Website Review: Guru.com
March 19, 2007 | Comments (7) | Filed under: Reviews
When it comes to freelancing, Guru.com is the self proclaimed world’s largest marketplace for freelance talent. If you’re a programmer, hardware administrator, lawyer, graphic design, web developer, writer, fashion designer, accountant, salesman, or business consultant, Guru is a place where you can go, register for an account, and apply for open jobs in many different fields. About a year ago, Bookmark Bliss registered with Guru with the goal of expanding our reach in terms of landing programming contracts. Guru seemed to have a lot of contracts listed daily, so we figured it was worthwhile to test it out.
Unfortunately, the site is not as good as it may seem at first glance. In our experience, Guru.com is almost entirely populated by what we like to call “empty contracts.” What that means is that while the job may seem like one you have a chance at picking up, most of the time the potential employer doesn’t have any intention of actually awarding the contract. Almost every listing is either designed to get a free estimate on what something would cost or to get an idea of what type of person you need to hire to do the work.
To make matters more interesting, Guru actually charges a fairly hefty fee if you want to really compete in its online marketplace. There are several different levels of freelance contractor, Basic, Guru, and Guru Vendor. Each level has various restrictions on it. For example, a basic user can submit only 10 proposals per month while a Guru user can submit 100. For a yearly Guru account, the fee is $199.95 and for a Guru Vendor account it’s $259.94. Obviously, the higher you go up the bracket the more they hype your proposals. In our experience, the free account is virtually useless at Guru and carries a sort of stigma amongst employers as being inferior in quality to the vendors. You practically are forced to upgrade to at least Guru if you want a chance at any contracts. According to Guru, Basic members create more than 20% of the invoices at Guru.com, so this might be more of an isolated situation with us or perhaps limited to the sections we applied in. In our experience, the number of free invoices was much lower than 20%.
In the just over 6 months we were paid Guru members, we submitted many, many proposals (on average 10 per week, with just a 2 man team). Of these proposals, we had less than 10% of them actually get awarded to ANYBODY and of those 10% only 2 expressed an interest in awarding the contract specifically to us. The one proposal we did get, the company actually used Guru’s convoluted system for sending invoices and accepting projects to cheat us out of $100 dollars in work. So, all in all we invested almost $200 and came out with nothing except the loss of hundreds of hours of proposal writing time.
Guru.com has two really major problems that make it a pretty bad environment for small business freelancers. The first is that anyone can submit a proposal and has absolutely zero responsibility to even follow up after the initial post. Every proposal we submitted was several pages in length (2-5) and when the employer does not hire anyone for a project, the time taken to apply is totally wasted. One proposal we submitted was for someone interested in building online software for designing custom boat docks. They liked our proposal, and followed up asking if we could do a quick image mockup of our idea. We did, and the person never responded again. Basically, they used our excitement of the project to illicit a free design with no intention of awarding the project to anyone. Suffice it to say, we learned a good lesson that day.
The second big issue with Guru is that it has a very complicated Escrow and invoicing system that has so many steps that it is easy to get completely lost with what needs to be done. We were awarded a very small contract for $100 dollars and we completed the work, submitted an invoice, talked to the company over the phone, and submitted the completed project work to them. Unfortunately, we had failed to notice a very hidden requirement for Guru to completely commit to a project, which allowed the employer to take our work without paying leaving us no recourse to follow up. This was a huge fortune 500 company, but I will keep the name out of this document since it was Guru’s fault more then it was theirs. Basically, we were awarded the project, we submitted an invoice, we contacted the employer and submitted a formal project proposal, we did all the work and met every deadline on the proposal, and we submitted the work to them. The only thing we didn’t do was get a second acceptance of the proposal in Guru’s system, instead we got it over the phone. Because of this, the employer had the ability to completely walk away from the project despite a month of effort and work on our part. In the end they got everything for free, and we got nothing, including no completed proposal in our profile which could have helped us land additional contracts.
Overall, we found Guru’s system to be difficult, and gives 100% of the power to employers and absolutely none to the freelancers. Their database is populated with “empty contracts” and the potential for work is not worth the subscription fee it takes to get it. I don’t recommend Guru for anyone interested in Freelance work, you’d have a much better chance going door to do then you do through their site, at least in the programming and web design fields.
If anyone else out there has had any experience with Guru, we’d love to hear about it. The site had a lot of promise, but in the end none of it pays off. If you’ve had a different experience, please let us know all about it.
UPDATES: Article was updated to include the actual official names of Guru packages, Basic, Guru, and Guru Vendor. Also, I have added a statistic sent to me by Guru on the number of Free account invoices that are sent through their site. This would give some indication as to how many contracts are awarded to non-paying members.
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I tried their basic membership and couldn’t find anything either. I tried different combinations of skills, etc. One search I did just as an experiment (because it isn’t my field), looking for jobs that were architecture related, appeared to turn up several jobs, but it turned out only Guru and Guru vendors could apply for them.
I’d be suspicious about that 20% statistic. It’d be interesting to know exactly what jobs those invoices were for.
You should name the fortune 500 company that didn’t pay you-I think it’s at least as much their fault as Guru’s-unless the company was required to walk away. If they weren’t required to, but were just entitled to, they should have had the decency to pay you.
Its a complete waste to work on guru, its a total waste. It never shows any of the bid prices made by other people(since its completely blind).
There are at least 20-50 bids for each project after a few days, and I don’t think these people get award any job to anyone.
Guru.com has to be more friendly to providers and be a little more cheap to them. They can start charging a bit to the buyers since they are the one to spend the main money on the site.
We’ve been working with other auction sites for two years now. Every one has produced results, from the occasional job to major contracts… except Guru.
Guru has been a complete waste of time and money for us. The site isn’t friendly to use, the lack of transparency disturbs me, and the fact that 10 proposals a day for the past month has not even stirred up communication with a potential lead concerns me.
On any other site, we’d be already working by now (and I’m including the crappy sites, too)
It’s expensive and not cost-effective. There has been zero return on investment and when our three-month Select subscription expires, we won’t be coming back to Guru. We’d rather burn our money than waste it.
I’m glad to see that there are plenty of reviews out there about the lack of quality for freelancers on Guru. Join my voice to the ranks.
I’m a copywriter — a good one who has worked on hundreds of projects locally. I just signed up as a Guru Vendor to check things out, and have bid on nearly 15 projects, but have not heard back from any “employers”.
My impression, unfortunately, is that the majority of the employers are either bottom fishing (those dudes in India work mighty cheap, ya know) or they’re listing projects just to see what going rates are.
It seems there are quite a few stay-at-home moms who took an English class or two who are willing to work for McDonalds-style wages as well as the overseas types working in third-world economies.
But, ya never know, maybe I’ll cover my fee at some point.
I agree with the sentiment of the article. The site seems like it could have a lot of promise.However,since they allow anyone to post as an employer that leads to a lot of empty real leads.
I’m not saying that the site can’t work for some people. But to me ,if you allow anyone to post as an employer than how can this be taken labeled as the biggest freelance website. Give me a break. I don’t see this site up and going in 10 years unless they revamp. Unless they use it as an engine for people to hire cheap labor in third world countries. Also I think they should charge employers to post to weed out some of the empty employer posts. Maybe like 5.00 a post or something like that. And if they award the project they can refund it. Even Ebay makes you pay for posting whether you sale or not.
I have another two months on my membership and after that I don’t see myself renewing. I am sure guru.com doesn’t care they already have my 74.95 for the subscription.