That looks really interesting, thanks. I’d love to hear more about your experience with this kind of service. Are there non-obvious pitfalls? Was the work quality good?
The only real mistake I made was trying to over-invest in planning for it. I dithered around trying to make a perfect screencast video showing how to use our web-based data entry tool, etc, write perfect decision notes, etc. This was all a waste of time. It would’ve been better to just jump in sooner.
You’ll meet a lot of people who can’t do what you want, and as soon as you post a project you’ll get a lot of bid-spam. One trick I had was to make the instructions on how to bid slightly non-trivial. We had 2,000 documents to get done, and didn’t want to give it all to one person. So I instructed bidders to bid for a number of documents and a price per document. This meant that if someone posted “I will do it for $100”, their bid was meaningless, and they could be excluded from consideration.
That looks really interesting, thanks. I’d love to hear more about your experience with this kind of service. Are there non-obvious pitfalls? Was the work quality good?
The only real mistake I made was trying to over-invest in planning for it. I dithered around trying to make a perfect screencast video showing how to use our web-based data entry tool, etc, write perfect decision notes, etc. This was all a waste of time. It would’ve been better to just jump in sooner.
You’ll meet a lot of people who can’t do what you want, and as soon as you post a project you’ll get a lot of bid-spam. One trick I had was to make the instructions on how to bid slightly non-trivial. We had 2,000 documents to get done, and didn’t want to give it all to one person. So I instructed bidders to bid for a number of documents and a price per document. This meant that if someone posted “I will do it for $100”, their bid was meaningless, and they could be excluded from consideration.
Very useful, thanks. :)