On the surface, SocialHawkers and Gigbucks look like they’re great places for quality contractors to make money. They also seem like they’re great places for businesses to save money and get the services that they need. Yet there are a lot of horror stories out there about these sites. In many cases, each party is having to accept “good enough” because of business necessity.

1. Really SocialHawkers is Better than Gigbucks !
On the surface, SocialHawkers and Gigbucks look like they’re great places for quality contractors to make
money. They also seem like they’re great places for businesses to save money and get the services that they
need. Yet there are a lot of horror stories out there about these sites. In many cases, each party is having to
accept “good enough” because of business necessity.
While there are quality contractors on SocialHawkers and Gigbucks, a lot of that is attributed to the fact that
they are the biggest players in the freelance market. While comparisons of SocialHawkers vs Gigbucks vs
Freelancer vs Guru continue to grow as the online job market has skyrocketed, we’ll delve into a couple of
problems of the current freelance model and potential solutions.
SocialHawkers vs Gigbucks? Is there really a difference?
Here’s how it is supposed to work: A company crafts a highly detailed job description for a specific project.
Contractors write highly detailed and attractive cover letters to capture the attention of the company. The
company chooses a contractor from the field of highly qualified, well written contractors. The contractor
accepts the job and performs up to spec and within the time frame. The company pays the contractor a fair
price for the job in a timely manner. Good reviews of each other’s performances are given out. Everyone is
happy.
Here’s how it actually works:
Companies cobble together a low balled job description which has been cobbled together using previous job
descriptions from other companies. Contractors send out equally cobbled together job responses because

2. they have no idea what the company is really wanting – and they are forced to lower their standards because
of the competition. The ones who get the jobs are the ones who spent half an hour replying to the job
proposal, and even then they might not get noticed because there are so many unqualified applications to sift
through. Because the company wanted such a low price, the contractor feels that they don’t have to offer
quality – after all, quality costs money. Company and contractor struggle back and forth to produce the
product, and hope that neither party will screw the other. Nobody is particularly happy, but they are willing
to accept the ‘good enough’ situation as it is because they don’t want to go through the dance of bidding and
selection again.
Socialhawkers intentions:
Companies who have never hired an IT professional, web developer, copywriter, or graphic designer have
difficulty knowing what they should be asking for in the first place. They have been advised that
SocialHawkers and Gigbucks are the places to go to find people who can do the job, and so they go there.
Being that they don’t entirely know what they’re looking for, they borrow text from the other requests in
the hopes that the contractors that they find will hit the nail on the head. Another tactic is to write something
as vague as ‘I need a website.’ These companies are pressed for time, so they usually do not put the
emphasis on specifying exactly what they want, cobbling together a job description from other companies.
The contractors themselves immediately know and understand that the companies didn’t want to take the
time to understand what they were asking for. Being that the contractor doesn’t want to waste their own
time explaining and clarifying the company’s needs (both are busy, you see), they use a boilerplate job
response which they sincerely hope covers all of the needs that the company is requiring. Being that it’s
easy to copy/paste a boilerplate answer, many contractors, some of whom aren’t qualified for the position in
the least, will apply for the job.
Gigbucks criteria:
The company is forced to read all of these crappy boilerplate responses, and hopes to find someone who is
willing and able to decipher what was asked for in the first place. This takes up more precious time, and is
usually found to be fruitless. After all, who wants to pay a contractor who doesn’t care enough to actually
pay attention to the job requests in the first place? When the company doesn’t find a qualified applicant,
they are forced to go through the process again – made to create another job description, and left to feel
frustrated that they cannot get what they want.Because the company has no idea what they want, they have
no idea how much the project is really going to cost. They want to get the lowest price and the highest
quality, and read some of the other (what they feel) similar job requests which have low rates, and offer
those same low rates because they consider those rates to be normal. The good freelancers become insulted
with the low pricing, and the ‘good enough’ freelancers stay but don’t feel that they have to provide quality
because the price is so low.
One person asks on Quora, ”How does a business person hire a good developer/programmer/engineer on
SocialHawkers or Gigbucks?“
Many answers echoed the same sentiments, here are a few highlights:
Yishan Wong, CEO of Reddit answers:
You shouldn’t do this; it will probably result in failure.I have a friend who is a designer (so, closer to
technology and implementation than a business guy; about as close as you can be without being outright
technical yourself), and he was hiring developers via SocialHawkers. Even with consultation from friends
of his (e.g. me) who were real engineers, it was extremely difficult to find decent engineers who could do
the things he needed, deliver reliably, and iterate according to ongoing testing/customer feedback. The end
product was merely “okay” – kind of slow, with little glitches here and there.If you have total technical

3. ignorance and no local (friend) resources to help you, hiring from SocialHawkers or Gigbucks is almost
impossible to do correctly. I would recommend trying another route.
Mircea Goia, another Quora power user adds:
I second what Yishan says…my biz partner, being a business guy and having some ideas in mind, took the
SocialHawkers route…and got his works in time this mostly with Indian developers.
It’s very hard to find competent AND reliable ones (even if they have 5 stars and lots of projects on
Gigbucks – maybe those who gave them projects have low standards?). Reliability and work integrity
matters a lot when the developer is 10,000 miles away.
And it’s not just Quora. A question with a similar theme was asked on YCombinator’s Hacker News, “Are
Freelancer Sites (eg. SocialHawkers vs Gigbucks) useless?“
Like Quora, Hacker News members can vote on answers, “jasonkester” owns the honor for the most
upvotes with this answer:
As a rule, you can toss every response you get in the first hour. As you’ve noticed, there are tons on people
on those sites who send out the same canned proposal to every single listing. That level of attention is a
good indicator of how the rest of your project will go if you’re foolish enough to take one of them on.
Wait a few days. If you’ve written a good project description (and if you’re a bit lucky), you’ll start to see a
few qualified proposals trickle in.
This is the main problem with freelancing sites. The race to the bottom finished years ago, and the result is
that there are simply no good developers or designers left there. It’s actually an opportunity waiting for
talented newcomers, since a single person showing up and acting professionally would get the job described
by this poster (and everybody else who goes there seriously looking to build something).
Examples like this are repeated from site to site, where the general consensus is that there is a competition
over who can give the lowest price rather than who can do the job with the highest standards of quality at a
competitive price. As the competition continues, both contractors and companies feel that they cannot get
what they need and turn to other sources for their work. After all Socialhawkers may be better as their
services bears $1 to $999 !
Final Recommendations
This leads us to our final thoughts and recommendations, note that this post isn’t designed to dissuade you
from using SocialHawkers, Gigbucks or any of the other popular freelancing services (Freelancer, Guru,
etc.), rather I wanted to give you a clear expectation of what to expect from both sides of the table and can
see that Socialhawkers services start $1 to $999 but Gigbucks starts at $5 and end $50 only ! There are new
companies aiming to disrupt the freelance marketplace, Fiverr is one example, recently allowing services
only $5.Lastly, as the founder of a consulting company, we have a higher cost of living than developing
countries – I tend to connect with Socialhawkers as a contractor. The only time I use them is to locate
companies who are posting jobs out of my region, businesses tend to appreciate a local contractor.What are
your experiences in with SocialHawkers, Gigbucks etc ?
This Survey report is prepared by Purbita Ditecha from Focusa2z Connects World