A matchmaking service for EA projects and EA volunteers / freelancers with a reputation system: At present, volunteers are underutilised because there’s no good way of knowing who is reliable. Freelancers are often chosen because they are “EA-aligned” when really some are either incompetent or grifters. There ought be some way of seeing how someone has performed on past work.
Templates already exist on-line for this exact type of marketplace. The only upfront cost would be in finding enough early adopters to give it a go. From there, it could take a small cut of freelance work and fund itself.
Interesting! Could you share one or two examples of the “Templates [that] already exist on-line for this exact type of marketplace”?
Since you’ve thought about it a bit already, I’d be interested if you have any thoughts on how long something like this would take to setup on technical/operational side to a high standard, excluding time spent “finding enough early adopters”.
(Also, I’m guessing this isn’t something you’re interested in doing yourself?)
No technical knowledge required, it’d just involve learning how to use “bubble”. The hard part is that no volunteer wants to be on a platform with few organisations and no organisation wants to be on a platform with few volunteers. [further reading]
Do I wanna make this?
I have no time. Ideal founder traits:
1. Well connected with EA orgs volunteers find attractive or volunteers EA orgs would find attractive. 2. Experience volunteering 3. A love of networking 4. Good at convincing EAs to do stuff.
Also just copying unedited a related rough note to self I made on my own list of potential entrepreneurial projects (but which I’m very unlikely to ever actually work on myself)
Impact-focused red-teaming, consultancy, and feedback marketplace
Problem I faced as a founder: Often making decisions where I would have loved external input but felt reluctant because I didn’t want to ask people for favours, and didn’t necessarily know who I could ask other than my personal network.
Solution: a platform like Fiverr or similar where people willing to give feedback and advice are listed with a description of their interests/background, their hourly rate, plus a bunch of tags (e.g. cause area, experience type) so that people can filter by types of role.
Probably take a % cut of the fees. E.g. Fiverr system: “Service fees are 5.5% of the purchase amount. For purchases under $100, an additional $3.00 small order fee will be applied.” Maybe also add some minimum amount, in case people want to list their services for free, e.g. we always charge minimum $1 per hour of service performed. (I think maybe we could get away with charging a lot higher rates than Fiverr though, like 10% or 20%. E.g. if someone is willing to pay $50 for 2 hours of review from someone, they’re probably willing to pay $60
Later could potentially expand into a broader freelancing type platform.
Misc idea: crowdsource ratings of how well the job was done by a bunch of different criteria, and encourage ACCURACY in the ratings. Batch the ratings in groups of 5 to help anonymise the source of the rating and thereby reduce embarassment for not giving wholly positive ratings.
Downside: Probably pretty small volumes of money. E.g. a person read-teaming a doc for 2 hours might only charge ~$50, of which we would get ~$5. So we’d need to achieve a really high usage volume for it to become financially self-sustaining and justify the time on the setup.
[I’m sharing partly because my “Misc idea” seems like it could help with the problem you highlight.]
A matchmaking service for EA projects and EA volunteers / freelancers with a reputation system: At present, volunteers are underutilised because there’s no good way of knowing who is reliable. Freelancers are often chosen because they are “EA-aligned” when really some are either incompetent or grifters. There ought be some way of seeing how someone has performed on past work.
Templates already exist on-line for this exact type of marketplace. The only upfront cost would be in finding enough early adopters to give it a go. From there, it could take a small cut of freelance work and fund itself.
Interesting! Could you share one or two examples of the “Templates [that] already exist on-line for this exact type of marketplace”?
Since you’ve thought about it a bit already, I’d be interested if you have any thoughts on how long something like this would take to setup on technical/operational side to a high standard, excluding time spent “finding enough early adopters”.
(Also, I’m guessing this isn’t something you’re interested in doing yourself?)
Example
https://upworkclone.bubbleapps.io/
Person specs
No technical knowledge required, it’d just involve learning how to use “bubble”. The hard part is that no volunteer wants to be on a platform with few organisations and no organisation wants to be on a platform with few volunteers. [further reading]
Do I wanna make this?
I have no time. Ideal founder traits:
1. Well connected with EA orgs volunteers find attractive or volunteers EA orgs would find attractive.
2. Experience volunteering
3. A love of networking
4. Good at convincing EAs to do stuff.
Also just copying unedited a related rough note to self I made on my own list of potential entrepreneurial projects (but which I’m very unlikely to ever actually work on myself)
[I’m sharing partly because my “Misc idea” seems like it could help with the problem you highlight.]
Is https://www.impactcolabs.com/ still active? They don’t have the feature with the reputation system, but at least it’s a start