Some of you may be growing tired of hearing about companies described as the “Kayak of _____” but if the analogy fits, we might as well abuse it. So without further ado, I give you DoNanza, the Kayak of online freelance project search. With 70,000 projects on offer, there’s a high chance there’s something for you as well so you should consider giving it a whirl if you’re looking to make some extra money on the side in these tough times.
The one thing you have to keep in mind about DoNanza is that it keeps clear of offline gigs, so if you’re looking for an office job, DoNanza isn’t for you. It does however have 70,000 projects available right now, with 30,000 new projects added each week, or about 4,000 a day. There are 12 main categories with more than 400 sub-categories. The most active in terms of user-interest are (in the following order): Writing, Web Development, Graphic Design, Virtual Admin. Support, Translation, Marketing, SEO, and Programming.
DoNanza currently aggregates its freelance and crowd-source projects from 300 websites, with another 300 sites to be added in the coming months. Amazingly (or maybe not, really), 99% of the projects are indexed via scraping, with only a handful added manually.
There are a couple of main features I really like about DoNanza. First, its filtering tools are very clear and effective—nothing innovative, but often common-sense discovery tools are misguidedly cut from a public launch for some reason. On DoNanza, searches can be fine-tuned wit sliders on several levels, from Budget/Reward (Fixed/Hourly/Revenue-Share), to Project Type (Contest/Bidding/Other), to Time Left and Date Posted. The second useful feature is that each project’s details are displayed in an easy to skim form (see screenshot below). Again, not rocket science, but it makes the sometimes cumbersome chore of going through a myriad of search results a breeze.
DoNanza is also jumping on the ever-growing Twitter bandwagon by tweeting out new project notifications. Handles include: @dnzSEOfor SEO, @dnzWriting for Writing, @dnzPHP for PHP, @dnzDataEntry for Data Entry and more.
Demonstrating that it believes in freelancers, the DoNanza team outsourced much of its site development, including the UI, search engine, crawlers, as well as the indexing and data evaluation mechanisms. The company has yet to start making money but is planning on introducing sponsored links and projects in a couple of months. In the meantime, it’s pretty much a traffic and retention game.
I just want a company or reliable artist that will do anime art in jpg and psd… and can understand english.. getting an engineer is not hard.. artists are a pain to fnd..
@gebadia: go to deviantart.com for many art portfolios.
@roi: Thanks for the post! as a freelance programmer, one can never have enough leads. Thanks!
Some Innovations are simple yet leave a great impact on how we work! I have always thought of doing something for freelance work online… this is what the solution is! Kudos DoNanza… your service will rock!
There used to be a similar site called Feedlance ( http://feedlance.com ) which used to aggregate all the freelance job feeds and made them searchable. But alas, didn’t last for long.
Check out GetAFreelancer.com’s new design.
What a sad, shilling article for a company with no business plan and no future. Maybe Paul Kedrosky is right that we need a major cull of the VC firms.
http://www.kauf...tudy-finds.aspx
If they actually had an original thought or acted as a real intermediary, one might suggest they could survive as a unprofitable coffee-shop sized business. But they’re just scraping odesk and elance and their ilk? Give me a break.
Hi Roi,
Thanks for the post, as someone who is just starting out on the road of building a new freelance business sites like this are sure to help me out.
Cheers, Chris
My pleasure Chris, come again
R.
great site great people , good luck guys
Ya looks good. Will give it try to make some $$$..
http://www.smartbloggerz.com
They might get sued for using other peoples data. Anyone?
Its a JOKE – scrapping data from other sites and making it available – is no business.
@David, thanks for your concerns about DoNanza legal issues and profit model
DoNanza is aggregating the data in order to expose freelancers to all of the potential jobs across the web and refer them to the sources of the data, this is what a search engine all about.
I’m sure you are familiar with some other search engines that are doing the same things on different verticals (travel, real-estates, jobs, etc.). The important issue is to make the process of finding relevant projects for freelancers much easier. In addition, this is only the beginning of the services we are going to offer to the huge global freelance community, so stay tuned!
Interesting idea, I guess. But I have to say that the jobs posted in my field were ridiculously low paying. Some weren’t even a tenth of what folks in my profession make per hour. Seems like some of the posters are trying to take advantage of the economy or don’t quite know what they’re looking for. I won’t go back to the Donanza site aggregator.
DoNanza search engine index all kind of online freelance jobs, some with low budget and some with high budget.
Try to use the budget filters (on the left pane of the result screen) to filter the budgets which are not suited for you.
Sounds like this post was outsourced. “…. on offer” is a sickeningly common phrase you’ll see in outsourced, low quality article writing.
idea of aggregation is good enough. With so many sites working on outsourced model , this looks good.
But the point is apart from ads how will the money be made. ?
Would they take a commission for every job secured through them ?
I do not think other sites would agree to that
it seems like it makes it much easier to do the search for freelance jobs. I am used to work with Odesk but this way I found lots of other options – good work.
But what happens when I want to submit a job? Do I need to open an account in every site seperatly? Is there a way to make it easier?
It does seem like it is just bargain hunting.
So what I think freelancers really need: a great site that lists jobs. There is something less than ideal about every single one out there, whether they send the work to you, get paid by the client and refuse to pay you if the client doesn’t pay, whether they don’t let freelancers see the bids against which they’re competing, whether they have no mechanism to ensure that you get paid, etc… As an aggregator, obviously, most of these concerns do not apply to DoNanza but there is room for all of these sites to grow and improve. I do see value in an aggregator site. It takes time to look for jobs on all of the sites and you don’t want to rely on a single site.
I will never understand the Techcrunch moral compass. TC is condescending and unfairly critical of anything that comes from what they deem to be an un-cool company (e.g., they relentlessly bashed Microsoft’s marketing campaign where money was donated to a food providing non-profit for each download of IE). Yet they are so often gushingly enthusiastic about companies that for whatever reason fall into the cool list. Take in point this glowing writeup of DoNanza, a company whose basic business model is to steal other companies data and to provide freelance listings of tech jobs at exploitative rates. (Yes–you can find 40,000 different gigs, if you are willing to work for $1/hr.) Just imagine how this article would have read if Microsoft had started DoNanza.
@jasons, DoNanza is the kind of services that can help people earning their living in such time of economic downturn, by exposing them to project they can do from home. the projects we aggregate published by thousands of companies and the budgets are not something that determined by us, its a free market. What we do provide is a filters that allow you to define your desired budget (in each economy the level is different) we just giving the picture you will decide what fit for you. If you think the service is not cool its probably true, for you, but believe me there are hundreds of thousands of people out there who looking for new options of earning money, and for them i think we cool enough. thanks.
I actually have no opinion about the “coolness” of your company, nor do I think that this should be relevant to any tech articles.
My post was to comment on how the “coolness” factor has a such a strong influence on what TC writes. Perhaps in the future DoNanza will list jobs that have non-exploitative rates, but for now I would challenge any competent, US-based professional to find a single job that is worth doing at the rate listed on your site. So despite your sites nice UI, it is not very useful. (TC completely fails to comment on the quality of the listings, but gushes over the UI sliders and Twitter support).
In contrast, I can go to Dice.com—a long-standing, unglamorous, but highly useful site–and find thousands of real contract tech jobs at industry competitive rates. Why didn’t TC make this comparison?
I think that you missunderstood the site,
The rate they give is the same rate which is published in the original site.
So your challenge means that no job in the world is worth doing in a crownsourcing way.
Well, from my knowledge this concept is just getting bigger and bigger so I can say easily that you’re just wrong.
And if you wish to get only jobs with good price you can just filter them in their site.
Are you from the people that just like to complain, without understanding on what?
Nice blog,
i went through your blog it is really awesome. i went through the different techniques of searching freelance job with your help. i really found your above information interesting and wonderful.
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Ugh, I hate seeing contests for anything related to design. Because the only person who makes out from that is the company running the contest. If you are a designer and you submit something for a contest you lose all rights associated with that piece. The ‘client’ now has an endless supply of useful pieces while we sit back and watch our hard work get torn apart. That and it is a really cheap way for a company to get around paying what they should for a piece that will be the face of their company.
Designers, please don’t submit items for stupid contests. It hurts the industry way more then it helps.
- g.design
I agree with you that contest is not something that fit for freelancers that are looking for sure compensation for their work, and you can omit all contests through our filters. we also think that contest are great opportunity for someone who do it for getting exposure / experience and not doing it for living. the facts show that the number of contests are dramatically increased, so it means that there are a lot of people who find it valuable.
I think the reason they are increasing in availability is because companies know they are able to get what they need without paying what they should. A majority of the contests are hopefully being done by graphic designers just out of school. Sure why not, because to them its a portfolio piece and money in their pocket, that is if they win. Unfortunately we are also in an age where everyone thinks they are a designer.
Guys, great job!
This site is really helpful!
I had to stay tuned to sooo many sites before, and
now we can easily find all the projects in a single place, with all the relevant information, and fast!
Congrats on the lunch, and good luck,
Vitaliy F
@vitaliy, thanks for the compliments! we will continue to expend our service and make the process of finding valuable projects easier for you, stay tuned!
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NIce help. Thanks fir the post