Source: iamwire

If you’re looking to hire talented freelancers, there are many options out there. With major freelancing platforms emerging in recent years, you can have someone working on your new project within a day. And often at the same or lower cost than hiring someone full-time or even part-time.

But this approach comes with its limitations. The person you hire could be difficult to communicate with because of language barriers and time zone differences. And if you’re in a rush to hire, you might end up with someone who is not as skilled as you’d wished for.

To tackle these problems, some freelancing platforms specialize in one field. From location-based platforms to skill-specific ones, you can now hire top-quality experts for your projects quickly – if you know the right place to go to.

Here we’ll explore the best freelancing platforms out there. We’ll highlight their strong points so you know which one is right for your next project. After reading this post, you’ll know exactly where to find the perfect freelancer for any use case.

1. Workana

Workana specializes in matching freelancers with employers in Latin America. If you need someone who speaks native Spanish or Portuguese, this is the right place to go to. It’s especially useful if you’re in the same time zone so communication is quick and easy. Chances are, you will attract much more relevant applications than if you posted on a generalist platform.

2. Upwork

Upwork is the result of a merger between oDesk and Elance – two of the pioneering freelancing platforms. As such, it’s probably the largest site out there and boasts a great reputation. The majority of its user base comes from North America and South East Asia. So if you’re based in one of these regions, it’s going to be a breeze to find someone talented and easy to collaborate with.

3. Fiverr

Fiverr is also one of the first platforms to gain traction in the world of freelance work, but it’s different than most of its competitors. It allows for services to be packaged and “productized” meaning you know in advance how much you’re going to pay, how long it’s going to take, and exactly what you will get for your buck.

In a sense, it works like a store where you walk in, say what you need to a super smart sales rep, and all the products that fit your requirements are presented – along with their price, quality reviews, time to deliver and so on. Great if you’re looking to get a quick job done on a budget.

4. PeoplePerHour

PeoplePerHour is a smaller site compared to giants like Upwork or Fiverr, but in a good way. While services on average cost a little extra, the site boasts a reputation for quality few can compete with. It’s hugely popular in the United Kingdom and you can find quality freelancers from there as well as more standard locations like the US and India. Definitely a good option if you’re looking for high-quality work done professionally, especially in the UK.

5. Freelancer.com

Freelancer.com is another big player in the space. Although you can get any job done there, the site is ideal if you need a non-demanding task to be complete. As such, it often costs less to hire someone, especially if you need something mechanical done like scraping emails or data entry.

6. 99designs

As the name suggests, 99designs is a specialized platform for designers. Everything from banner ad designs to business cards and logos is available. As the site specializes in one skill, you can expect dozens of applications for your project with draft designs already made. Once you review the suggested designs, you can pick the one you like the most, pay a set fee, and start collaborating with the designer. This site offers different options depending on your budget, but you will generally pay a little extra to get the best quality design out there.

7. Toptal

Toptal is a young platform compared to some of the big players out there. However, it quickly solidified a position as one of the best places to go if you’re looking for top-notch work done.  This site only curates the top 3% of freelancers for your job in software, design or finance. Some of the big investment banks and tech giants use its services which speaks for itself. If you’re prepared to spend enough to get the highest quality, then Toptal is a good choice.

8. Moneo

Like Toptal, Moneo specializes in curating high-quality talent – they approve only 6% of freelancers who want to find work there. To use a student analogy, that’s like getting into Harvard. Also, Moneo is focused on Blockchain talent. If you’re in the world of digital currencies, this is one of the best places to find high-quality freelancers who speak “crypto”. The site accepts payments in Bitcoin which is quickly spreading as a payment medium across the internet and beyond.

9. Guru

Guru also specializes in curating the best freelancers, with a focus on consulting services. It’s great if you’re starting a new project and want a shortcut to the best strategy to do it. From finance and accounting services to business coaching, Guru is the place where you can get the advice and help you need at the right time.

10. Remote.com

Remote.com is an interesting platform as it uses AI to match employers with remote job seekers and freelancers. While it’s a small site compared to others, it’s growing quickly and offers great technology. Because of their AI-powered matching algorithm, Remote is great if you’re looking for people to work with long-term. Many people from its talent base are looking for full-time or part-time remote positions instead of project-based work. Ideal if you’re building a remote team without an office.

Conclusion

The internet has quickly become the best place to match employers and job seekers. We can now see specialized freelancer platforms that frequently guarantee successful project delivery at a speed and cost well below what you expected. With new technologies like AI and advances in collaboration tools, it’s easier than ever to get high-quality work done online.

Whichever platform you choose, you’ll need a powerful way to collaborate in real time. If you’re looking for an easy way to work with your team, clients, and suppliers in one place, try out Sendtask for free now.

Source: Impact

I’m proud of the team we’ve assembled at Sendtask. I truly believe that each and everyone of us is an expert in their domain. But when we hire, our first priority is not skillset, it is attitude. Attitude is both more important for a team’s success and much harder to acquire than skills.

And although most of us have complementary skills and roles, we can all learn from each other when it comes to attitude and in general how to approach and solve problems.

When I was in the Swiss Air Force, we gave each other very open, direct and honest feedback after every mission. Did it sometimes hurt? Yes. Did it help? Every time.

That’s why we are giving feedback within the Sendtask team more frequently than I’ve experienced it in other companies. Some of those companies only had a formalized feedback process for annual feedback. Some large companies like Google do it twice a year.

We give each other feedback every six weeks. Six weeks is the length of our sprints and therefore a good opportunity to look at our own performance and give each other tips on how we can get better. We first think and write about our own performance and then give each other feedback.

We collect our own and everyone else’s opinion via Google Forms. Here’s what they contain:

#1 Reflection

The first form is called ‘Reflection’ and allows us to determine how we see our own work and attitude. The questions covered are:

• What expectations did you have for the past 6-week sprint? Name your 2-week milestones and comment on why you had chosen them.
• How happy are you with your work in the past six weeks? (1-5 stars)
• How do you feel about your work in the past six weeks?
• What is one or multiple achievements you are proud of?
• What is one or several things you’d like to improve?
• What is the #1 learning you are taking away from this sprint?

#2 Outside perspective

The second form is called ‘outside perspective’ and is there to make us aware of how others have perceived our work. It first links to the goals that someone had for the start of the 6-week sprint and then covers the following questions:

• Overall, how happy are you with this person’s work? (1-5 stars)
• START: What is something this person should start doing (and isn’t doing yet)?
• STOP: What is something this person should stop doing? (e.g. a bad habit, a systematic error, a facet of their attitude, …)
• CONTINUE: What is something this person should do more (and is already doing)?
• Additional comments?

Distributing Feedback

The feedback is then merged and consolidated. Then, during a feedback call, the feedback is shared and discussed. If it’s misaligned, measurable goals are agreed upon and tracked until the end of the next feedback cycle.

What do you think of our feedback process? How do you give each other feedback in your company?

Communication is key in any business. But in a remote setup, it becomes even more crucial to have everyone on the same page. At Sendtask, we spend the first day of every retreat on the Vision and Mission of the company. On one hand, we want to make sure our strategy and actions are aligned. On the other hand, it is a good opportunity to get new team members up to speed.

Our combined vision and mission statement is quite long currently – and so by design. Given how young we are and how often our product changes, we found it helpful to have a very detailed Vision and Mission statement to guide us when we decide on what to build next and how to build it.

Our vision

“We strive to empower makers to realize bold ideas…”

You might ask: Where’s the connection between a collaborative task management application and enabling people to realize bold ideas?

No goal is too big if it can be broken down into smaller steps. By themselves, these steps are not as intimidating as the larger goal. A tool that allows you to break down big projects into small ones helps you do more and bigger things than you would have imagined.

Another term that we talked about a lot is who ‘makers’ are. The term is a bit pre-occupied by the tinkerers. But we understand it in a bigger sense – anyone who creates things, who makes the leap from nothing to something, anyone who moves people and projects. It includes project managers in corporations, leaders in local clubs as well as entrepreneurs.

Our mission

“… with a collaborative tool that allows them to work with anyone, prioritize and focus and assists them in a smart and friendly way, when and where they get work done.”

This is a long one but describes accurately what we’re building. “With anyone” is at the core of Sendtask. We are building Sendtask because none of the existing tools allowed us to share tasks and collaborate with anyone. People needed onboarding, they needed accounts and very often they needed training. In Sendtask none of this is required. As long as you know someone’s email address, you can collaborate with them in an efficient way.

Sendtask allows you to ‘prioritize and focus’. Both are extremely important in order to be efficient. Sendtask allows you to collect all your tasks in one list and to prioritize from there. Ideally, you’ll never have more than five items due on a single day and you can focus on them one by one.

We use natural language processing (NLP) to allow you to create tasks without clicking into ten different fields. Just type “Hey @Joe, please send me the report until Monday #reporting”, and Sendtask will do the rest. Set the assignee, the title, the due date and it will also add the #reporting project. Pretty smart! 🙂

Sendtask makes work more enjoyable. With a fun and friendly user experience, we make it enjoyable to check tasks off. Fun quotes here and there and beautiful animations, along with gamification, make work a lot more fun on Sendtask.

The ‘when and where they get work done’ relates to the virtual world. We don’t want to be yet another app that you need to keep open and that takes your focus away when you have to switch to it to create a task. Instead, we’re integrating with the apps you already use like Slack and Email. Using our integrations, you can create tasks seamlessly wherever you get things done.

Conclusion

Coming back to our vision and checking if we’re on the right track or if we need to make any adjustments, is hard work. The discussion can become emotional and long quickly. However, it’s a time and energy investment that is always worth it. Only when everyone on our team understands what we are building and why we’re building it, will they be able to contribute in their full capacity.

How do you continuously work on your vision and mission statement?

I’ve sat in board meetings on both sides of the table – both as a founder and as an investor. It feels like there are countless articles, books and whole blogs dedicated to various parts of the startup life. Yet, in my experience, there’s very little written about startup board meetings, which are crucial for a very important relationship – the one between founders and investors.

Here are some of my learnings from the past few years on both sides of the table.

#1: Preparation is everything

If you are smart, you have attracted smart people to join your board. If they’re smart and successful, chances are they have days just as full as yours.

So do yourself and your investors a favor by allowing them to be prepared so that you can focus on discussions when you meet. There’s no bigger waste of time than reading something to someone that they could have read in advance.

Send over the board meeting agenda with all attachments until no later than two days before the meeting. Track and answer questions directly via comments in a Google Drive document or track them separately on a shared list (you could use Sendtask.io or Asana.com for this). Get as many detail questions answered as possible so that you can focus on the things that really matter during the meeting. Strategic decisions, hiring, vision and the likes.

#2 Keep the reporting separate from the board meetings

This one is related to #1. Don’t mix reporting with board meetings. Meetings are there to discuss things. Reporting is one-way communication. It’s data supply and it should always be done in written form and ahead of time. Whether you do it via Google Sheets, Slack or any other form of communication, give your investors access to the right amount of data. They don’t need to know every little detail – that’s your job. They need to understand how the business is doing and most probably they will need less than ten KPIs to do that.

#3 Provide a brief look back

There’s a lot of dynamic in your company – and that’s ok. Marketing channels that you thought would work well might not perform as expected. People you hired and bet big on might not deliver what they promised. Sales deals that were 99% safe might not go through. That’s ok and you should not focus on what has happened in the past.

But provide your investors with a summary of what went well and what didn’t go too well since you last met to bring everyone onto the same page. To do that, a system that has worked well for me in the past is to ask yourself: What were the three biggest highlights and the three biggest lowlights since we last met? Write them down as one sentence each. Start the meeting by giving a brief commentary – less than five minutes should be enough to set the context for everyone.

#4 Focus on the challenges ahead

You’ve found smart people to invest in your company. Now use them and pick their brains on the things where you need help. Ideally, you will have less than three topics to discuss. This allows you to dive deep and get real value from your investors.

If you’ve followed #1, you’ve already supplied your investors with the necessary background info and you can dive right in. Ask your investors not for advice, but experiences that relate to the topics at hand (a trick I’ve learned from Entrepreneur’s Organization).

Have they been in a similar situation? How did they react? What went well? What didn’t go well? Were they able to deduct some general rules from that situation? If so, do they apply to your business? From past experience, did everyone come to the same conclusions? If not, in what are they different? In what way are they similar?

#5 Vision and mission

The length of this block will depend on how many things you discussed in #4 and to which extent. But your learnings since the last meeting – what went well, what didn’t, who you hired, who you fired – almost certainly had an impact on your strategy and may call for a slight or drastic shift. And that may influence your company’s vision and mission. When investors invest, they almost always do so because they buy into your vision and mission. So make sure to keep them up to date. If they invest in startups, they will understand that the vision and mission are very dynamic in the early days of a company. Just don’t leave them in the dark.

Ask yourself – how do your learnings influence how you’ll do business? Let your investors know and make sure they’re in the same boat as you. They bring a backpack full of different experiences with them. Profit from this diverse set of experiences and use it to avoid making mistakes someone else made before.

#6 Take-Aways & meeting minutes

Keep track of the decisions you make and the to-dos that come up. Intros that you want your investor to make, additional material you want to send them or interviews where you want them to vet some of your key people. Make sure to track these to-dos in a place where they are actionable and can’t be easily forgotten. I’ve sat in countless meetings where we realized at the beginning of the meeting that almost none of the to-dos from the last meeting were done. We kept them in a Google Doc at the end of the meeting notes – and they didn’t go anywhere from there.

Use software like Sendtask, Asana or similar to hold everyone accountable.

Also, keep minutes in a useful format. No one will ever go through a five-page minute document quoting every single thing that was said in that meeting. Boil the minutes down to a summary that captures the essence of what was discussed and decided. Notes longer than two pages have almost zero chance of ever being read.

Conclusions

Be respectful of time – yours and that of your investors. For a valuable board meeting, provide all information in advance in written form. Keep reporting separate from board meetings. Give a brief summary of what has happened since the last meeting and point out three highlights and three lowlights. Then, deep-dive on a maximum of three topics. Make sure to hear what experiences your investors have to share and how they can apply to your business. Finally, make sure your meetings produce actionable takeaways. Keep summarized meeting minutes and actionable to-do items. Use tools like Sendtask or Asana to hold people accountable.

What is your experience with board meetings? What tip should I add to this list?