In June, our company completed a project totaling $ 20 thousand. We got the contract through UpWork. This is such a popular international exchange for freelancers. The contract was successfully closed - the customer put five stars and wrote a good review .

We went to such a result a year and a half. Prior to that, our average bill was $ 500.

If you look at the company card, you might get the impression that things are going well. But it will be false. We have suspended work with the platform. We had to close the development department and lay off employees.

All of this could have been avoided. In places where the floor is wet, it is customary to put a yellow sign that warns of danger. It took us a while to understand that these signs were under our noses all the time, but we did not notice them and eventually slipped.

In this post we will list six phrases that were not listened to in time, we will tell you that they all have in common so that you do not flop on the fifth point.

“That's all because UpWork dictates its rules to us.”

Upwork is a strange place. To be successful, you need to constantly monitor the rating of work performed. How this rating is calculated do not explain to you. It is accumulated for a long time and hard, but it can collapse due to one dissatisfied recall. It's important to understand what Upwork really wants.

It is logical to assume that the freelance exchange is the engine of the gig economy, the essence of which is in performing small tasks for many clients. But actually it is not. When calculating the commission, Upwork looks at how long you have been working with an individual customer. Therefore, it is beneficial to do the opposite - to build long-term relationships with customers and look for larger orders.

At the same time, in order to gain privileges and greater control over your account, you must successfully close 10 contracts every three months. This will make it possible to chat with tech support and remove negative reviews from customers. To please all the algorithms and not give a ton of money, you need to find a customer who always has a job for you, and persuade him to constantly open new contracts and leave feedback for closed ones. The task is not easy.

But the market always imposes restrictions on participants. Despite the tough conditions, Upwork is an almost free source of leads, and, apparently, all the actions of the exchange are aimed at improving their quality. And if you do not like something, then no one is holding you.

“But they are overseas, they have night now!”

We limited the geography of searching for offers by the USA and Canada. With the east coast, we have a difference of 8 hours. There are two whole hours to tell the customer what you managed to do today and what you plan to do tomorrow. You can even arrange a call during working hours. But it so happened that most startups that need outsourcing are located on the west coast. Working hours do not intersect with them anymore - when we drive home from work, they only make their morning coffee.

The time difference makes it difficult to act quickly. All work can get up because of a trifle. Has the client provided the wrong access? Wait until he wakes up. Need to clarify the task parameters? Wait for the Christmas holidays to end. But these points are solvable. We set up a workflow that suited both us and our customers.

Could not solve this problem in presales. At the stage of the first contact with a potential customer, the reaction speed is very important. In order for him to continue negotiations, he needs to convince him of his competence from the threshold. For this, the manager did not always have enough technical knowledge. And it was impossible to attract developers to phoning, since they wanted to work strictly from 9 to 6.

No matter where your customer comes from. All customers want the same thing. They need better quality for less money. Any customer expects a guarantee and wants a quick solution to their problems. Ultimately, the client pays the salary to employees. This must not be forgotten.

“Mobile development is not at all like web development.”

The core competency of our company is web development. Mobile technology was new to us. The department lacked commercial tasks, which is why we sent it to conquer Upwork.

All you need to know about the difference between mobile and web development is that the first is very dependent on the third party. You can create anything, but the final word is up to the vendor - only Apple and Google decide what gets into their app store and what doesn't.

Almost never did the application display go smoothly with us, which negatively affected the delivery time. This is not even about violations of the guidelines now - it was not possible to give the build for testing due to failures in Itunes connect, and one day I had to wait a month for an answer from Apple to find out that the problem was on their side.

In the case of Google, you are still dependent on the decisions of specific smartphone manufacturers. Today in the production of more than 16 thousand certified devices. It may happen that your application will not run on only one of them. This happened to us once - we made a simple scanner that did not run only on Lenovo, which we purchased for all warehouse workers. As a result, even more time was spent on debugging through the timber viewer and establishing the reasons.

In web development, there are also problems - sometimes you have to suffer with the support of old browsers and the server environment. The vendor of a specific CMS is in no hurry to issue patches, and the hosting provider does not go to the meeting. But all this can be solved. There are more risks in mobile development, and you need to be able to work with them. In the end, other companies somehow do the same.

“What did you want?” Gamedev is not our profile! ”

Any tender on Upwork literally in an hour gets fifty responses. With such competition, it seems that getting a project is like winning an iPhone for a repost. But there is a sure way to stand out among the candidates - show the relevant case. For your letter to be noticed, say that you have already done something similar.

During the year of existence, our mobile department managed to create just a few applications, among which were children's coloring. And when we saw a similar request, we immediately responded with this case. The customer liked that we worked with optimization and storage of images, animations and sound effects.

So we got our biggest contract on the exchange and set about developing a real game. At this point, the developers had a new excuse - they were not hired by the company for the role of game developers. They explained that they did not see any reason to grow in this direction and did not want to delve into the technologies associated with it. It seemed to the guys that the skills acquired in the process would not be useful to them in the "real" software development.

That's about how developers felt, finally getting stuck in textures

The fact is that it seems to young specialists that the most important thing is their level of programming languages. In fact, it’s more important to be able to switch your perception in order to better understand the client’s requirements and find optimal solutions to problems. To do this, you need to constantly study new engines or frameworks. In this regard, game development does not require anything special - here you also need to be able to work with new tools.

Every day, programmers have to not only write code, but also learn different technologies. This is how career growth happens. All skills gained in game dev can be easily transferred to other areas of activity.

- “And how can we be without team lead ?!”

It is impossible to get a serious contract without statistics and a portfolio. Therefore, we hired junior specialists to work with Upwork. June is not boring to work on small tasks, and so they pump not only their profile faster, but also their skills. We expected that the growth of competencies will be accompanied by larger projects.

The team needs a team lead. Attracting an individual to such a role was expensive, so one of the key employees acted as a mentor. He monitored the overall quality of the code and shared tips. The strategy seemed a win-win.

Take the project to develop the game allowed precisely the team leader. He helped the team in the initial stages of development - from choosing a framework to completing a test task. The developers felt comfortable and already independently wrote the main functionality of the application.

When the time came to put the project into operation, the team leader unexpectedly left the company. The team was stuck: a technical debt formed, it was necessary to eliminate memory leaks. Corrections took a very long time.

Left without a captain, the team was waiting for a life buoy. They hoped that management would quickly hire a replacement person who would solve all the problems for them. In turn, the management hoped that one of them would pick up the helm and align the course.

As a result, the developers coped with all the problems in the normal mode. They did not stay late until late and did not sacrifice the weekend. As it turned out, the decision was within their power, but they are used to the fact that in unusual situations, the team leader comes to the rescue and corrects everything overnight.

If your company has key employees, check how much you depend on them. Do they have understudies? Is management decision making closed to them? Define this dependence and start to reduce it. Do not rely on the dedication of line specialists.

- “We need to drag this case into the portfolio, then we will live!”

This project seemed to be a gift of fate. The client wanted a native application to replace the existing cross-platform. Instead of technical specifications, prototypes and layouts, we had a finished result before our eyes. All the requirements were clear, it is a pleasure to conduct such a project.

Our manager expected that if we successfully fulfill the contract, then further sales will be much easier. After all, as we have already seen - there is nothing better than showing a potential client a live application. In addition, the game could boast of good ratings, user reviews, a million downloads. Our task was to replace it. Thus, all statistics would be preserved and we would have completely legally appropriated all the merits to ourselves.

Manager looks at legacy application statistics in the console

We wanted to drag an excellent case into the portfolio, which would make it more attractive for potential customers. We imagined that we would have no end to customers, and did not notice anything other than conceited metrics and easy sales. So we wanted to do well for ourselves, and not for the client, but this is wrong.

All this time we should have been worried about something completely different. We had to focus on our work and create a quality product that would help the client.

Output:

It may seem that the team tried to otmazyvatsya. But all that they said described the real state of affairs. They did not invent anything. Therefore, in your company these phrases may sound completely different, and in order to notice them in time, you need to understand what unites them.

The thing is that the employees reasoned from the point of view of their exclusivity: the department is moving in a new direction for the company, working with new technologies, took an atypical project, and remained without a team lead.

It is important to recognize that you are not exceptional. Tell yourself that you are ordinary people who do ordinary work. And there is nothing special in the fact that now you took an unsuccessful project or went in the wrong direction. This happens to everyone. People are constantly making mistakes. There is no specificity in this. Maxim Batyrev in his bestselling book “45 Manager Tattoos” even devoted a whole chapter to it - “Recognition of the specificity of death is like”, which we seem to have read inattentively.

We want to return to UpWork, but this time we need people who will simply do their work in good faith and not assume that they are doing something special. And if you are such a person, then contact us.