage:
Lead Feed Web App Page:
Lead Feed App Homepage:
