Hire freelancers without becoming the bottleneck.
For owners and small teams handing work to a freelancer: what to hand over first, the brief to send, who to pick, and how to accept the result so it keeps working after they leave. Written from doing it, including the parts that broke.
Latest guides
All guidesDo you own the project files and raw footage from your video editor?
You paid for the edit, but the project file, the added assets and the music licence are often not part of the delivery. What to ask for, and how to check it before you approve.
Writing the briefMy chatbot gives outdated answers: what to hand a freelancer
When a chatbot quotes old prices or retired policies, the fix is rarely the model. Where stale answers come from, and the brief that keeps it in sync.
Before you hireHow much a YouTube video editor costs per video, and what moves the price
What a YouTube or Shorts editor charges per video on Fiverr, the seven things that move the price, and how to get a fair per-video rate for a weekly batch.
Before you hireHow much does it cost to fix a vibe-coded app?
What buyers pay to have an app built with Lovable, Bolt, Cursor or Claude Code fixed, why quotes split into small fixes and large projects, and how to scope yours.
Writing the briefHiring someone to build a chatbot that answers in several languages
A chatbot that speaks several languages fails in quieter ways than one that speaks one. What to put in the brief, which languages to test, and how to accept it before launch.
Writing the briefHiring someone to build a scheduled web scraper: frequency, output, and the day the site changes
A scraper that runs every week is a small piece of infrastructure, not a file. What to specify: how often, where the data lands, and who fixes it when the site changes.
From the field
All field notesWhat broke in the automations I run myself, and what I now put in every brief.
The API said my posts failed. All five were live, and the retries kept going
A publishing API returned errors, my job logged five failures and retried, but every post was already live. Why the error lied and what the job checks now.
Field notes · September 2026My automated image layout kept putting speech bubbles over the character
An automated comic-panel layout kept placing speech bubbles on top of the character. Why it happened, and the pixel-overlap check that fixed it.
Field notes · August 2026An update restarted my computer, every night job skipped, and the watchdog skipped with them
Windows Update restarted the machine at 1 a.m. and nobody logged in. Three overnight jobs and the morning watchdog meant to catch them were all skipped.
Basics
All basics- What are aspect ratios and safe zones?The aspect ratio is the shape of the video frame (9:16 is tall, 16:9 is wide); the safe zone is the part of that frame the app does not cover with its own buttons, caption and username.
- Who pays for the music in my videos?A music licence is written permission to use a track in a video, and it belongs to a specific person, channel or use, so the question is never just whether the song is royalty-free but whose licence covers your video, on which platform, for what kind of use.
- What are proxies, and why does a scraper need them?A proxy is a go-between computer that sends your scraper's requests to a website under its own internet address, so the site sees the proxy's address instead of the scraper's.
- What are escrow and milestone payments?Escrow means you pay the platform first and it holds the money until you approve the delivery; milestones split one project into several smaller payments, each released after its own approval.
- What are TAM, SAM and SOM, and what is bottom-up market sizing?TAM, SAM and SOM are three nested sizes of your market, from everyone who could ever buy to the part you can realistically win, and bottom-up sizing builds them from customers you can count times what each one pays you.
- What is a three-statement financial model?A three-statement financial model is a spreadsheet where your profit and loss, your cash flow and your balance sheet are linked, so changing one assumption updates all three and they always agree.
First time hiring?
Start here- Step 1 · Before you hireDeciding what to hand over first and whether it is worth outsourcing at all.
- Step 2 · Writing the briefTurning a vague wish into a brief a freelancer can quote and build from.
- Step 3 · Choosing tools and peopleComparing approaches and reading a seller profile before you order.
- Step 4 · Acceptance and handoverTesting what you received, owning the accounts, and pricing maintenance.
Hire by job
All jobsFor each job: the usual price, a brief to paste, and the sellers we checked.