Best Freelance Sites for Product Managers

In today's video .

I'm gonna be walking you through five of the best freelance websites that experienced product managers can use to go ahead and generate a secondary income stream .

I'm gonna be showing you the five biggest websites , which is number one up work .

We're gonna be talking about five .

We're gonna be talking about , we're gonna be talking about a team and then lastly , we're gonna go ahead and cover freelancer dot com .

You don't want to miss this .

Keep watching .

Welcome back , everybody .

My name is Rich .

I'm one of the co-founders here at product gym .

Your number one resource for everything related to product management , interviewing and product management .

Job hunting for the first freelance platform .

Let's go ahead and talk about the largest one first , which is upwork .

Now , upwork is a very interesting website just because it's got the most number of freelance contracts in general for people looking to freelance and for product managers , it's really just a haven for really , really awesome jobs .

Now , I'm gonna talk to you about those are the advantages , right ?

You have the highest quantity of product manager contracts or freelance contracts that are out there .

But you know , you know , the drawback is , you also have to understand how to use it .

And I would say another big drawback is they have such an abundance of contracts .

They can go out there and basically charge whatever fees that they want .

So if you take a look here , if you're unfamiliar with upwork , this is their general , just their search platform .

You can go ahead and search for whatever job it is that you want .

In the case of product management , you can go ahead and just look up product management and you'll see that there's 1000 a little bit over 1100 jobs .

And then you can also toggle whether or not you want to just keep it in the US or whether or not you want to go beyond that .

Obviously , if you want to go beyond the United States , there's other countries like uh Canada , there's other countries like the UK that offers very similar rates .

So is Europe and Australia , but there's obviously countries that offer lower rates .

Now , one of the drawbacks about uh utilizing upward is actually you're gonna notice here , there's gonna be something called , which is why we're doing the video this way is , are basically think of them as tokens that you need to pay for in order to go ahead and apply now because there's just so many freelance contracts on upwork upwork is charging you as the consultant to be able to use their platform now , some people have argued whether or not this is right or wrong .

I can tell you , I think back in 2020 they definitely weren't doing this .

They weren't really doing this in 2020 one .

This is something that's been very newly implemented , I think sometime around 2022 when there's really just been a flood of people coming in to upwork and leveraging it as you know , a very legitimate platform to get a secondary income stream .

Product managers happen to be one of the .

Now we're currently right now in the middle of 2023 the rates for connects constantly change .

So it could be a different rate .

But to give you guys just some context because I'm pretty sure this video is gonna be watched for a while .

Right now .

A lot of these jobs are require anywhere between 8 to 16 connects .

I think it can go as high as I would say , extreme cases one E connects .

So it's really like a divisible by four .

You see anywhere between , I would say like two connects , four connects .

You see sometimes six connects , eight connects .

I've seen 12 connects , 16 connects .

I think I've seen a few that are 20 connects as of right now .

I think the fee for a connect is anywhere between 8 to 12 cents or less .

If you buy these connects in bigger packages , which you absolutely can .

Uh obviously the price is lower , but here's the perspective that you guys have to have in the beginning of the year , which is 2023 it only took about 2 to 34 connects to apply to most jobs .

Right now , most jobs are requiring 8 to 16 connects .

And I largely suspect for the following reason , I largely suspect it's because there's just so much talent out there hitting up all of these different jobs that companies want to go ahead to make sure that instead of them filtering out like really , really bad talent and spending majority of their time filtering out people that are not good .

This is a good way to offset just not good appliers .

Like , hey , if you're just starting out , you don't know what you're doing or you're just randomly spamming as many jobs as possible .

I don't really want to go ahead and work with you .

I would much rather just go ahead and work with somebody that really knows what they're doing that's gonna go ahead and apply to us only if they know that they can take on this job .

So the pros of upwork is that there's a lot of contracts here .

A hack is utilizing something like searching for a very specific uh skis tabs such as like Air table Jira and all that .

You're gonna find an abundance of jobs .

Uh You're very targeted in your search .

The bad thing is this market is getting more saturated and one of the ways that we know that is that it's costing applicants , it's cost , it's costing product managers a lot more money to go out there and apply for each , each of these individual postings .

So I would still say that it's something that you should leverage , but you should never throw all of your eggs in one basket .

The next one that we have will be here is gonna be fiver which I also think is a very interesting platform to go ahead and utilize .

But I think fiver offers like a very different problem , a very different challenge for product managers .

It's because with fiver , you can't really go to the clients .

This is more of a marketplace for employers .

So you have to have a very , very well optimized profile and you're waiting for people to come to you , even if you have an extremely well optimized profile .

I think this platform is very challenging for product managers to go ahead and get a start with upwork .

I mean , as long as you're willing to go ahead and pay , right , you can go ahead and leverage upwork and you can look up things like mirrors zap confluence , road maps , product vision , user stories , wire framing customer personas , uh user personas , right ?

Product design .

There's just so many skills out there that honestly if you're willing to pay to play , there's an abundance of contracts for you to be able to go ahead and reach out to and you only need the average contract size for product managers on upwork is about anywhere between , from , from our data is about 1500 or $3000 if you know how to negotiate your rates properly .

So the most you're gonna have to spend on connects really is at most 50 bucks and that one contract is gonna go ahead and wipe out the $50 that you spent going out there and applying for it .

And if you understand how to leverage like remote virtual assistants to give them scale on this and chat , which is something our side hustle program teaches , then you know , the math really makes sense with fiver .

I think it takes a little bit longer because you're waiting for the deal flow to come to you .

So I don't know how well you scale that .

Obviously these are people who are not product managers , but when you have more than like 1000 reviews , I think , and you have five star ratings , I think it makes it easier for people to reach out to you because you're just so well liked or like you're just so high ranked .

But , you know , I still think upward really wins against fiver because you have to pay to play .

But like you have control , you can choose to pay to play right with fiver .

That's not even the choice .

Now , next off , we can go out there and talk about .

Top , top is a very interesting one because top to offers you , the highest paying contracts and top toll is really cool because the , they're guaranteeing to the company , we have the top 3% of the freelance talent , which I honestly believe that they do .

But at , and at the same time , I believe that they offer the top 3% of the people that are hiring out there because this is where you're gonna be getting the 10 15 20 $30,000 fees .

The drawback with is that their application process is very long .

I've had some people approved within 3 to 4 weeks .

I've had some people have to wait 3 to 4 months .

In fact , I almost feel like they do so much to try to make sure that you wait it out just because they have such strong inventory of companies that are looking for talent that they don't necessarily need to let you in .

They can actually wait as long as they want before they let you in the door .

So something for you to consider is that , you know , I think this is a really good long term strategy , but if you're looking to try to start making money within the next two weeks to is not it .

So what I would really recommend is for people to go ahead , try to get as much outreach done within reason and be very strategic about how they want to go about upward .

Have your fiver profile up , get in the wait list for top toll , but still make upward your main hub .

Now , moving on from that , there's a team , a team is also very similar to top , but they're definitely more tech focused , which I like top till if you go ahead and take a look at it .

In terms of like the talent that they offer here , it's very much geared towards like tech , but there's also a lot of finance experts on here , product managers are right , pretty low .

So in terms of top to a team , I think they're definitely a lot more tech focused .

But same thing if you request access , you're also hopping on a wait list and there's no real uh I've had some people approved within about 3 to 7 weeks trying to join on a team .

But again , you can't really bank on a team in terms of controlling your income , even if you did at 18 and you netted those huge contracts .

Something that you really have to like keep in mind is this ?

So they give you a $20,000 contract and let's just say that you're good and you're gonna ask me like , what do these contracts entail ?

It can entail anything , right ?

You don't know what's the lead time between first contract completed to the next contract that that's even gonna get accepted .

So still you gotta leverage up work .

Lastly though I think another really cool one is freelancer dot com , which operates a very similar lead to upwork the advantage here is they actually give people like way better fees for the employer .

The fee structure is a lot better , but at the same time , it's also a pay to play platform , right ?

So if you wanna get on a monthly plan , it basically lets you go ahead and uh you get a certain amount of bids .

So before a lot of these freelancer platforms where you can go after the client , uh didn't charge you a fee to contact these people .

They only really took a fee off of the transaction when it was completed .

So if I'm a graphic designer and I'm bidding up 30 graphic design contracts , the truth is like , hey , if I didn't get any of them , I used to not make money .

But at the same time , let's just say out of 30 people that one client hires one person up work or these freelancer platforms are really only just making money off of that one completed transaction .

They're thinking to themselves like , actually , why don't we make money off of the other 29 people that applied ?

But they didn't get the job .

So , you know , all in all if you want to go ahead and ask me , like which platform should you go ahead and , and focus on my best advice is to look at investing your time the same way as investing your money , you got to go ahead and leverage all of them because the truth is they all have their pros and cons .

But if it was me , I would definitely prioritize up work .

First .

I would go ahead and prioritize freelancer dot com .

Second five or third .

I'd make 18 , number four .

I'd probably make top till fifth just because their screening process is so long .

But I would have to go ahead and have a third game plan of life .

How do I wanna go ahead and allocate my time on each platform ?

Probably the your best resource is upward because upward and freelancer dot com gives you control over how much freelancing you want to do the other platforms , you're waiting for the business to come to you and there's really nothing that you can do to increase your deal flow no matter how well you optimize your profile , no matter how nice your photo looks , no matter how well you write your copy , it makes a little bit of a difference .

But like , you know , you have a better chance of converting .

If you have some degree of contact with the other customer or potential customer , if you don't even get a chance to go ahead and interact with them , you have no chance .

In fact , you don't even know that they're looking at your face .

So with that said , leverage all five platforms .

If you guys wanna learn more , there is a link to a free training , how we show experienced product managers , how to double up their income in the next 90 days with that said , my name is Rich .

I'm of the co-founders here at gym .

And uh if you have any , if you have any thoughts , comments or feedback , in terms of what it is that I can clarify or another video that we can produce for y'all .

Let me know .

But until next time I look forward to speaking with you very , very soon .