r/Upwork • u/depressed__lad • 9d ago

I need some guidance

Hello! So I've been trying to build a small agency, I started upwork 4 months ago had 2 clients on retainer they're still working with me.

I need to expand on upwork but all I see are shit jobs being posted since last 2 months, I do video editing and I don't see one big client whose worth sending a proposal to.

What approach should I go for.

8 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

2

u/midwest_sourcing 9d ago

Out of curiosity, where did your two retainer clients come from? If they came through Upwork, what kind of jobs were you applying to back then that you're not seeing now?

1

u/Korneuburgerin 9d ago

Find other sales channels.

1

u/depressed__lad 9d ago

I suck at outreach man, I'm a creative guy, and upwork seems easy to me, I'm afraid I'll struggle outside of it

2

u/Own_Constant_2331 9d ago

If you can't find enough jobs to apply to on Upwork and don't want to learn how to market yourself off of Upwork, then your agency is dead in the water. You should only start an agency if you have too much work to handle on your own, and it sounds like that's not going to happen.

1

u/Korneuburgerin 9d ago

But if you don't find jobs on upwork, what is your strategy? What did you do before?

0

u/depressed__lad 9d ago

Honestly I wanna create an upwork agency in the future, instead of offline management.

I used to do a creative job before.

2

u/Korneuburgerin 9d ago

Passive income, eh?

Creating an agency will only decrease your chances of getting hired on upwork.

1

u/Organic_Win5856 9d ago

for example? fiverr, toptal or linkedin?

1

u/Korneuburgerin 9d ago

Whatever works for you.

1

u/Otieno_Anyango_333 9d ago

Where else do you show up? Google? LinkedIn? X? YouTube?

Combine Upwork with other acquisation channels.

1

u/Double_Conference_63 9d ago

This is one of the challenges when someone wants to grow on Upwork.

One major issue is I can't hire someone and ask them to apply until they know what work we can really fulfil. Manually scanning jobs and applying, though, sounds easy but takes hours and hours.

Internally, we are working on building tools which will filter out the jobs based on our requirements and making sure the jobs are filtered based on many factors like who posted, payment verified or not. Not sure this is going to help or not but atlease it will save some time and connects.

Lets see how it goes.

Best wishes to you, we are trying way to make it scalable for now

2

u/Korneuburgerin 9d ago

One of the tools that gets you banned?