oDesk to the Rescue

Jan Zands lost years, and a lot of money, looking for reliable, skilled software designers who could get his company's product off the ground. He might never have finished if he hadn't found oDesk.

Jan Zands was working as an assistant to a movie producer in 1996 when he had an idea. "A film producer will make about 40 calls per day and receive another 40 per day," Zands explains. "You need a good system for tracking calls and what they're about, but at the time, no such software existed." Zands saw a business opportunity, but turning it into a viable company was harder than he expected.

"I went on oDesk and it was awesome!"

— Jan Zands / Co-founder, Phonesheet.com

Turning his first product, a FileMaker database that tracked calls, into a web-based application that would cut costs and work better, took most of this decade. In 2001, he used craigslist to hire an expensive freelancer — who left the job unfinished after three months. Equally expensive programmers moonlighting from big production companies didn't have enough time to finish the work, and an online company from Argentina, though less expensive, also left him with the application incomplete.

"My biggest challenge was finding programmers that were affordable, but also skilled enough to finish the entire job," he says. "I was wading around in the ocean of freelancers for over five years until I found oDesk."

oDesk Did the Trick

Zands says he loved oDesk from the moment he got started. "I posted my job and got about 20 responses within a day. I was able to find people at the rate I needed and was also able to look at testimonials so I was certain that these people would finish the job," he says. "It was so important to see on a provider's profile that there were jobs with start dates, end dates and positive feedback."

Zands also made use of oDesk's management tools. "I do enjoy looking at the screen shots of the work," he says, "especially with designers. You want to give them freedom so they can create their own vision, but you also want to stop them if you see that they are definitely on the wrong track. With the work diary, you can peek and get a sense of whether the design is going in the right direction without making them feel like you're giving them notes before they're ready."

Zands also praises oDesk's simplified payment process. "When I was working with other companies, I had to wire money, which resulted in wiring fees every month. Now I just put it on my credit card — and I'm actually getting miles! It's much easier for me to track all my expenses since everything is on my corporate credit card."