The symptom
You posted a job. Now one of three things is happening:
- You're getting proposals, but they all read the same — generic, copy-pasted, no sign anyone read your actual brief.
- You're getting proposals from people who clearly can't do the work, alongside a couple of strong ones you can't tell apart from the noise.
- You're getting nothing at all.
None of these are bad luck. They're all symptoms of the same root cause: the job post isn't giving good Smiths enough to work with, so it can't filter out the bad ones either.
A vague post is a magnet for vague proposals. A specific one filters itself.
What's actually missing
1. You haven't said what "done" looks like
"Fix my app" and "Build me a dashboard" describe a destination, not a job. A strong Smith needs to know what changes when the work is finished — not just the topic area.
Compare:
❌ "My checkout is broken, please fix."
✅ "Stripe checkout returns a 500 error after payment on the confirmation page. Orders aren't showing as paid in the admin panel even when Stripe shows the charge succeeded. Need this working end-to-end — checkout completes, order marked paid, confirmation email sent."
The second version tells a Smith exactly what they're being asked to verify is true when they're done. That's the difference between a proposal that says "I can help with that" and one that says "this is likely a webhook signature mismatch — I'd check X, Y, Z first."
2. No budget or timeline signal
Leaving budget blank doesn't get you a better price — it gets you worse proposals. Experienced Smiths read "budget: open" as a signal to either skip the post or lowball a guess, and lowball guesses are the proposals most likely to turn into scope disputes later. A number (even a range) does two things: it filters out mismatched applicants before they apply, and it lets a serious Smith tell you immediately if the scope doesn't fit the budget — which is information you want before you hire, not after.
3. No way to tell who actually read the post
If your post doesn't require any engagement with the specifics, you can't tell a proposal that took two minutes from one that took twenty. Add one line that only makes sense if someone read the brief — "In your proposal, mention which part of this you'd tackle first" works better than any generic screening question, because it can't be copy-pasted from a template.
4. For AI-built apps specifically: "just fix it" hides the real scope
If this job is fixing something an AI tool (Bolt, Loveable, Replit, etc.) built for you, "just fix it" is a genuinely dangerous thing to post — not because Smiths won't try, but because AI-generated codebases don't have predictable scope the way a normal freelance brief does. What looks like "one broken button" can be one broken button, or it can be a symptom of a much larger architectural problem the AI tool never surfaced. State what's broken, what platform it was built on, and what you've already tried — that's the difference between a Smith quoting confidently and a Smith quoting defensively (padding the price because they don't know what they're walking into).
A before/after
Before:
Need help with my app. It has some bugs. Please reach out.
After:
Built on Bolt.new with Supabase. Two issues:
- Google OAuth redirects to a blank page instead of the dashboard after login.
- Row-level security seems misconfigured — users can see other users' data in the admin table.
Budget: $300–500. Need this fixed within the week. In your proposal, tell me which of these two you'd start with and why.
That post will get fewer proposals than the vague one. It will also get better ones — from Smiths who can already tell you something true about the problem before you've paid them a dollar.
Checklist before you post
- Does the post describe what changes when the job is done, not just the topic?
- Is there a budget number or range?
- Is there one detail that only makes sense to someone who read the whole post?
- If this is an AI-built app: platform named, what's broken named, what you've already tried named?
Post that, and let the quality of your proposals do the rest.