• Home
• » Reviews » My Experience With Guru.com

My Experience With Guru.com

Ah, Guru.com. A good source of freelancers and such.

As a web developer by trade, I started freelancing on Guru.com before I got interested in affiliate marketing. My run with Guru.com was interesting. I’d like to share my experience.

The start

I first signed up for Guru.com last summer. I put up the $149 or whatever it was to put myself into a better status with their site right off the bat. I thought “Wow, I should be able to make that back fairly quickly”.

Well, I made it back, but not necessarily through Guru.

I bid on tons of jobs. I got lead down lots of dead-ends by potential clients, spending way more time trying to answer there pre-bidding questions than actually working on anything. After a couple months I started to get pissed off at people posting jobs on Guru  ’cause it seemed they were just leading people on in their own search for the “perfect” developer that they were never going to find.

A good contact, finally

I did, however come very close to landing an actual project one day. But I didn’t get it since I wasn’t going to be available over a particular weekend, which was fine.

That one contact though, contacted me outside of Guru a few weeks later, since he was very impressed by my proposal.

I forged a relationship with this contact and worked on a couple quick projects to show off my development and communication skills. After working with this contact for a week or so I could tell this was going to get big.

A few months later, and I’m still working on lot’s of projects for this one contact. All outside of Guru.

My thoughts about Guru.com

I never did any projects through Guru at all, and found it to be a frustrating and demeaning experience overall. If you like to spend more time bidding on projects than working on projects, Guru might be for you, but it wasn’t for me. I think a lot of people that try to hire through Guru are looking for people that will work for $10/hr. Since I charge $50/hr I was being overlooked a lot, even though I probably would have been a great pick for any of the people who’s jobs I bid on.

I can also see how spending a lot of time to build a solid reputation on Guru might be worthwhile, but I think you’d have to whore yourself out for a period of time just to get to that point, which didn’t seem too appealing to me. I was looking for a situation where I could just focus on getting work done for somebody who needs quality, fast work – and not have to focus on finding work.

In the end

But, from this one contact that I made through Guru, I was able to recover the fees I had paid to Guru to be a member and also make a lot of money working with somebody that actually appreciated my skills and wasn’t just looking for the “perfect” 8-dollar-per-hour overseas programmer that they’ll never be able to find.

So – now that I look back on it, if I hadn’t signed up with Guru that day, I would never have made that particular contact. Interesting.

No related posts.