Hi there! David here, co-founder of Sixty.
Sixty has moved on as a platform for hiring freelance web designers, engineers, and digital service providers.
That said, here are my recommendations on hiring freelancers and working as a freelancer.
If you have any questions related to this, I always love to help people here. Feel free to tweet at me @_davidhead with the question and I’m happy to answer!
For Clients
If you’re looking to hire top-end freelancers and pay the lowest fees, I recommend Braintrust*. They charge 10% to clients, compared to 20-40%, which is what other marketplaces charge. They have many of the same freelancers as the other top-end marketplaces too.
If you're looking for freelancers who are newer to their careers, Upwork and Fiverr are great choices.
For Freelancers
Freelancers with experience
If your portfolio is built out, I recommend working on Braintrust*. Reasons:
- Committed to building a decentralized freelance marketplace that empowers freelancers more
- 0% fee on freelancer earnings
- 10% fee for clients (lowest in industry)
- A+ client list with Fortune 500s
- Opportunity to contribute to building the platform and get compensated for it
If you have some full time employment experience
I also recommend Braintrust* here, for the reasons listed above.
When you start freelancing, I recommend easing into it with 10 hour/week moonlighting jobs at first. Then you can ramp it up and eventually freelance full time if you want to.
The key to marketing yourself here is turning some of the major projects you’ve worked on into portfolio items. Ideally they’re directly related to what you’ll be doing for clients.
Examples of this are on my portfolio. See the Sixty Hire project as well as the SMV product when I built at Lambda School.
As long as the product isn’t private, you should be ok creating a non-public portfolio item or case study on a GDoc to share with a prospective client. If you want to publish the portfolio item on your site, you’ll want to get permission.
A way to get permission is to write the first draft of the case study, share it with your manager, and say: “I’m looking to start creating a portfolio of my large projects as a way to remember my work. It’s easier to do this one step at a time since the lift would be heavy at once. I wanted to ask you to confirm it’s ok.”
They’ll probably want to check with legal, and then they’ll confirm it.
If you’re starting off your career
You need to build up a portfolio. Good places to do that are Upwork and Fiverr. I don’t recommend spending too much time working on there though since they have a race-to-the-bottom dynamic where you won’t make as much money as other places like Braintrust.
To learn how to think about this phase, you should check out my blog post on how to hit $100k/yr in earnings.
*The Braintrust link above is my affiliate link, which helps contribute to me creating more advice articles like this. The commission I make comes out of Braintrust’s cut of the client fees.
You should sign up for their affiliate program too if you know other freelancers and clients that would be a good fit for the community. Appreciate your support.