Day 7 started with no news on my UpWork applications. In the meantime, I had been hearing excitable rumblings about a local New Zealand-based start-up called Yudoozy and I decided to check it out.
Yudoozy might be a dumb name, but it has a smart approach. It’s a freelancer marketplace that connects freelancers and potential employers, but that is where the similarity to Elance ends. For starters, it’s only open to New Zealand residents and there are no cut-throat bidding wars for jobs. Employers actively seek out suitable freelancers by perusing the directory of talent and skills available. To make this easier, both freelancers and employers go through a vetting process at Yudoozy. The idea here is to rule out tyre kickers and cowboy coders, levelling the playing field more than other job marketplaces and making sure all participants in the transaction get a fair deal.
Run by ex-staffers of a recruitment firm who felt they could do a better job supporting freelancers, the whole premise of Yudoozy is to align skilled workers with authentic projects at fair rates, with no middleman taking a commission. It’s totally free. On Yudoozy, you set your own hourly rate and the system promotes you to registered, pre-vetted New Zealand employers.
But where Yudoozy gets really fresh is in their scheduling app. Once you register as a freelancer, you can enter your availability for the next 2 months into their weekly scheduler. You can block out weeks as either free, busy or try me – the latter indicating that you may or may not have availability that week but will confirm when contacted.
The system auto generates an email to freelancers each week, reminding them to update their availability in the scheduler. That way, potential employers can see instantly if / when freelancers are available for projects and not waste their time contacting someone who can’t do the job anyway. Smart, no?
Right now, Yudoozy is still in BETA, with few registered employers as yet, but I have high hopes for it. I’ve set up my profile and now just need to wait for the calls to come in. Or not.
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Its very interesting news. Thank you for sharing news about the start-up companies like Yudoozy.