Data Wizardry on Contra: How I Turn Boring Numbers Into Gold

I'm a data nerd. There, I said it. I collect, clean, wash, and find uses for it like it's going out of style. For me, data is the lifeblood of any successful digital business - sales die without it, marketing wastes without it, and product fails without it. It's one of the hardest sales I have to make to brands, but the one they almost always need the most.

There's typically never anyone honed on the day-to-day business pulse, but there should be. (Or worse, they think they have someone, but they don't. coughmarketingcough)

Data isn't sexy. It's tough to present, tough to understand, and it has a nasty habit of distorting facts without meaning to. You might want 'data-driven' employees steering your ship, but chances are they just aren't smart enough, disciplined enough, or... boring enough (!!!) to do it.

But I am. (A nerd. But okay.)

Since we're on Contra.com right now, let's examine what's going on under the hood.

The Solution: Contra Hacking 101

I decided to take on Contra, the freelancing platform that's been making waves. Here's how I reversed it with a blend of engineering, KPI reversing and good ol' fashioned marketing knowhow.

My aim: To make it as a freelancer on this platform by any means neccessary.

My objective: To understand the opposition and what I was working against. Know thy enemy! (Or, as you'll read later, my soon-to-be collaborators).

I need as much data as possible about the people and jobs on this site so I can start making an informed decision about my strategy for finding work and rising as a top talent on Contra.

Enter Doug the engineer, and Doug the Growth Marketer.

Start with an in - Mine was Contra's sitemap. They've nicely bucketed all their user profiles by the date they were collected, so with a quick script, I could grab the profile URL of every freelancer (and not only...) on the site.

With some Puppeteer magic (I use Crawlee.dev and the Puppeteer wrapper exclusively now) I was able to grab what I needed and make a pretty comprehensive aggregate of what's going on at contra.com.

Any data publicly available makes a nice, friendly target, so I picked up what I could with a plan to start dissecting it later.

Having dumped it all into Excel, pivoting like a ballerina and mocking up a graph that'd make Contra's designers say 'oh look hey, that looks vaguely similar to our own UI! - "Branding", I proudly posted it in LinkedIn and tagged Contra for one of their trademark pat on the backs... after all, every good story needs a distribution method.

I missed this mark on this one though - probably because 'Hey I scraped your site and now here's my strategy to manipulate your users' isn't a great in. But I'm writing it for the users now, so you've missed your chance, Contra!

I spun up some automation magic to visit profiles, leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for curious freelancers to follow back to me. My first thought was that this was a brilliant idea to game my profile views—I'd appear in someone's list of accounts that definitely checked out their profile, and they'd reciprocate out of curiosity.

Turns out the percentage of Pro accounts with this feature rendered this idea dead-on-arrival - it worked to some extent, but it's going to be a slow burn.

Having dumped stats to Mongo (which turned out to be an excellent solution for this), I could set about querying the data to get some insights out!

Here's what I dug up from the digital mines of Contra - some helpful, some novel, some outright random that I'll include for fun.

Only 2.19% of profiles reply within 24 hours. Talk about an opportunity to shine!

A measly 7.3% of profiles are listed as Active. Update those case studies, people!

Framer vs Webflow? It's Brexit all over again - a 50.2% to 49.8% split.

Average Minimum Hourly Rate: $37.55. Time for a career change, anyone?

Just 0.7% of profiles list Ukrainian as a language. Слава Україні!

Are you a Muhammad, David, Daniel, or Sarah? Congrats, you're basic (at least on Contra). Of Doug's, I am one of fifteen on here. Hello!

Only 1.93% are 'Contra Pro'. Exclusive club or waste of cash? You decide.

Those working in Product have the highest minimum hourly rate at $49USD, followed by Business, Marketing, Audio, Design, Engineering, Social Media and Video pulling in last with $35USD. (As an engineer, how do I feel about that? Not great. As someone in Product, RevOps and Marketing? Slightly better)

Be faster than The Flash: Reply quickly, leaving 97% of the competition in the dust.

Keep it fresh: An active profile is like a billboard on the busiest highway.

Flaunt what your countless hours of practice and expertise gave you, and what it didn't: If that's a rare combo expert knowledge knowledge as a Head of Marketing turned AI & Automation Engineer with a sexy deep British accent, make it known. (See what I did there)

Ride the wave: Stay on top of trends like a pro surfer. Framer today, who knows what tomorrow?

Play the game: Only a small number are serious contenders. Be one of them.

Sounds obvious, right? But what about something more - that special, je ne ce quoi - the va-va-voom?

What if we sent an agent into the Contra world to deliver fresh leads directly to Slack as soon as they came in, complete with research on the customer, their needs, their focus for the year, their favourite color, the name of their first school, and their pet's favourite food?

Open up Puppeteer again (Its Chrome, but you control it with some scripts.)

Visit every single profile. Click the recommendations tab if they have it. Grab all the recommendations.

Visit all the Client profiles you can. Ping them over to Attio (A great CRM. Stop using Hubspot in 2024) or Clay.com

Refine that data so the faceless company and name become an email, a LinkedIn account, an LLM-generated summary of the company, its latest hires, the last 50 social posts, and all the negative comments on the app store for its hastily built app (an example I've used in the past).

Post those to Slack so we're top of the inbox, and top of mind. Lead with a hyper-relevant, laser-focused message showcasing your best, MOST RELEVANT work so it's a no-brainer to work with you.

Reach out! On Contra, obviously - We keep things on platform. But there's nothing to say a quick view on LinkedIn might nudge them our way.

Okay, it's not quite as straight forward as that - which is great for me, because I'd be out of a job if it were... but you get the point.

Data may not be sexy, but success sure is. This is how, in one day, I kickstarted a project to find success on Contra using the mongrel product, marketing and engineering skills I've developed over a long career in digital

If you don't have someone actively doing this type of work for you at scale (No, your SDRs don't count), then you need someone like me. Someone like me (the new cool term is GTM Engineer) can turn your business outreach up to eleven - that means more leads, faster closes, and less overheads.

It means working with talent fit for 2024, and leaving traditional marketing and sales careerists at the side in favour of engineers wanting to be closer to revenue.

Don't send marketers to do an engineers job, send Doug Silkstone instead.