[anovikov]

I'm within top 40 Upwork freelancers by lifetime revenue and at one point was #11. Directly and indirectly extracted around $15M there.

It's dead. Noting to look at. It's not AI or interest rates, as it seems, the very dream of "getting rich quick through building a software product being a complete outsider" has waned, and people are no longer trying. Of course, it never worked. But it made money.

[burnerToBetOut]

    > …the very dream of "getting
    > rich quick through building
    > a software product being a
    > complete outsider" has waned…

Then I guess I've completely misunderstood the raison d'être of the Y Combinators of the world.

[anovikov]

Y Combinator founders, and proper startup founders in general are not outsiders. They aren't, and never been, Upwork customers, and in fact every sane VC will reject a startup that uses any sort of outsourcing to build their offering, because they know that not just it doesn't work, can't possibly work, but the very idea of trying it shows that you don't know what you are doing and are thus uninvestable.

So i don't mean people like YC founders (i wouldn't even talk to one if i met them - surely there won't be money to make there). These are mostly, people from different spheres completely who just walked into money for some irrelevant reason and decided to start something online, out of random. For almost all of my clients, mine was their first, and last, software project ever.