HireWriters: A Freelance Marketplace for Writers

Project Background

While doing his business, our client, a talented engineer and entrepreneur, came across the problem of finding appropriate copywriters.

First of all, he noticed, that it’s really hard to sift out ashes from cinders and find a quality author. Besides, even if you have found an adequate one, talking the terms with him appears to be highly time-consuming.

That was how our client decided to create the most convenient content marketplace ever, which would accept for registration only well-skilled authors and, after that, would match customers only with those of registered writers, who offer quality level and price, relevant to the customer’s terms.

The client found Sibers by himself, sent us an e-mail, and after a 4-hour Skype conversation about the project, which took place in the very beginning of January, 2012, we started building the web application, lately named HireWriters.

Solution

Since the main competitive edge of the platform is the highest quality of authors it hosts, many tech hacks within it are focused on supporting this particular characteristic.

All the authors are prescreened since before being registered, — it is the opening line of the quality control process. At this stage, we check whether an author is a native English speaker or not. Based on the assumption that users from six countries: the US, UK, Australia, Canada, Singapore and New Zealand, — are natives, we primarily review, if the user’s IP belongs to one of these countries. If yes, we proceed to defining so-called proxy score — whether this IP is proxy or not. Technically the feature is implemented by integration with Maxmind API.

Once the IP is approved, the author passes online grammar test and writes an essay, which is then marked manually. A-a-and, great! Finally, from now on we have a pool of native English-speakers with good writing skills. Here the next question arises: how can we prevent scamping?

We’ve made it by integration with Copyscape API. The check on plagiarism is run before the article is visible to the client. If a writer attempts to submit unoriginal material, his account is automatically banned for life. Besides, the author’s plagiary score is stored in the system and an administrator sees it in the administrative panel.

Speaking about the system’s functionality in other aspects, it is written in PHP and consists of an administrative panel and two UIs for two types of users: clients and authors.

The workflow on the platform looks the following way. A client can post a job, requesting for any kind of written content, search for appropriate authors within the system (by keywords, industry, price or skill level), invite the one he likes and offer him a job. Once a customer became interested in some writer or had a conversation with him, he can make notes on this author, which will be visible above the author’s account when the client views it the next time. There is also an option for clients to have their job featured in the open job marketplace, which means it would appear above the rest of the jobs. Finally, if a client needs to have the job be finished within 6 hours, he can pay for it additional money with CC or PayPal. All the financial issues (primarily payment distribution across several shareholders — the site and the writer) are solved by integration with PayPal Adaptive Payments Service.

Tech highlights

• PHP
• MySQL
• Symfony
• jQuery
• ORM Doctrine
• AJAX
• Apache web-server
• Copyscape API
• ImageMagick
• JavaScript
• PayPal API

Results

Being the apple of our client's eye, the platform has still further paid off in spades and, as for today, it brings to our client considerable monthly income. And, since the client is a kind of person who is never going to stop, Sibers team continues to work on the project, gradually implementing the new features, the client regularly things up, maintaining and enhancing the platform.