Thanks Kamulegeya! I’m happy that you found the article helpful for you!

Thank you Nina! Happy you found them inspiring!

Thanks! Glad you enjoy them!

You could add CodeControl.io as a great alternative as well. I myself am part of the community of freelancer and see first-hand the quality of the work CodeControl is providing through its community of talented freelancers.

It’s very similar to Toptal with a rigorous vetting process where only 2% of the applicants get selected.

But the key differentiators are :
– They are Berlin based with the german quality in heart.
– They match talent’s profiles with the companies within 1-3 days.
– All profiles apply voluntarily for the project so they are very motivated.
– The price is a no brainer considering the quality of the talents and the speed of recruitment

I strongly recommend checking them out.

Thank you Igor!

Thanks Bryan. Yes — these are proven methodologies.

My pleasure, Jennifer. I’m happy you found it helpful.

Thank you for the kind words, Michael! My pleasure.

Thanks Normann! Nice article you wrote. Cold email, display advertising, and guest blogging are indeed 3 great lead generation activities for startups. Thanks for sharing.

Thank you Aaron!

Here are 3 working lead generation techniques for startups:
https://digitalmind.guru/how-to-get-leads-for-startups-3-effective-techniques/

Hint: 3 best techniques DON’T contain SEO, PPC, or SMM

We’re happy to share your site!

Thanks for commenting Vishaka. I understand where you’re coming from. Posting daily is still recommended so you can keep your audience engaged and be on the top of their minds. While the Facebook algorithm is indeed designed so that when people don’t interact then the posts will go down in organic reach, it’s still important to show that consistency and show your face.

While posting high-quality content is important, it doesn’t need to be original.
– You can copy and paste high-quality text from an article you found and tag other people in your post to get more engagement.
– You can ask your audience questions to spur engagement.
– You can use polls to find out what type of content your audience might engage with more.
– You can even post links to external blog posts of awesome content you found and say why you liked it so much to give your audience some insight.

Either way, you’re providing value to your audience, and that’s the goal.

So in this case, less doesn’t equal more. The idea behind posting high-quality content less often rather than a higher quantity of medium to low-quality content is more geared towards publishing actual content.

Does that make sense to you?

Wouldn’t it be better to post only high quality content, even if you post it twice a week?

Thanks for your suggestion, Peter! Much appreciated. I noticed that there weren’t any requests from startups on there for beta testing. Maybe that will change soon.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts and experiences using these freelance websites, Ronald!

I have one “project” that’s turning into a startup and I’ve tried many of these remote engineering firms for it — Toptal, Crew, Andela, Upwork, Remote.com, Hubstaff Talent etc.

The other answers here are absolutely correct that Toptal and Andela are in their own league compared to Upwork and Freelancer.com. The latter have no filter, and yes you will waste your time hiring people from there because while some quality candidates do exist, they are a needle in the haystack and in all likelihood you won’t meet them.

When I hired from Toptal, I knew I had to put down at least 80/hr to hire a good candidate which I was prepared to do. I got a fairly decent engineer from Eastern Europe who was very good at React and Django, the technologies I was hiring for. He helped me build the dashboard for the telemedicine platform I am working on (still not yet launched), and I was impressed by his responsiveness. The experience was way better than wasting my time with Upwork.

The main strengths over traditional “Upworky” options were:

responsiveness
code quality
commit frequency
inclusion of tests in code when I requested them
codebase file structure
familiarity with CI/Devops
communication (I prefer 100% slack with daily check ins, this style worked well for me.)
But as any entrepreneur, I am always trying to get the best bang for buck and also am always trying to attract as much high quality remote talent to my company as possible so I started researching Toptal competitors. I came across Crew and Andela but they seemed no different from Toptal. I later came across this fairly small company started by this Stanford grad I met at a networking event in Mountain View. At first I was hesitant, but the company Learning Dollars gave me 10 hours of free engineering. I thought it was a bit too good to be true that I don’t have to put down money before hiring an engineer, but it turned out to be legit. I got to try out a couple engineers and saw how they gel with my style and needs before I made any commitments — one of the two engineers I worked with gelled. I got matched with a pretty good Django dev and he currently works with our Toptal dev — they are together pushing out a new version of our dashboard based on customer feedback every week. Learning Dollars is charging me 35 per hour for the developer, and Toptal 80 per hour. Both are good and I’m keeping both of them right now.

I think Toptal is great because of its vetting process which Upwork, Freelancer, and some of these traditional market places lack. They’re a pretty revolutionary company in this space for that reason. That being said, there are some interesting companies starting to compete with Toptal and offering free trials, and they have similar vetting processes in my opinion, so I would try those options out as well, especially if you don’t have to put much down.