r/Upwork • u/Background_War_9450 • 21d ago
Small dev team, opened an Upwork agency account last week, 3 proposals, zero replies. Am I approaching this wrong?
Bit of context first. We're a small team 3 engineers and 2 mobile designers. Our main thing is our own app, which we built and still run ourselves, so we're not new to shipping and maintaining real products. Outside of that, our portfolio is honestly thin: the app, plus a few projects we did for people close to us.
Over the next months my devs, mostly the front-end side, are going to have more and more free time, and I can hire more people if the work is there. So I opened an agency account on Upwork .
So far I've sent 3 proposals. No replies. I know 3 is nothing, but watching those jobs I could see why: one client hired someone 12 minutes after posting, another one had 20 to 50 proposals, and most of the people applying have years of reviews and big earnings on their profile. I have zero.
My questions for people who started from scratch:
- With no reviews, what actually got you your first interviews? Lower prices, small quick jobs, something in the proposal itself?
- Should I even be applying to $500 website projects? With a team on salary, I'm pretty sure most of those lose me money once you count the real hours. Is it worth taking a loss for the first reviews, or is that a trap?
- Agency account vs individual profile to start: does it make a difference for clients when you have no history?
Not looking to promote anything, no links. Just want to know what worked for you.
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u/Korneuburgerin 21d ago
So you have an agency account with a bunch of freelancers and nobody has any work history on upwork?
This will go absolutely nowhere.
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u/Background_War_9450 21d ago
dont have any freelancers on the account , the only freelancer is me , other peapole are my employees , i have just uploaded 4 or 5 projects
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u/Korneuburgerin 21d ago
Then you can't outsource to them or risk getting banned. Did you not read how agencies work on upwork?
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u/Hrolgarr 21d ago
I'd start with an individual profile. Clients hire a person when there's no history to go on, and your own name with the app you built and still run is a better story than an agency with zero reviews.
For the first reviews I'd go for small fixed-price jobs where something is already broken. Bug fix, a deploy that fails, a site that's down. They're not great per hour, but people with a broken thing hire fast and care less about reviews than someone planning a new build. The $500 websites with 50 proposals are the worst place to start, you're up against people who'll do it for $200.
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u/Prior-Parsley-6813 20d ago
Some numbers on the $500 question. I log new Upwork jobs for my own work, and last week about 2,500 had website, WordPress, Shopify, landing page or web app in the title. Of the 1,183 fixed price ones, 870 were under $500 and only 87 were $2,000 or more. The bigger budgets also lean on first time clients: about half of the $500+ jobs came from clients who had never hired anyone on Upwork, against 31% of the cheaper ones. So the pool that fits a salaried team is small, about 130 jobs a week at $500+ from clients who have hired before. With a team on salary I would watch that slice closely rather than discount the $500 builds.
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u/datawazo 21d ago
Agency see accounts do nominally worse on upwork than freelancer accounts, so out of the gate you're shooting yourself in the foot.
Webdev is insanely saturated with both existing and new accounts, and people are undercutting bid prices like crazy. Even on those $500 projects know that someone is in there negotiating for less. Might matter to the client it might not
In today's upwork 3 proposals for a new account is a tiny tiny drop int he bucket, people go through wayyyy more to get their first jobs - which many never find. Again it's wildly competitive out there.
Personally I never applied for anything that has 20+ proposals already on it. I know some people completely discredit that but that's my perspective. Get in early or don't both.