Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer podcast, where we work on getting better step by step professionally and personally. Let's get started. Hello and welcome back. Thank you so much. Today we are back for another episode of Building Better Developers, the Developer podcast. I'm Rob, he's Mike. You don't see either of us, but you're going to hear his awesome voice as well in just a moment. Want to jump ahead a little bit, just say this episode is going to be an interesting one. This one where you probably are going to want to utilize the YouTube page a little bit. We're going to do some examples. We're going to walk through Upwork. Using this is something I've used a lot, something Michael's starting to use to go find work. And so we're going to walk through the idea, a process of let's go find a project that's out there and let's put together a proposal and figure out what our stuff is around that and then kick it off. And so it's just to give you a nice example of something that we do, some of the tools I've used because I have done, gosh, probably a thousand proposals or more out there over the years. And before we get started though, Mike, go ahead and introduce yourself. Hello everyone. My name is Michael Molloch, co-founder of Developerneur, also founder of Envision QA And like Rob said, you know, I've been trying to gain that work for a little bit here. So we thought this would be a good exercise for us to go through together and try and flush out some of the tips and tricks that Rob's done over the years to find potential work to do on Upwork. All right. So I'm going to talk through this. We're going to see how well this goes. I'm going to share a screen. So those of you that are watching, you actually get to see me share the screen. And so we should see here now, confirm for me if you will, there's no rabbit, you know, there's nothing up my sleeve and there is an Upwork screen sitting there that is being shared right now. Correct? Yep. There we go. Excellent. Excellent. Excellent. Okay. So what we do when we come into something like this, the first thing I do, although I actually have a, I've built a little app, which someday I may walk through that as well, actually ping some of this, I pull from Upwork and Guru and a couple other sites, I pull stuff in and then I can sort of look through and it's not the, it's not the full project or job itself, but it's enough to give me an idea of like, does this look interesting? And I'll pull things like the title, a summary, the rates, and then, you know, maybe like if there's any restrictions, like, hey, it's only people in India or something like that. And I've got some filters around that as well. So I can sort of like narrow that down. This is going to be the much more painful way to look at this essentially, because I'm going to go through this and this is just live. I'm looking at jobs are out there. We're going to go find one and we're going to walk through it. Now, if you come to Upwork, one of the first things I would do is build out a safe search for yourself is just go in, you can do, you know, it's a bunch of stuff you can do with it as far as like what kind of job, what kind of area. So if I look at, I don't know if this is actually going to show me that. No, it's not. Oh, wait. Am I? You might want to make it a little bit larger. Zoom in just a little bit. Let's see what I can do. I'm not sure he likes that. It is not a happy camper with that. Okay. Nevermind. Let's see. I'm actually. You do control plus reusing Safari. Yeah. Yeah, I'm doing that. But you know what? It's like, I don't think it likes this. This may be interesting because I don't think it likes it with, I'm going to stop sharing my screen real quick. Oh, wait. Let me see what happens here. I think it doesn't like. Let me get this screen up a little bit better. If I do that. Now, let me try to share because I wonder if it doesn't like that share because some things don't like that. So let's say go back to share the screen. Let's just do this. So if I do this. You'll see over here on the side. I may not be able to because I don't think. Oh, well, maybe it is. So maybe it's just been something on that. The browser was. But what I would do is I would go ahead and set stuff up to give yourself just like, because there's so many jobs out there, particularly on Upwork, that I would just pick some of the stuff that you're common things that you're going to do to sort of limit it to something that makes sense to you, particularly like with your categories. There's a ton of different categories out there. Like here, I've got some subs and things like that. And so this is my save. So let me go back to I'm just going to go to the main one here. So this is off of. Oh, let's see. Rob, this from default. Now, for those of you on audio, can you walk them through how you got to this screen to show the filters? Yeah, it's really straightforward. If you come in, there's going to be fine work. And that's your home page. Basically, you're going to do that. And then you're going to be able to within that, there's going to be if you've got them, there's going to be saved searches. Otherwise, you're going to be able to I think somewhere in here go into the jobs you might like. And there is a little dot dot dot and you can edit your saved searches or which is basically create one. There is some other stuff they've got in there. I haven't played around with it, but you can easily do like, for example, I have US only and save jobs and something. So there are some filters around it. It's your standard searching filtering type algorithm. So you won't spend too much time in that. Let's see. I'm going to go with. So I've got a save search, which is my default, which is essentially just like, hey, I want us only jobs, intermediate to expert. And you can see out to the side how many jobs are out there. So here there is looks like if I do US only, there's like 11, 1160 jobs right now that are available at the intermediate level. So you can sort of figure out idea of like how this is going to shorten your how these filter items are going to shorten down your list. So let's go ahead. And so here's what I'm going to do when I do this is I walk through and I'm just going to look at all right, first thing. This is what you need to do. This is where you need to sort of figure out what are you? What do you want to do? What do you want to get into? If it's the. If it's your first job, then you're going to be much more broad. If it's something that you you've only got a certain amount of time, then you're also going to use that to filter yourself down. So here are things like and you'll see stuff that's incredibly vague like web developer. OK, great. Well, let's see. We're in the process. Well, here this is a good thing to show right here. Web development, JavaScript, HTML, PHP, web design. That's possible. Let's see. We're in the process of creating a comprehensive digital tool, the resource library, ABUS, enable users to effortly search and find industry specific tools. OK, this sounds like it could be good enough. They've spent all of two hundred dollars. So sometimes you're going to want you definitely going to almost always going to want that payment verified. That means that they've actually done something and they're not completely new. And they've got an hourly rate here that's 40 to 70 bucks an hour. It's an intermediate. OK, all right. Let's take a look at it. So we're going to click on this and that's going to give us something much more detailed. And this is where we're really going to look into what matters. So it's going to be things like, all right, let's see. Website will offer user friendly interface, content presented in a card format, similar offerings on Behance. We're looking to skilled web developer with experience in Relume applications to bring this project to fruition. I don't even know where Relume is. So that is a punt. Let's move on. Full stack React developer experience in MongoDB. I don't really want to get into React, so we'll keep on moving. Fillable PDF custom form could be, but no Unity C, no. One thing you kind of throw out as you're going through this, go back up to the top for a second, though. That's second one. So the full stack React developer. So one other thing that's kind of interesting that I've noticed on these, check out the budget. It's one hundred dollars. And then when you start looking into the descriptions, you realize very quickly that this is like more than a couple of days worth of work and the budget's going to be blown away. Yeah, that's one of the things. Usually I'm going to start and that's, I guess, how I start and you can you can pick it however you want. That's the nice thing of my the tool that I've built myself, the little spring boot app is that I like I'll throw out smaller in budgets or certain things that don't make sense. Now, sometimes they're just open and so you just have to figure it out. But it's not like this. So if you say the budget is one hundred bucks, yeah, I'm not going to mess with it. It may be because it's even if it's valid, even if it's one hundred dollar project, by the time I put together everything, it's not worth my time. So unless it's something that's I can repeat that a thousand times. OK, then I do it. But that's one of the things that normally I'm going to look more like a topic first and also work my way down into budget. But that's those are your areas you're going to use to throw some stuff out to ignore things. And that's really what it is, is figuring out what where do you want to actually spend time? So I'm sitting here scrolling through, let's see. So bed board system for like here, there's visual basic, don't want anything to do with it. Shop by developer. No, thanks. Developer agency needed for a survey budget. Fifteen bucks. No pass. Let's do jobs per page to 50. And now what we'll see is because I've been on this for a while, there is well, I guess there's in here. But what you will end up seeing as you're going through these is towards the top. It will be a it'll say, hey, there are newer jobs. Note they've got their little RSS feed. So you can always which is what I use for my. So I can pull my save search out, which I use for my little app. So you can you can use that to actually see these. They're not. Let's see. Let's see if I can go. Can I put. Yeah. So if you'll see. Oh, wait, I'm on this. Let me go to. I don't want to get too far into this. But what you can is you can take a look at the RSS feed. It is there's a lot more text there. There's a couple of things that are going to be. It's not going to be as easy to read. But if you want to scan or if you've got a nice little RSS read, you can do that. But if you want to scan or if you've got a nice little RSS reader, you might want to do so. So let's continue to go through here. Smart developer for integrations connecting stuff. Oh, that could be really cool. Hourly 10 to 15 bucks an hour. Now I'm not going to do that. And again, this is something I'm not a big fan of. And you can to help yourself out. You can sort of thumbs down and sort of throw it off your list. What I will do at times when I'm using this, actually using the upwork. As I'll put a heart on the things that look like they could be useful. So let's see. Looking for excellent Zebra scanner to lamp. No freelance Swift. No WordPress developer. No Arduino. No, let's see. Unity. No 3D rendering for sheet metal. No build Excel or access. Excel or access database. This is an interesting thing. This is brand new as you look at. So this is something you're going to know. So to help you out. So payment unverified. I haven't spent any money. This guy, gal, company, whatever it is, is probably pretty new to this. And they're sitting there saying, hey, we are a low voltage contractor in a Seattle commercial market. We're using different forms of Excel to track projects, which is somewhat inefficient. Duh. Build a project flow log Excel to combine all these functions. It includes a dashboard on one sheet to display the data from very large. Look at this. From a very large table on another sheet. But I need to do more than what I'm able to program in VBA. So either need an assistant completing it in Excel or move to access. So this is an interesting one. Because these guys are new. This is where I'm going to look at some things. So now I haven't seen anything really that's told me necessarily it's not good. It's intermediate, which is good enough. I'm usually going to look at intermediate, advanced, depending on what you want. Intermediate, advanced or beginner is probably going to help you. Particularly now, if I don't have a rate, then or something they're looking at, a budget, then it's going to help me figure it out. Also, OK, less than 30 hours a week, one to three months. They've got a nice little PDF, which you're going to want to look at. But here as I go, this is where depending on, and I think it's able to everybody. If you scroll down, you're going to be able to see some more information, including their qualifications. So, for example, here they want the location to be Washington. And it'll give you a nice little red exclamation point to be like, hey, you're not in Washington, or at least in my case, I'm not in Washington. So you can. You can. And if you do, if you put a proposal out to these, they'll say, hey, by the way, you have something that you are lacking that they want. Do you still want to do it? So you can. And I could try to like sell them out of it. But in this case, I'm not going to. One of the things I'm going to look at, though, let's say they were local or that was an issue. I'm going to look at this. So there's only a few people have put a proposal out. This is the last view by a client only two hours ago. They haven't interviewed anybody. And of course, this whole project just got posted two hours ago. And then this bid range is awesome because it tells me roughly what's out there so far. So there's been a couple of proposals and I know that at least one was 35, one was 75, and then the rest of them averaged out to 54. If I'm trying to figure out what is this going to support, I may I may be able to, particularly depending on what you want to do, you could lowball it and you can say, oh, you know, the lowest 35. I'm going to go 34 or 30 or something like that. Or, you know, you may want to just hit the average. Sometimes I do that depending on what that project is. And then sometimes it's like, you know what? I can afford or they can afford the rate. The high rate is still within what I'm expecting. And so I'm going to do that. Now you do have to watch. This is where this is a numbers game. So in this case, this is a good example. We've got 35 to 75 and the average is almost dead in between them. Now, sometimes what you're going to see is you'll see a low that's, you know, let's say 35. The high could be 5000, but the average is going to be maybe 36. So, you know, that somebody put something out there that was really high and everybody else is down at that low. So this is where hopefully you can, you know, you have enough math skills that you can figure out where is sort of the median. And you can figure out where are you going to fit within the proposals because that's something you're going to want to if you're going to be on the low end, then you can sell it that way. You say, hey, this is I can do this cheaper than most people. I don't know why they think it's going to be so expensive. Here's what I can see. Make sure you're clear on it too, though, that you're not lowballing yourself into a situation where you didn't understand the problem. I've seen that more than a few times where you'll have a, you know, the average is 100. The low is 20. And you're thinking whoever put that 20 in was not paying attention. They probably didn't figure it out. I see a question. Hey Rob. So one of the interesting things about this, I actually have experience in doing things like this. Scroll back up for a second because I think there's something that unless it's in that PDF, they left out some critical information. Yeah, so VBA can mean anything. They mentioned access. They mentioned Excel. They do not mention if this is Office 365. They do not mention if this is Office, what, 2003, 2002, whatever the last physical version is. The VBA thing is slightly concerning because that makes me think older versions of Office. Overall, though, the pricing, the bids for this is about right. The other thing I don't see here that is potentially could lead to the three month issue is they might want you to actually build a access interface. They may actually want you to build the reports. They may actually want you to build the UI to get into those, into this data. So there's a lot to this that's unknown. So something else to be kind of cautious of. Yeah, we'll get we'll get a little bit more into that when we can actually find one that's a little more worth chasing down because I'm going to go ahead. So we'll put on this one because it's it's what actually I guess what I was going to say with this one is this this is not in my for example, for me, it's not in my wheelhouse. But because we can do Excel, we've done stuff like that, but we really don't want to. So somebody comes to me and says, hey, I don't care even at whatever the top rate is. We need you for 30 hours a week to do this and we just want you to work on Excel. We're going to say we're going to pass probably because unless there's something they've got that's a follow up that's going to make sense. That's not something we want to get into. And if we want to go Excel to access again, this is where there's this is not something that has a ton of data of details to it. So I don't want to get into something where I'm going to worry about whether we get into spending a lot of times putting requirements together and then end up wanting to punt anyways. But what we can do and what I have done with a couple like this is sort of skirt the issue a little bit. And I say, hey, I get what you're running into. I understand that you've got you've got it. You're using Excel. It's not working. It's not scaling. You want to go to something else. You're thinking access. Well, and I just did this where I said, you know, access would be fine, except for the problem is that everybody I know that I've moved to access has ended up moving on the road a little further down the road has moved to a web application. And so I'm going to sell them on. Hey, how about we take your Excel spreadsheets, we put it into a nice web application. That way you can you've got access to it from everywhere. You don't have to worry about issues, you know, about all the issues of multi users. Now, you do want to look at some of this stuff because they've got like all these old data markers and this flow log and some things like that that they're talking about. So you may need you may have to do something very complicated for the web for a website. You may have to have some very complicated reports, but that's how you get that that conversation started as well. So let's move along a little bit here and see because I would love to find one. You'll see these sometimes answer my questions related to Java Spring API development, there will be and this is like estimated budget 30 bucks. If you're just starting out, there are a decent amount of projects that are there that are really not a project. It's like, hey, spend I need somebody to spend a couple of hours with me on a Zoom call to go over this technology or how do I do that or explain this IT thing? And if you're starting out, those are great because what you can do is you can it's not a big investment. You know, you get to interact with the customer, you get to practice on putting together a proposal. It's probably going to be a fairly, you know, it's not going to be very cost worth. Like, let's see, I wonder if this will tell me if I do a. Oh, so it's 10 connects. So that's like it's not super cheap. But so maybe the connects that you're doing, which is you have to have a certain, you know, each proposal, you're going to throw a certain amount of points at it. These are great for building out your basically your credibility, your, you know, your your rap sheet basically here of, hey, there's some projects I've done. And these are successful, particularly what you want to do with these is they'll come in and make sure that you get that like five star feedback that it's somebody that will work with you on that. And you may even say, hey, I'll give you, you know, help you out a little bit. Well, you know, this normally would be maybe beyond your budget, but I'll work in your budget. Just so one, I can help you out to you can help me out with some feedback. So things like that. Don't don't just immediately throw them out because you're like, I don't think that's really a good fit for me. It may be something that's a great way to build up your basically your, you know, your background on this site. So moving along, let's see, setting up domain. I'm just going to be one for a second here. I'm going to try to see if I can find something. What I do is I'm looking usually for keywords, for example, WordPress. If I'm going to see WordPress and I want it out, I want to get away from the word. I'm not going to bother. Can I jump on a Wix site? Automation usually is pretty interesting. Let's see. I'd like to link card information between multiple cards and boards or maybe a one card can do it all. Current list card is generating a board, copied another. So this probably wouldn't be too bad. It's like guessing it's going to be a small project, though. The process generates quotes that I need added to the original card. So you can take a look at this and see what they're doing. Something that it would be potential, but I don't want to dive into it as an example for us. So what I will do is I'll harp it and I may come back to that at some point and take a look at it. Let's see. Web design. Anything is web design. I'm not a web designer, so I'm not going to do it. I can build one, but don't want to unless I really, unless it's part of like a bigger piece. Website revamps, unless it's a backend. This is going to turn out to be, let's see, WordPress, edit and update. SEO, I stay away from that. Redesign a company website. Senior backend. Let's see. This was posted seven hours ago. MySQL, Lervel, PHP, Web development, JavaScript. Let's look at that a little closer. Let me interject for just a moment. So before we go down the rabbit hole, finding one to actually apply to, let's step back one level because I don't think we actually talked about when we create an account with Upwork, what you need to actually make these proposals. I know you mentioned connects, but what is a connect? And why don't we talk about that briefly and then wrap this section and then start the next one. Okay. Yeah, this, so one of the things with Upwork, different sites, each of the sites are a little bit different how they do it. The way Upwork works is you have a subscription and with that subscription you get what they call connects. And I think it's, I forget what it is off the top of my head, but I think it's like you get a hundred a month or something like that. And what happens is every time you submit a proposal, there's a certain number of connects that are required for the proposal. Typically, I think most of them I see, I think 16 seems to be the typical number. So that means that for a regular, for your typical monthly subscription, I think you get like five proposals you can put together. Now you can buy more. I think they're like 15 cents a piece, something like that if you want to buy more. And you need to think of it as like advertising points or something like that because that's basically what it is. Is the more connects you have, the more proposals you can put. And you can also, as we'll see when we get into doing proposal, we'll go into that a little bit more about the details about like where those connect, where you can leverage those connects to maybe like bump yourself up and be a little bit more visible to the customer that wrote the proposal. And so that's really your key there is you're going to get in, you're going to set up your account, you're going to have a profile. And that's something the profile side of it, I think we'll probably cover another time. And we've talked about a little bit in your your general branding kind of stuff. You're going to have it's that kind of thing. It's almost like a LinkedIn profile or anything else where you're probably going to want a picture of yourself. They have an opportunity for videos. It's what are your skills? What's your sort of like your your vision? What's your tagline? Some things like that so that you can say this is who I am and try to wow people. So actually, I'll show you real quick because I think I can do. OK, I'll go find that a minute. Yeah, because one of the nice things about when I created my account was it allowed me to go out to LinkedIn. And it pulled in all my job history from LinkedIn that I had posted out there. And then it allowed me to actually fill in the gaps on that. So that is one nice feature that they allow. Let's see, I want to see where is let's see, it's probably in settings. I go to profile profile. My profile profile set my profile. Let's see if that's going to give me my want. There we go. So. I don't need that ad. So you're going to see stuff like, hey, who, who are you? You give it a name that's like a useful name. There's a checkmark because I've verified that I've gone through the ID check stuff, which they do. Your job success matters. So you want to have jobs and you want to have a good success rate. You want to there's a couple of different ratings, bonus tags, things that you can get. I think they'll show your totals. I think they're all pretty much available. So you can see like, hey, they've done, you know, they've been around for a while or they're brand new. You can talk about here's some of my basics like here's sort of my general pitch of a couple of lines. You can use connects to boost your profile, which is basically says if somebody is doing searches, that's going to bump it up a little bit more. How available are you? What are your languages, license skills, background, stuff like that? And then they give you some work history. So that's like the. The short and the quick and dirty of your profile. A lot of this is stuff that you want to go through. Oh, this is my public view. Let's see if I public view. Then I'll see that, you know, here's what it is. Here's the here's who they are. Here's their feedback that they've got some portfolio. If you've got specific you want to highlight some of your skills that you can have, that's limited to 10 catalogs. If you've got some specific projects that you want to put together, certifications and it gets into like, you know, again, sort of like your LinkedIn kind of stuff. And that will bring in. The nice thing is it can bring a lot of your stuff in from LinkedIn. So I do want. Well, I don't want that. I want to go back to. Work. And I'm going to try to jump down because I want to get to something so we can talk about one real quick before we jump. We sort of wrap this one up as a nice little cliffhanger. Let's see. So I'm going to grab one. Well, you know what I'm going to do is we're going to probably wrap this one up on the audio because it's not very visually. It's not very useful from the audio side. We'll wrap up this episode of podcast. We're going to turn it into another one, which surprise, surprise is going to be us walking through doing a proposal. On sort of some of the details, the wording and some of the things that we want to we want to consider more putting one together. That being said, you can always check us, send us any information, questions, all that kind of good stuff at info at developer.com. If you've got requests for some specific topics, you can always check us out on the podcast. You can also check us out on our YouTube page out at developer, which is D E V E L P R E N E U R. So there's like, you know, it's just that L N P D R right next to each other. That being said, we'll wrap this one up, let you get back to your day. So go out there and have yourself a great day and great week. We will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to building better developers to develop a new podcast. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts. We are there. And remember, just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success.
