I’ll just go ahead and proclaim myself the King of Craigslist until somebody else steps forward. I think I did more business than any single person last year. (By the way, freelance programmers, try Ben’s Gigs – shameless plug!).
This article is about how to find good help with your project.
We all know that 99% of the posts on Criagslist are crap, if they’re even real. My business is about you: that 1% of real entrepreneurs with real ideas and real budgets. But I see a lot of you fall by the wayside and never launch your web sites or bring your dreams to reality. Why is that? I call it The Craigslist Effect, even though it’s not really Craigslist’s fault.
Here’s what happens: you pick someone, you send them a good faith deposit, and they start working. It’s going great. As the site develops, you begin to see farther into the process. Without consciously realizing it, your expectations begin to shift. With the benefit of hindsight and a little experimentation, you can see better paths. At the same time, the programmer is feeling this too. Plus he’s losing interest because your deposit is running low. Once he passes that inflection point, he realizes that he didn’t bid your project right. He feels his hourly average approaching minimum wage. Finally, one day he just doesn’t show up. You try to call. You try to email. But the guy is gone.
You might have some code from him, but it’s probably worthless. And now you have 50-80% of the budget you started with. Time to start over with another Craigslist post for another developer to pick up where the last guy bailed out. And lose another chunk of your budget as the cycle repeats.
At some point, I see your post and respond. You hear about the benefits of the Agile process. I tell you about the fixed-price sprints I do, and how it helps to contain your project and budget. I also tell you the cold truth about how custom software takes a life of its own and that you need a trusted partner to navigate the waters with you. But, it’s probably too late for you. By the time we find each other, your budget might only be 50% of where you started.
Your budget gets eroded slowly as you search for a good provider. Craigslist makes it easy to find bad providers, which accelerates that erosion. But there is a mystery here. You understand all this, so why does a smart person like you get caught in such an obvious trap? I think I know.
1. Illusion of Knowledge
Let’s admit it: you are wearing “invention goggles”. You have been thinking and dreaming about this idea for so long that it feels really solid. Your confidence is high because you know exactly what you need, what you know, and what you don’t know. You have solved for most of the variables. But you know that’s not true. The invention goggles obscure important considerations that would be obvious to an onlooker. The more you think about a problem, the more likely you are to overlook big problems. Then you hop on Craigslist and actually CHOOSE somebody to help you build your massive oversights into reality. How’s that for an illusion?
2. Illusion of Choice
Second, you have an illusion of choice working against you. When you post to Craigslist, you get too many choices. In a recent test post, I got over 75 responses. Who the hell has the time or knowledge to evaluate all that! At night, most of the responses come from overseas. In the day, the responses are split about evenly between US-based contractors and people pretending to be US-based. Because I’ve been doing this for so long, I’ve become very accurate in assessing who is a real programmer and who is not.
Let’s say 10% of the responses are real people who might actually be able to do the work. If you have them flagged in your inbox, you’ve already gotten farther than most. But now you, someone who knows very little about how to launch a stellar web site, has to try to evaluate skills you don’t really have.
Naturally, you turn to portfolios and references. That way you can compare the work objectively, talk to other people, and make an educated choice. You’ll hire the most qualified person for the job.
Or will you? You can probably guess by now that the answer is no, or I wouldn’t be writing this article. Craigslist is a strange vortex where logic and traditional approaches yield very bad results. Let’s think about this. Who is on Craigslist with a stellar portfolio and references? By its very nature, Craigslist tends to attract both buyers and sellers who have no alternatives. It’s the Hail Mary of contracting. Either you don’t know someone to hire, or the people who know you would not hire you. A match made in heaven!
The person on Craigslist with great references and a portfolio is usually a well-disguised middle man. I’ve even seen middle men post their own ads for ads originally posted by a real buyer and to which I responded days earlier. Middle men post ads for business they don’t even have yet. Did that make sense? In other words, they post an ad for a programmer so they can get a quote to turn around and send back to the original customer (who also posted to Craigslist a few days earlier) in hopes of winning the business. It’s bad out there my friends, it’s bad out there. The middle man is the only person who has the time to market to you. The real people are actually programming web sites and are less than impressed with your request for samples and references. It shows that you don’t know a thing about Craigslist or how to select a good web developer. How’s that for a weird illusion? Your very responsible efforts to find the best candidates just turned off the best candidates!
3. Illusion of Thresholds
I talked about pricing a little earlier, but I want to dig into it a little more, because there is another illusion. I’m sure your mother told you that you get what you pay for. It’s true enough, but the hard part is deciding how much to pay. You will get bids from $10/hr to $150/hr. Are the programmers really that different? Maybe in the real world, yes. But on Craigslist, no. There is nobody pulling $150/hr who finds work on Craigslist. And the $10/hr guy is going to find a way to charge you a lot more, so you can’t believe him either.
So it’s an illusion of thresholds. Science tells us to find threshold tests so that we can group choices into categories. We think it’s especially useful to separate the extremes from the middle. But on Craigslist, the extremes are both false and the vast middle leaves you with still too many choices and no easy way to tell them apart. The more you try to evaluate candidates based on reported statistics, the further you get from the truth. How’s that for an illusion?
Yeah, so what’s the answer?
You need to approach the problem completely differently. You need something that cuts through all the noise. It turns out, getting back to basics helps a lot. Forget the spreadsheet skill matrix. Forget the skills/portfolio/references/pricing.
Instead, look for a real person. Someone with a name, a family, and ambitions in life. Those people are responding to your ads, but they won’t pop based on any statistical measurement. Instead of a traditional portfolio, look for love. Look for the person who has contributed code to the open source community, donated his time, maintains personal projects, and generally shows a true love of what he does.
That’s the person you want. That’s who I am. Ouch! Sorry, I couldn’t resist 
