He's an outlier at best. Just search through the listings: the vast majority of them are extremely low paying jobs with vague or outlandish requirements.
This is most definitely true. Most aren't great. But I need to land a couple jobs a month and there are ~250 new a day in looking for US Devs only. Even at 1% thats 2-3 relevant decent jobs a day.
And when I last checked I get about a 40% response rate to proposals and ~25% of those convert to doing the project. I probably apply to about 20 jobs a month and each initial proposal takes 10 or so minutes. Which seems about right since they give you "proposal" credits each month and I've never run out. At the end of the day, I'm only spending a few hours on cold sales per month.
You want to be an outlier on sites like that. You need to be.
The median developer on a freelance site is correctly priced at $9/hr, and there are thousands of options at that price point. Your job is to signal that you are not one of them, and that you are capable of actually completing software projects. A $150/hr bill rate is a good way of doing that.
You want your client’s decision to be whether to hope for the best with one of those Lowball bids that inspire zero confidence, or whether to go with the expensive guy who will at least get the thing built.
Back when they were oDesk, I lived in a remote area with no technology jobs. I ended up working for oDesk for a 6 mo stint (Actually for oDesk not a third party). So I'm familiar with the ecosystem. I was just wondering if it was web dev or something more specialized.
I build websites and apps. Nothing crazy, but it can be a lot of fun working with lots of new people trying to better their business through tech or start something new.