Hello,

I'm in the middle of building a website with one other friend. We are both programmers, and have little-to-zero experience on the marketing/user acquisition side of growing a startup.

I wanted to ask if any 2p2er had ever used Odesk/Elance/etc to hire someone to help with user acquisition, growth, marketing, SEO, community management, content management (basically all non-programming related items).

* If you have hired a freelancer for marketing, how were your results?
* Did you see drastic improvements in growth?
* Did they fulfill the deliverables required?
* What did you look for when you hired someone?

I ask this because we can't afford any crazy expensive agencies, and there seems to be decent priced freelancers on Odesk. Also, if anyone had a really positive experience, and would like to PM me their reference, I'd truly appreciate it.

Thanks!

Read carefully what they're offering and how that is going to help you.

A billion fake likes/followers and a billion **** links is still worth next to nothing. They generally "deliver" on outdated and fundamentally flawed metrics.

If you can find someone who can get me legit links on PR4+ sites or company mentions on 2nd rate - but legitimate - news site articles, post up. But that sort of stuff is not cheap or easy. I haven't seen it on freelancing sites.

In 2014, good "SEO" is basically public relations. Quality content -> quality links -> increased rankings/subs/readership/etc. And it will never be cheap or easy.

I've had good experience with hiring freelance developers from oDesk (and by contrast bad luck with elance). But the one time I tried to hire for SEO I found nothing but shady people promising the world who obviously were just doing scummy blackhat stuff. They're relatively good at selling themselves though, so I'd tread carefully...

Sounds like you guys need a 3rd co-founder. Look for somebody with a strong track record in a related business. You have a very good bargaining position (2 devs) and can afford to be picky.

You might post on Quora with something like 'we are two developers and are looking for a marketing cofounder with a strong track record, how could we find somebody' etc and use your real name and give a link to your product. Then if you guys are legit, I would imagine people will be falling all over themselves to work with you.

And if your knee jerk reply is 'i don't want somebody stealing our idea' - what you have to gain in finding a great 3rd member of your team greatly outweighs whatever negligible risk there is of somebody running off with your idea (which isn't something you should worry about anyway).

Good luck