People Per Hour….A Great Resource or a Costly Platform with Too Much Red Tape?
What does it take to compete on online marketplaces?
An honest People Per Hour Review by an active buyer/freelancer (myself) since 2008
For those of you who haven’t heard of People Per Hour, it’s an online platform for selling and buying services for your business. Catering for everything from needing a photographer locally to online remote jobs like logo creation and web design. There are 2 sections to the website; post a job and get bids from freelancers and the hourlie section where you purchase a ready-made job that gets done quickly. A great feature is both parties can review one another publicly.
From our perspective, People Per Hour (PPH) has been a really helpful resource, which has given us much-needed work right away for 2 of our businesses.
Our viewpoint, however, isn’t held by everyone out there. Look around online for People Per Hour reviews and you’ll soon discover that there seems to be an army of people who are far from happy with the platform. Why is this? Are we just in a minority or is it something we’ve done differently to have such a differing view?
Well, we’ve had a good think about our approach and come up with some tips to help you fall into the ‘happy’ category when dealing with PPH as a freelancer/business like ourselves.
“My proposals don’t ever get accepted”
We did find this too initially, as each job posted receives multiple ‘proposal’ bids unless you stand out, you’re not going to get chosen that often. Also, it takes time to complete personalised proposals for each job and you can soon lose hope and enthusiasm.
The solution
PPH allows you to post ‘Hourlies’ which are smaller jobs to complete in up to 5 days. Provide your prospective customers with a way of sampling not just your work, but also how you are to work with them. ‘Hourlies’ are an invaluable tool, as more often than not, if you do a job well, you’ll get more work from that person. In our experience, if you do a good job, more than half of clients either want more of the same or are willing to discuss bigger projects with you because they now trust you.
This is one of the reasons we never send bid proposals to the jobs section and because the Hourlie serves as a point of contact to prospective clients to put work to you. They can see you are selling well and are viewing your fab feedback. The client then goes to your profile and views your portfolio and bang they want to hire you, saving you time!
We have also found that if you start to ‘trend’ for your ‘hourlie’ (which happens because of a number of factors e.g. you are selling in volume and getting lots of good reviews), then PPH puts you up in lights to all its members in the opening screen when you log in. Because of this, PPH used our hourlie as their online advertising and we were full of work!
You can’t buy that kind of publicity…well, for free anyway!
Another very welcome by-product of performing ‘hourlies’ is that you get lots of lovely genuine reviews which helps others to trust you too. The more work you do, the more work you get…and so on. We like to share these reviews everywhere!
Escrow
Whilst it can be annoying to see PPH fees come out of your earnings, one of the great benefits of their platform is the Escrow facility, which holds the money until both parties are happy that the job has been done as promised. Though we have read some negative reports from previous PPH freelancers about the effectiveness of their Escrow platform, for us, it’s worked pretty well.
An added bonus of the Escrow facility on PPH’s site is that if you direct new or existing customers of yours to PPH, you can utilise the service with no fees. Perfect for building trust with new clients and excellent for getting paid on time for us!
Functions we like
- You can pause your availability or your Hourlies if you can’t take on any more work.
- PPH emails you when they match your skills with a job posted
- You get invited to jobs by clients, to bid on their job and you don’t spend any of your monthly credit allowance
Tips for being a People Per Hour Freelancer
- Under-promise and over-deliver
- Only offer quality work
- Be as fast as you can
- Be specific
- Explain deliverable’s in detail
- Communicate at all stages to confirm you are doing the job well
- Provide value over being the cheapest
The Negatives
Ok, so now for the bad points. As good as we’ve found it to be, there are things that could improve;
Not UK Focused Anymore – When we first started and for a good few years, PPH was mainly based within the UK market and that was one of its best features. It allowed us to compete and do business with fellow country peeps. It meant we didn’t have to compete with low prices and stiff competition.
Confusing Multiple Work Streams – If you are working for many clients at any one time, the number of workstreams can lead to confusion. Multiple workstreams for the same customer often occurs, which can be a bit annoying.
Slow Clearance of Funds – Although quicker than platforms like Fiverr, who can take an age to pay you, PPH does take upwards of a week all in all, which isn’t always ideal, but you can wait a whole lot longer in the real world.
Inviting Freelancers – It would be fab to have a search facility that is by name because our clients have spent a long time trying to find us to invite us to a private job.
The Verdict
Use PPH as we do and we’re pretty certain that you’ll come out of it happier than you went in, but approach it as many do and you could end up feeling like it’s a waste of time. Aside from a few niggles like not being invited to jobs that seem to be addressed to someone else, we are happy with the platform. Take our advice and we think you might just love it too.
Join for free and get £30 credit to try the platform here. You can find our profile http://pph.me/louisagoldstone do bookmark us by clicking on the star in the corner so we’re in your favourites 😉
Do you want to branch out and get more business?
We have found Fiverr to have a higher volume of clients that convert who return more often. Get 10% off your first purchase with this link. Check out our profile on Fiverr, we have a pretty awesome history of reviews for our gigs – ForContentWorld Profile
