Thank you. I fully agree with you. Except that I am very selective in choosing which jobs to bid on, especially after analysing things. The issue is not my success rate - it is the overall success rate for niche jobs where the real expert is needed. IoT, wearables, sensors, proof-of-concepts are jobs where one need to invest a lot before claiming or promising something which maybe cannot be done.
As written, for me it is not problem our success rate, I’ve got the Top Rated badge in the very first week possible. It is just amusing for me all that complaining about connect price but no one see the real problem, like in “Emperor new clothes” fairy tale. And agreed, everyone has its own problems and every job is different.
You know about statistic - let' s discuss about methodology first. And different methodologies lead to different numbers. But one can only put numbers which can grab and are available on UpWork, so - how I calculated everything? You can argue that methodology is wrong - there were only numbers I had.
1. Our "Marketing effectiveness" in stat was really bad (around 25%) when compared with others in category "freelancers in Web, Mobile & Software Dev". Therefore, we've decided to analyse it, because it was clear that it should be improved.
2. The first thought was that we didn't get a job because someone else got it (lower cost, better proposal, better team, you name it..)
3. So we've decided to learn from the best, the winners, like what was their price (you can get it when the job is finished, who did it, reviews).
4. That is possible only to monitor all proposals posted, check if someone is hired, when the job was finished end similar, manually. We have manually copied every proposal into our CRM and analyse it every week.
5. We have found out that in our niche market there are lot of jobs offers, but few jobs hired.
Yes, one can argue:
1. That it cannot be done correctly because it takes time for jobs to be approved and cannot be claimed that nobody is hired yet if job is only a week or two old. Agree, but 6 months and 500 proposals can show some trends. And even if we multiply the numbers with 2 from 3% to 6% because of, it is still very low number.
2. That is waste of time to monitor the progress in that way, but we have learned a lot 🙂
3. That the overall success rate is 30% or even 50% (success rate in a meaning that client accepted an offer regardless who is applicant). Maybe in category IT development in general, but not if you are an expert in niche market; IoT, sensors, wearables, special solutions in eHealth, Industry, Logistic.
I can agree that someone can be easily hired to prepare a mobile application with 5 screens, login and connected to fb. I can bid in 3 minutes or less. The client knows what is buying and the freelancer can just simply copy the last version of its template. And for that kind of jobs the connect price can be an issue.
But for highly specialized jobs, hardly.
