wonderbread: Yeah, you should check out AWS, it's really cool.  I think other cloud infrastructure AWS competitors are going to have a difficult time because AWS really does provide a pretty reliable service at a good price with great APIs and a growing community around it.  It also really lends itself to amazon's model of selling tons of low margin stuff at scale by automating everything, something that a startup really can't compete with.

darbsllim: Thanks!  What's your twist?  I also thought a 99 Designs type site could be a great fit for bitcoin, looks like there's already a couple along the lines of auctions or craigslist, but still not a whole lot of activity on any of them.

Thought I'd pitch in here, I recently put up a site that does exactly what you're talking about (kind of an e-lance for bitcoin).  I've been getting a steady stream of user signups but there are no projects listed yet.  It went up yesterday, it's www.btcworker.com if anyone would care to check it out.  Also, really open to any feedback from the community as I think it could be a great way for a lot of people to make a living and earn bitcoin from non-mining related activity.  Also announced it in the projects section in its own post.

Yeah, I figured I might not be the only guy working on something like this, I think competition in all kinds of different "X for bitcoin" sites is going to heat up as more people hear about bitcoin and start using it... should be interesting/good for people to have a couple different options.

On setup, I used Django/Python to build the site, Postgres db, hosted on AWS so I can scale the system up pretty quickly if lots of people start using it, and a bit of jquery here and there.  Yeah, it's truly amazing how rails, django, et all have drastically reduced the time it takes to build and expand a site and yet seems like a lot of people are still building w/ PHP or trying to build auth systems from scratch.  You're a rails guy yourself?

Thanks!  Yeah, definitely has a couple smallish bugs to iron out and needs a lot of work in fleshing out certain features (feedback system for ex.)  Re: comments, yeah, point taken re: landing page copy, I think I should be able to add https pretty easily.

Re: tags, yeah, I really need to think about how I want to do that.  My issue with e-lance is they limit you to certain categories and has weird organization.  Was thinking a tagging system of some kind would be easiest way to classify projects, and thought this could extend to users as well where they will have to tag themselves with certain skills and they can actually give their background/message when they make a bid on a project.  Need to think this over, but certainly open to suggestions?

Re: lack of projects, definitely a problem at this point, if some people sign up I will try to find some jobs and subcontract them to at least get some stuff up.  Also need to consider proper way to notify people of stuff.  Best to just publish new jobs as rss feed?  weekly e-mails?

Yeah, definitely needs a lot of work, but I think it could be a really good way for a lot of people to make a living online and give a boost to the bitcoin economy.  Thanks for checking it out.

Hi everyone,

I spent the last week or so putting this site together as an elance type site for projects that pay in bitcoin.  I tried to make the interface as simple and user friendly as possible and think I solved some problems that really annoy me with elance.  Would love to hear everyone's thoughts on how I can make it better.

http://www.btcworker.com