I Reviewed Upwork Profiles for FREE (Here's What I Found)

And they're all making the exact same mistake. This one, 1,800 hours delivered, 100% job success score, 5-star reviews. Charges $52 an hour. Now the guy at the top of this exact niche, he charges $100 off a tenth of the hours. It's the same skill, same reviews. The entire difference, it's sat in one line at the top of the page. He posted his profile in my free school community this week and told me not to be gentle. It took me 4 seconds. 2 of them get the full review today, and I'm rattling through the rest on screen. At the end of this video, the one sentence that fixes every single one of these issues. But it starts with what you're hiding. Because I didn't ask for hypotheticals. I asked my community for the real thing. Actual profiles, actual proposals. The real job post sat next to the real applications. The receipts. And going through them, the same problem kept turning up. Different niches, different rates, different levels. People still chasing their first reply. And people with 50 grand in the bank. It's the same disease. Which tells you this isn't a skill problem and it isn't a level problem. I guarantee you that you're making this exact mistake because every valuable thing in this proposal is locked behind a door and the client has to knock before he finds out what's on the other side. This is Ziad's. Read it with me. Hi Mohammed, I've built this system before, but it's on steroids. I just made you a personalized Loom. Watch it here. Shoot me a message with a bit of context and I'll give you a full audit of exactly how we do this, which AI model, which content calendar we will use, how it will actually look on your screen. Ziad. He then goes on to say a few individual issues that he's facing. What do you think is wrong with that? Look at that project and relate it to your own applications, because I guarantee there are a lot of things correlating with it. He recorded a Loom. That's great. I tell everyone on this channel to record a Loom. It's still the single biggest edge that you've got, and most people, they still won't do it. But look where he's put the value, right? Those 3 bullet points there— the model, the calendar, the screen— that is the best part of the whole pitch, and none of it exists yet. It's a promise of something that the client gets after he messages Ziad with a bit of Context. He's asking a stranger to do homework to qualify for a thing that he hasn't made. Flip it. What happens if we flip it? Those bullets aren't what's coming; they're what's already in the loom. Hi, Mohammed. I recorded a 90-second loom. In it, you'll see the model that I'd use and why, how I'd structure the content calendar, and what this looks like on your screen on a Monday morning. Is this going live this week, or is it still in planning? Same effort, nothing held back, and it ends with a question that he can answer in four words. The Loom is the right move, but there's a version of it that wins and a version that gets closed after 8 seconds. The difference is not production quality. Before I answer Ziad's questions and go through some really interesting things that counteract the problems and mistakes that Ziad's making, if you want to join my free school community and have your profile, your proposals reviewed, it's in the description. Head there now. Because the thing is, most Looms are just a cover letter with a webcam attached to it. Your face talking about what you would do. That is not a Loom, or at least it's not what it should be. That's a proposal that you have read out loud. The Loom that wins it has one job: prove that you've already started. Not, here's how I would approach it. Show the thing partly built, or at least show their problem on their screen. 60 to 90 seconds, 3 parts every single time. The first 10 seconds is their asset. It's their website, their spreadsheet, their CRM open on your screen, or things that you've done in the industry or on the tool that matches it. Not your face, their actual stuff. That's the moment that they realize that you haven't just gone and blasted this to 40 proposals. You care about them, which is the biggest thing. The next 40 seconds, the specific thing. The break, here's where your lead is getting dropped. Or the build, a rough working version running in front of them. And the last 10 seconds is the easy question, same one from your proposal. Now let's go back to Ziad. So he wrote those 3 bullet points, the model, the calendar, what it looks like on screen. But that isn't a list of promises, mate. That's a storyboard. He's already written the Loom and then not recorded it. 20 minutes in any end gets a scrappy version of that running. Record it running. Now you're the only person out of the 40 who sent a working thing instead of a description of a working thing. Clients do not hire the best explanation. They hire the only person who actually started. That's his proposal. His second question is the one that I get more than anything else on this channel, and the answer is just arithmetic. So Ziad told me that he can't find enough jobs to apply to. Then he told me that he finds 3 good ones every couple of hours. Which one is it? You do the maths with me. 3 good jobs every 2 hours. That That equates to over an 8-hour day, 12 qualified jobs. He wants to send 10. He isn't short of the work. He's got more than he actually needs, and he's been calling it a shortage. And his filter is fine, by the way. There's nothing wrong with his individual filter. Posted in the last 8 hours, under 50 proposals, not costing him 80-odd connects to bid. Not everybody has the spending power, and I understand that. The client has spent money before. It's got a decent hire rate, I guess. It's not a huge volume. It's not something I'd aggressively go after, but it is sensible, and I wouldn't really change a thing on it. So why is he still tuning it then? Because tightening a filter is safe, right? It feels like work, it feels like progress, and it takes no courage. Nobody can reject a filter. Rewriting the proposal, that is the scary bit. That's the part where you find out. I hid there for years myself, and I doubt Ziad is even aware. Thousands of proposals in, and on the days that I didn't fancy rejection, I'd optimise my search instead. It felt productive, but it moved nothing. I got the dopamine hit. Because here's the actual maths. 12 qualified jobs a day isn't the number that changes his month. The number that changes his month is how many of those 12 come back. Nothing on the job finding side moves that. Every bit of it is in the message. And no, don't send 10 a day if you only found 6 good ones. Connects cost money. He knows that. It's in his own filter. A bad proposal isn't neutral. It costs you cash and it trains your hand to write very generic. Six great ones, ten okay ones every week of the year. That's the first review. Now the second one, I went and researched before I answered because I wanted to check I wasn't talking rubbish. By the way, everything on this screen came from one post in my free community, the Upwork Accelerator. The links below. Post your profile and the next one of these could be yours. This is Madhu and he asked me what made me wince first and I didn't make it past the headline. Go high level, Claude code, NAM make CRM instantly. Hey Reach Clay, it is. The Bible of AI tools. There's 7 of them to be precise, and it tells me what he owns, but it doesn't tell me what he fixes. I didn't just want to say that. Earlier on, I pulled up 3 live profiles in his exact niche this morning. Same skill, same platform, all 3 on 100% job success score, and they all had 5 stars. Now the bottom one, the title AI Agent Expert, NAN top rated, but business and marketing automation. 4 sections stuffed completely with tools and badges. 30 jobs delivered, $15 an hour. The middle one was Madhu, and that was 7 tools, 1,800 hours delivered, $52. And the top one, N8N workflow automation and no-code, low-code development. 6 words, no badge stuffing, no shopping list. 155 hours on the platform, $150 an hour. The more tools in the headline, the cheaper is the person. And look at the hours again, because that's the real story. Madhu has worked 11 times more than the guy charging double. That's not a rate problem. That's what happens when you get hired for hours instead of outcomes over and over for a year. Put a number on it. 1,800 hours at the gap between his rate and the top in his niche. That's about $85,000. He didn't lose that to bad work. He evidently knows what he's doing to make $50K on the platform. This is a bit of a North Star here, but he lost all of the other work to a headline. He could boost his open rate. He could boost his hire rate significantly. And this is the part that stings. You know, in the post that he sent me, Madhu wrote this. Most of my work is the jobs other automation people pass on. CRMs with no public API. I reverse engineer the request flow in DevTools and wrap it in an MCP server so it finally talks to everything else. That's the position. That's the whole thing. And it's nowhere on his profile. He wrote his headline by accident in a community post while asking me to find his headline. What does it become then? Because there's a wrong way to fix this too, and it can make it worse. It's the thing that most people do the second they hear stop listing tools. The wrong fix is to delete the keywords and write something that you think is clever. Don't, because you will vanish. Upwork is still search keyword themed, right? It still matches to the phrases, especially in the title. Clients filter by tool. If you strip out NAN, you've positioned yourself beautifully to an audience of nobody. That $100 guy that I mentioned earlier, on his profile he didn't delete the keyword. He kept NAN in there, but then he stopped. No badges, no 7-tool list, no expert stapled to the front. The structure is what you fix, and then The two or three keywords keep you findable. That's it. For Madhu, something like automation engineer, undocumented APIs and custom CRM integrations, N A N make go high level. You have to look at the character count there. But that's his role, the hard problem, three keywords. Nobody is competing in the middle section. Madhu knows it. That's why he's winning the projects. Thousands are competing for the shopping list, and that's the right answer too, because price isn't a number; it's a category. At fifty-two, he's priced as a N A N contractor, and that market only goes in one direction. As the person who does the integrations nobody else will touch, he's not in that market at all. Mechanically, it's simpler than most people make it. You don't put your rate up on your current clients. You put it up on the next one. The contracts already billing, they carry on. You don't want to ruffle too many feathers there. Win one job at the new number, then go back to the existing 3 with evidence instead of a request. And those 5 dormant contracts that he's sat on? Close them. Good review, clean exit. A contract that isn't billing isn't pipeline. It's a comfort blanket wrapped up, ready to Blow up like a firework when that client decides to close it. Ziad hid the value behind a message. Madhu hid it behind a tool list. Neither of them has a skill problem at all. They're actually exceptional. Right? Those were the 2 deep ones, but they weren't the only ones that got posted. I'm gonna give a quick pass on the rest, including the solution to the mistake that Ziad was making earlier that Madhu actually nails. So this here is an example of the job post for Madhu when he applies for a job, what he does. And this is the exact line of thinking that I need you guys to take. Hi there, I made a quick video for you. It could probably pull in the individual name of that person because I think he had it. I think it was Mo. So he has ways to improve it, but this is custom made for every client hosted on Vercel and has a specific framework. I don't particularly like the coloring. I don't particularly like the, the book a call button not standing out. However, the point still stands. This is somebody that understands the gate to winning projects on Upwork because this solves in part the issue with not having something custom built. If If you have something like this, it at least shows the client that you've made something for them. Personalize it more. Ensure that when you're looking at things like this, you know, hi there, I made a quick video, you know, then he has the individual Loom below. If we play this, I'll play it for you now.

First of all, thanks for clicking on this video. My name is Madhu. I read your job post and this is exactly the kind of work I do for a living. I also put together a Miro board specifically for your job post.

We'll get to that in a minute. That is a really good graph and it does help individual clients understand the flow of what you're trying to do. And that's why it ticks that box there. However, I don't think the start to that video was strong. I think you could be much, much faster. You've got to hook them to ensure that they watch the whole minute-long Loom, which is the right length of time. You don't really want to go over that.

And for your project, on the left, I mapped out how the process works today based on your post, and on the right, I broke down exactly how I'd build and automate it. I linked the board below.

So he's taken the client's problem and given them the solution in writing. So it's the basic step that you can take. Some of these AI projects in general, very, very heavy with workload. And when that happens, you've got to be careful with how much you build. The real trick is to have something built. If you're a specialist, this is why it works. If you're a specialist, people come to me for Google Ads management, for example. When they come to me, I have a list of case studies. I have a list of account build structures, data, understanding of things that I can share with that client in order to improve the likelihood that they're going to come on board. So I have things, even though it's not directly for them, that I can show them, which shows that I understand their business, feed optimization, campaign structure, all of this. That would be better for this video here. Madhu would be better off if he did that.

Below this video, so you can feel free to open it and take a look. And just so you know, this is a theoretical system and this is the real system I built for another client last week.

There you go. Madhu brings up that system, which is the closest thing that he's got. I don't know with the job briefs of what he has exactly where that is, but Madhu just basically solved the problem before it happened. He showed exactly what he would do, what the client had requested, and then he showcased an example of something similar to the job post that he'd built. So he did exactly what I told you to do there.

My approach is always the same. Get the data right. First, automate on the top of it. Test everything with real data and document it so your team can run it without depending on me. And you can check it on my Upwork. And I'm at Operator Plus with 100% job success score with 25 bills that are delivered. And if this looks like a right fit for you, reply here on Upwork or book a time below and we can talk this week.

I don't hate the outro. I don't hate it, but it isn't what you should be doing there. He starts to talk a lot about himself right at the end, which is the call to action. It's the most important part of a Loom video. At that point, ask them a question that's simple to answer that Is this or that? Can we speak today or tomorrow? What works best? That sort of question is open-ended, makes someone's brain want to respond, and gives them the opportunity to do so without having homework to do. They're booking a call, 20 minutes chat, it's very committal. You want that, but first you want them to respond. Now, Aaron had a really interesting question. This was posted in the community as well. And I'm in the interview phase, I'm going through this, the client is using AI, giving me crazy replies, and you decide They're asking for more and more. You decide that you want to quote them a little higher. What do you do? There's a 7-part milestone. He's quoted them $450. Basically, Aaron's answered his own question because in here he's looking at the actual approach from the client, understanding that it's going to be a difficult task to work with. What do you do? I've got a whole video on scope creep. It's in the description. You should go and check that out if you're having problems with this, because clients do try and move the goalposts. If you've produced a key element that can help you win the job, send it. That's my advice. Do not concede to clients all of the time. You look at clients' realistic expectations, and if they've got unrealistic expectations now, what do you think is going to happen by the time they get to 3, 4, 5, the steps in the milestone? It's going to continue. You want to set the boundary. These days, at my stage in my career, I just tell clients straight away, that's unrealistic. It's all in that Scope Creep video. I wouldn't lower the price as such. I think that we're in a situation here where you're competitive as it is. Push for what you've got, chase them, but honestly, do not allow scope creep to influence your decisions. Never ever take on a bad client regardless of how much the project is worth, because the more they pay, the more the bad review is going to impact your Upwork profile. Saying treat them mean, keep them keen has never been realer than it has been with an Upwork client. So do it. Ferdav's asked for his profile to be reviewed. He's competitive on price. Now when it comes down to his title, it's actually really strong. AI SaaS MVP developer built for paying users, Next.js AI agents. He gets the volume from this. This is what he does. If you're looking for a big project A minimum viable product is exactly where you should be targeting. The problems start from there. It's not even the content because this is a wall of text that hurts my eyes. It's too long. I can't read it. How we built it, what I build. Da da da da da da. He could condense this drastically, and that's exactly what you want to do. The stack, the how we start, the background, you know what to expect. It's a very, very long profile. I like your portfolio. I like the product catalog. I think when it comes down to this, you know, I I'm not sure that that price is the right way to go, and I think. A consultation in here somewhere or a project catalog, which is like an audit brief. You could put that in there for $5 and actually use it as inbound. And that is a really, really successful strategy for me and has been for years. Many Upworkers who I know, they win a lot of projects through that. You've got good development history, you've got a good background of people to see, you know, you've got a great GitHub link. That is all of this is strong for what you're trying to do, but you have to think what the client wants. What the client doesn't want is to read this and then have to read a wall of text in order to do it. The rate's low, decent for entry to win some, you know, first projects on Upwork or whatever. But for me, your work comes inside of here. Think about what job invitations you're getting. If it's none and you're not visible, you haven't got a lot to lose. You can change this and optimize for conversion rates. Focus on job applications. And finally, guys, Praneeth, and you're going to learn a lot from this because this is great. He gives me all of his Upwork stats. $114 spent on Upwork Connects, 51 proposals, 2 messages, 1 hire. His net earned, $23.31. He fumbled a bigger deal. Your main thing is the fumbling of a bigger deal. Why did you fumble that deal? When you're talking about fumbling a deal, if you're in a position where where you're getting large projects come to you and you lose them, then you very clearly would have earned significantly more than what you've invested. And you do all the right things— recording a custom Loom. So he's recording a custom Loom here. He's more than capable of delivering his services, so he's confident. And he spent a lot of time optimizing his profile, which I've looked at, and I think that that's, you know, is pretty strong. I don't think that there's major flaws inside of here. Like, he's got voice agents, browser automation, then the tools, everything we said. He's got the portfolios. I I think this condensed profile is, is good. I mean, hi, I'm Praneeth. I just do not like those generic intros. Nobody really cares, Praneeth. Like, honestly, you just need to tell them exactly what you do. You know, he's got this inside of here. It's a little bit generic. Maybe become more specialist with what you've written. But you've been applying for jobs, you did 51, you got hired, and you fumbled a bigger project. Focus on the fumbling of that bigger project, my friend, because you would have been extremely profitable if you'd actually gone through and taken care of it. And the takeaway for you guys on here is he $114 on connects, which isn't a lot of money in the Upwork ecosystem. I understand it's a lot of money. I know the value of a dollar. The problem is, is that Upwork is more competitive. I showed that when I did my challenge. If you haven't seen that video, check that out. That's in the description. I spent $3,000 on Upwork connects in a week and I'd put all the news, the results live. Basically what this is like a micro version of that. If he did another 51 and didn't fumble the bigger deal and he gets them on ongoing monthly retainers, which is the key, that's going to put him in a significantly stronger position moving forward and build up his client base until he's earning thousands of US dollars a month. So Praneet's lesson takeaway here for you is if he continues and does this, he gets messages, he gets hires, he's in a position where he can win projects. He needs to work on what he quotes. He needs to build up monthly recurring revenue, not one-off projects. You have to look at the lifetime value, my friend. You cannot look at what's happening now, and that is going to ultimately dictate where Praneet's success comes from on the platform. You've seen a deep dive on 2 freelancers in my community. You've seen an overview, a brief overview of other challenges, whether it be how to onboard a client, the interview phase, all that different stages. This is all happening inside of my community. If you want me to answer your queries, go through these. It's free in the description. If you're serious about Upwork, then go and check it out. If not, go and check out the— some of the free videos that I've listed below. The Scope Creep one from Aaron was a big one, and you're gonna hit it if you're successful on Upwork. You're gonna hit this more times than what you would like. Hit like, hit subscribe. More of this content is to come. Enjoy your weekend. I'll catch you later.