Not really. What problem are you trying to solve and what are the benefits to me? This is a much better splash page but the copy is still pretty bad - https://www.workio.com/about/
We want to streamline work processes. If you need something done you have to find someone who is able to do it and has time. work.io takes care of this. You define what you need, say how much you want to pay and get the results. You don't need to interact with the providers. Less overhead and better results are your benefits.
Ok, so you are providing a service like Odesk and those types of sites. Cool, nothing wrong with that. There certainly is a huge need for this right now. Just come out and say it. Let me help you with that (using your own words).
Work.io allows you to hire skilled workers without the need to interview them one by one. Just join, define a task, price it, and get the results. Work.io works with a pool of talented people to deliver what you need. No resources wasted. Better results. Our focus is to streamline your work process by taking care of finding the people you need to get things done, at your price.
I know that we have that problem and we try to solve it. I believe that discussions like this one help with it. We try to describe what we offer and others tell us what they don't understand.
We remove overhead from outsourcing. You define what results you need and the people on the platform deliver. No management needed. (Sounds like more bullshit? work.io takes care about who fulfills your tasks so you don't need to.)
OK, so by mentioning 'outsourcing' we start to understand a bit more. You're focused on enterprise (or reasonable sized operations then?). Then you should say so.
You have to remove all the jargon from your pages (and preferably simplify the text by removing a lot of it) and then explain your proposition like it was to a 5 year old (as someone else said here).
Sorry to go on about this, but it's crucial if you're going to market your product successfully.
Try this:
You are in an elevator, you've got 3 minutes between floors to make your grandmother understand what you do and why people should use your service. What would you say? :)
We don't use outsourcing because people assume it's for bigger companies. Also it evokes a negative feeling.
Recently a developer created a task. He has a popular plugin for an open source CMS and wants to offer a paid version of it. Therefore he needs TOS. Finding a lawyer who has the right expertise in that space takes time. Instead he went to work.io, defined what he wants as a result and paid. The task is now distributed to fitting lawyers and the developer will get back exactly the results he asked for.
On the other side is the lawyer who gets contacted by people who ask what random things cost. She has to make an estimate and doesn't always get the job. Often she has to explain things instead of just getting them done. She charges by the hour because every client is different. On work.io she has a a list of tasks, sees how much she will get for each of them and can fulfill them immediately. She doesn't have to run after the money because work.io can pay her as soon as the buyer accepted the results.
We already plan landing pages for specific industries as it is easier to explain it with examples. A marketplace for services that can be fulfilled without further interaction between buyer and provider.
Elevator pitch for my grandmother:
Work has changed. You already experienced how less people were needed to work at farms while there was more food for everyone. Today factories get the same treatment. Intelligent machines, we call them roboters, can make many tasks and at some point in the future there will only be a handful of people needed to build for example a car. Most people work in the service industry. The teller at your bank for example. Or your taxi driver. Or the cashier when you buy groceries. These jobs will be automated too. I can use my computer to do the same things the teller does. It can talk with nearly all other computers on the world through some kind of phone line. While you need to go to the bank to send me money, I can do it myself. Taxis will be able to drive on their own and you surely remember the last time we were at Ikea were we used that laserthingy ourselves and paid with the plastic card instead of waiting in a line to have someone else to do exactly the same thing. Computers enable us to do things we paid others to do for us in the past in less time because we don't have to wait in lines. * ping * We are already there? On the way down I will explain you what work.io actually does.
Elevator pitch for my grandmother (second try):
work.io enables people to work like they were employed by a company without the corporate bullshit. They get a list of tasks and can decide on what they want to work. They get paid by tasks and know upfront how much they will get for each of them. They even can do only a part of the task and someone else will do the rest. They will then be paid for the percentage they did.
Instead of enroll others, people who need something done can create a task on work.io and pay for it. We then make sure that they get the results they wanted.
This creates a much flexibler environment for everyone involved. Companies can be managed by a core team that gets things done by great people done as they need it. They can buy an evaluation of their idea, a list of competitors and all legal documents they need for incorporation and doing business. If they want to get into a new market they buy the needed insights. They can buy a marketing strategy and the needed copy. They can even have someone else to incorporate their company. Nearly everything is at their fingertips.
I thought that outsourcing's main problem was lack of common incentives for both parties. Management overhead is a consequence of that. How's that related to what you do?
If you are talking strictly about money, the majority have figured out how to trade their value for something other than an hourly wage/salary. You can only make so much money by trading your time for it.
Typical Engineer:
2000 work hours/year * $50/hour = 100k/Year
John Carmack:
1.7 million copies of Quake * $1 profit = 1.7 Million/Year
This sounds pretty depressing to me. You're building the software that allows others to retire while you're a cog in someone else's wheel for another 33 years.
You're presuming an awful lot in that analysis there.
Besides, who is not a cog in some wheel or other? In civilized countries, there is nobody who is at the top of all hierarchies, no King. It's a pejorative with no bite if it applies to all.
Pretty cynical? You can have more or less autonomy in your life, that's very important. You don't have to be King to be your own boss; you don't have to be poor to be a cog.
I am a natural cynic, yes, but people tend not to pay you unless you are doing something that makes you a cog for some period of time. It's not a criticism you can just fling at someone when you don't know their context. An experienced software contractor who is picking and choosing their own jobs is still pretty autonomous. It's more about whether you can pick where you are a cog and for whom you are a cog, than whether you are doing something that somebody can point at and screech "COG! COG!". We live in a highly interdependent society, and I think that's largely a good thing.
Although I don't really use the word 'cog,' you are being uncharitable here; the word isn't completely meaningless and using it isn't "screeching".
The poster seemed to be distinguishing not on the basis of interdependence but on the basis of who has control over your life and the context of your work, and where the resulting profit would go. (This is, of course, my reading).
One part is your freedom. If you want to take a trip for a couple weeks once a year, or change your hairstyle or get a tattoo, and this is impossible because of company regulations unrelated to workload, this is coggy. Of course, everyone acknowledges that you have to work a certain amount of time and that if you are facing employees it helps not to have a swastika tattoo on your forehead, etc.
Another part is the alignment of what you are doing with your interests. If you are putting in 60 hours to pay the bills and learn a lot about SOAP on the way, that's coggy; it is not the same as choosing work that involves SOAP because it gives you a hard-on, which is less coggy.
Another part is what determines the broader role your work plays. Yes, everyone is doing work which fits into other people's wants (even the arctic explorer is playing to an audience somehow). But if you work for 8 months on something and it fails because customers hate it, you were still the one who chose that context - less coggy. It was trying an idea. If you work for 8 months and then it is permanently scrapped because the company came to a deal with Microsoft and your project was just a bargaining chip, that's coggy.
For the same reason, profits - if you are working in Hollywood and get paid an incredibly tiny amount for a hit movie because they got you with Hollywood accounting, that is coggy; it's less coggy if your profit is tied
Of course, this also means it's less coggy if you are taking on greater risk (financial, reputational, whatever). If you are very risk averse then you may prefer a coggier position. If you are very focused on one specialized skill, a less coggy position might force you to pick up other ones, so again certain kinds of people will rationally prefer coggier positions.
If the norm is for employees to be hired at low rates, dominated in every way possible, artificially hampered from building useful things, and fired on a dime, that is pretty coggy. If you are happily choosing your own jobs, leaving when you want, dictating terms, that isn't very coggy. Which is why you used it as your example.
In context: Do you have any reason to impute any of these issues to edw519?
The accusation of him being a cog without any apparent basis for flinging that accusation is what set me off, and made me use the word "screeching". You appear to have simply expanded on my point that there are ways of being more and less coggy, which is nice, but you seem to think you were arguing against something I said, though I can't find what. Yes, I already said there's a general point that could be made there, but the point wasn't made without a heaping helping of presumptions.
I just find it sad people write themselves off as never being rich or running their own business. There are 16 year olds making 6 figures writing their own iphone apps yet people view their only alternative to programming is moving to middle management.
"16 year olds making 6 figures writing their own iphone apps "
The reality is there are very few people making six figures writing their own iphone apps. Even fewer that can sustain that level of income as a sole proprietorship for a couple of decades, which is what you will need to do to retire at fifty.
For every programmer who does create a sustainable business, fewer still get rich doing so. One reason, creating a wildly successful business is a completely different skill set from programming. Another reason, it takes a fair amount of luck for a company to become wildly successful.
Not everybody wants to be rich. Would it hurt anything if I had more money? Of course not, but I have everything that I need in life and I'm not that materialistic.
The man has been doing a job that he loves for 30+ years. Having had to work in places I hated to 'pay the bills' enough times in my life to grow weary of it, I understand the value of working on a good team with people I like and respect, doing what I love.
As the adage goes: Get a job doing what you love to do, and you'll never work a day in your life. Startups are fine and dandy, but trust me when I tell you, they're a ton of WORK. Even serial entrepreneurs will tell you that it's taxing, and not for everyone. I for one would be much happier nestled up to a keyboard, solving a problem than I would be doing many of the things one needs to do to make a startup viable.
In summation, everybody's priorities are not the same as yours, and I'd wager that you could stand to learn that lesson sooner than later.
It's OK, one day you will get over your insecurities and inferiority complexes, and not fear people who are capable and comfortable of working on a team.
Being a cog in the machine allows you to focus on the code (in a good company) in a way that being in a startup doesn't. I can totally understand and respect that.
If you do something that gives you no kicks and only pays your bills, then yes, throwing away that nasty but necessary source of subsistence feels liberating.
But if you enjoy what you're doing every day and have no problem getting up in the morning for that, you only want more, and "retirement" feels like having your favorite toy taken from you.
Imagine someone saying: "Mr. Tesla, when are you planning to retire from your burdensome and soul-crushing experimentation and retire to enjoy some front porch whistling?"
If you want to build big things, in most cases you can't work alone. In a big team, everyone plays a part. Call them a "cog" if you want.
And, sometimes the specialization that happens in big teams allows people (err...cogs) to really push the state of the art by engaging one hard problem for a long time.
People don't get rich by simply taking from others (OK with a few exceptions); they get rich by offering something that another person/business/etc sees as a benefit worth paying for.
Some people just don't have anything they want to achieve. Others may have that, but due to mortgages, child college funds, or other reasons, just have to make due with having their value extracted from them in an employee role. The most depressing of sights is those that have successfully convinced themselves this is a good parking spot to occupy the rest of their lives.
I'm pretty glad I realized what this article is talking about early on and started planning long term for my own exit, as I knew my tolerance for this was a finite resource that would be continually depleted.
We know that whatever damage is caused, it can't be too bad because children born using sperm donors - which can be frozen for storage - don't have increased defect rates, but have decreased defect rates, something like 1/5
Not too be too negative but I don't see anything that would take more than a week to build here (technically). The hard part is going to be to stand out among the other thousands of sites with the exact same model.
