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Owais's avatar
Owais A Community Member

Upwork Customer Churn

I'm wondering how many job posts get filled a month on UpWork?
How many jobs reach the interviewing process without hiring any freelancer?
How many jobs get posted with no further activity from the client (not interviewing a single person)?
I keep reading that UpWork might suspend an account with high job applications with no successful job won in a period of time, this is unfair and is worrying me since I'm new here and I'm still building up my profile and I have noticed a huge number of clients don't even interview a single person.

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Wendy's avatar
Wendy C Community Member

Owais,  as a management consultant I understand your wanting to grasp all the facts as I'm sure Petra does.  However, as she pointed out, most of those facts are not relevant to business consulting from a FLer perspective.

 

As to another part of your comments ... it is never wise to put all your eggs in one basket.

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Petra's avatar
Petra R Community Member


Owais A wrote:

I keep reading that UpWork might suspend an account with high job applications with no successful job won in a period of time, this is unfair and is worrying me

They don't do that anymore (for the time being at least) so you can stop worrying.

Also, you are winning contracts, that program was mainly aiming at those who won none or very few because either nobody wanted them, or because they took the clients off site to be paid directly.

 

Owais's avatar
Owais A Community Member

What about the churn?
I see that you have been here for a while, is not something that we should be concerned about and highlight to help developing and sustain UpWork business, where we all make a living as a full time freelancers?
Petra's avatar
Petra R Community Member


Owais A wrote:
What about the churn?
I see that you have been here for a while, is not something that we should be concerned about and highlight to help developing and sustain UpWork business, where we all make a living as a full time freelancers?

Personally I am not concerned about the churn and not particularly interested in overall numbers because they mean very little for my individual circumstances, for my niche or my bidding behaviour or my hire-rate.

 

It's pretty much the same way I don't decide what to wear based on the world's average temperatures over the last month, but based on what the weather is like when I step outside the door and what I intend to do when I get out there.

 

I am really a bit puzzled why you are all worried and concerned, you have made very decent money for a newbie in your first couple of months and won a decent number and decent sized contracts? What's all that Angst about?

 

 

Owais's avatar
Owais A Community Member

Well I might be newbie on UpWork, but experienced in my area of expertise. As you have mentioned, everyone look at this from his/her own niche, expertise, or niche. From where I come it's a very important indicator, that would help drive strategic decisions such as but not limited to, proposal and bidding behavior, whether to rely on UpWork only and become the trusted and only jobs source platform to use, promote UpWork around, start an agency on UpWork, Benchmark it to other platforms to check if it's really the best platform out there and so on..

In short, I respect your kind straight to the point response and I feel your frustration of keep interacting with the same concerns over and over, which proof to me a point that my concerns are the others same concerns, which is a trend that hadn't been solved or mitigated yet on UpWork.
Petra's avatar
Petra R Community Member


Owais A wrote:
 From where I come it's a very important indicator, that would help drive strategic decisions such as but not limited to, proposal and bidding behavior, whether to rely on UpWork only and become the trusted and only jobs source platform to use, promote UpWork around, start an agency on UpWork, Benchmark it to other platforms to check if it's really the best platform out there and so on..

Surely you decide such things based on your individual results in your particular niche rather than overall, when the majority of the numbers would be based on "the rest" and completely irrelevant for your own business, for better or for worse?

 


Owais A wrote:

In short, I respect your kind straight to the point response and I feel your frustration of keep interacting with the same concerns over and over, which proof to me a point that my concerns are the others same concerns, which is a trend that hadn't been solved or mitigated yet on UpWork.

No frustration, you are drawing a conclusion out of a false premise. I am (at most) puzzled (and mildly concerned) that someone in your line of business would need those site-wide numbers (which you won't get unless you can calculate them from Upwork's numbers in the official reports) to make decisions for a niche business, rather than making those decisions based on your own experience and the results of your own bids.

Owais's avatar
Owais A Community Member

Your making sense now! I appreciate your time and effort in this matter.
My individual results for July were over %50 of the job posted in my niche hadn't had a single interview (based on over 50 different size proposals), which got me concerned for my second actively bidding month, that's a red flag of inconsistency and sustainability of winning jobs on UpWork that would drive me to look for a contingency source to keep up with my freelancing career. In which will get me distracted and just keep running from a platform to another.
So, I was wondering if it's only a problem in my niche or it's a common matter in every category around UpWork. In which I will have to adapt to it as I highlighted above. That's why I questioned and still questioning the overall numbers.
Others would say that we pay for getting a service and a high quality one. I say, I would pay higher fees for more sustainability and consistency of the promised deliverables and out comes of a service. It's a cycle for sure, you make money and others have to make money as well.
Petra's avatar
Petra R Community Member


Owais A wrote:
Your making sense now! I appreciate your time and effort in this matter.
My individual results for July were over %50 of the job posted in my niche hadn't had a single interview

I am not sure why that would concern you. Think of it this way: If you had a shoe shop, would it concern you if only 50% of the customers who came in tried on a pair of shoes?

 

Or think of it this way: If you would like to make $ XXXX a month on Upwork, and you do, does it matter how many people don't hire anyone, as long as you still manage to find the clients who hire you at the price you need to make your target?

 

What good does it do you if 100% of the clients you applied to hire, but hire someone else? Is it not better if only 5 out of 50 hire, but they all hire you at your price?

 

Those are extremes, but they do (try to) explain what my point was. Sitewide churn rates are of no use to you because you can not gain any meaningful data from a metric that includes all different categories across all different market sectors and price points and so on. That rate would (almost certainly) be of no use to you whatsoever at all.

 

On a platform where 98% of newcomers are rejected, and the vast majority of the 2% that are accepted never win a single job, and all the ones who do win a contract take some time to become established and almost certain increase their earnings over time, you're doing just fine from what I can see.

 

Keep going in the direction you're going and worry less about numbers that don't tell you anything.

 

 

 

Wendy's avatar
Wendy C Community Member

Owais,  as a management consultant I understand your wanting to grasp all the facts as I'm sure Petra does.  However, as she pointed out, most of those facts are not relevant to business consulting from a FLer perspective.

 

As to another part of your comments ... it is never wise to put all your eggs in one basket.

Tonya's avatar
Tonya P Community Member


Owais A wrote:
Your making sense now! I appreciate your time and effort in this matter.
My individual results for July were over %50 of the job posted in my niche hadn't had a single interview (based on over 50 different size proposals), which got me concerned for my second actively bidding month, that's a red flag of inconsistency and sustainability of winning jobs on UpWork that would drive me to look for a contingency source to keep up with my freelancing career. In which will get me distracted and just keep running from a platform to another.
So, I was wondering if it's only a problem in my niche or it's a common matter in every category around UpWork. In which I will have to adapt to it as I highlighted above. That's why I questioned and still questioning the overall numbers.
Others would say that we pay for getting a service and a high quality one. I say, I would pay higher fees for more sustainability and consistency of the promised deliverables and out comes of a service. It's a cycle for sure, you make money and others have to make money as well.

I have no statistics, but I think you can safely assume that a large percentage of posted jobs will go unfilled. I don't think the issue is niche-specific. Upwork provides leads, but they are not qualified. Definitely top of the funnel.