ROI in 48 Hours: How ProCrea Escaped Manual Outreach on Upwork
Paid Back in 2 Days: How ProCrea Reclaimed 4 Hours a Day on Upwork with GigRadar
ProCrea is a full-service engineering agency focused on B2B clients and technology startups in the instrumentation industry. They provide a full cycle of services—from idea to shipment—specializing in enclosures and mechanical components for high-tech products like IoT devices, consumer electronics, robotics, and small aviation.
Starting point
Before GigRadar, ProCrea’s founder ran sales himself—engineer mindset, careful process, fully manual execution. But their daily Upwork routine became too time-intensive to sustain at scale.
One proposal used to take 25–40 minutes. The daily plan was 10 proposals, which made it difficult to spend time on higher-level work like actual sales strategy and business development.
What they tried before
ProCrea didn’t start with GigRadar. They first did what many technical agencies do when they want to grow: they tested “external” lead-gen channels to reduce reliance on Upwork.
They hired a marketer and ran cold outreach through LinkedIn. It wasn’t a light experiment—Evgeny shared they invested €5,000, plus a lot of time and effort. But the output didn’t match the cost: only one $300 order came out of that push, which made the channel non-viable as a serious growth engine.
They also tested Crunchbase cold outreach, and it didn’t change the picture—same pattern: time-heavy, inconsistent, and not scalable for their team.
Meanwhile, one channel stayed predictable and aligned with their services: Upwork. That’s where demand already existed, where their B2B engineering offer made sense, and where they could get into real conversations—if they could remove the manual workload bottleneck.
Why GigRadar
ProCrea joined GigRadar in 2023, back when “AI everywhere” wasn’t the default. The motivation wasn’t hype—it was operational.
Evgeny’s core constraint was simple: he was both an engineer and the person responsible for sales volume. He wanted to scale bids without hiring a dedicated sales person, and without turning quality control into a black box. The problem was that their existing routine forced him into repetitive tasks every day.
That’s why Upwork-first automation fit their mindset: keep the main channel (Upwork), keep the process under control, but remove the parts that were draining founder time.
Implementation
Two shifts made the whole system click.
1) Automating proposal sending (removing the daily “volume pressure”)
Before GigRadar, Evgeny said one proposal took 25–40 minutes. And their daily target was around 10 proposals/day—which is an enormous time cost if the founder is the one pushing volume.
With GigRadar in place, the biggest operational change wasn’t “doing more” — it was stopping the manual sending loop. The system took over the repetitive execution layer, so the founder didn’t have to spend hours every day just to keep the pipeline moving.
This is where the main benefit showed up in real life:
“The main benefit is that I stopped sending offers manually and started fully focusing on the business.”
2) Profile optimization (unlocking inbound momentum)
The second shift wasn’t outbound at all—it was inbound. After profile optimization, Evgeny shared that they started receiving organic requests in ~1.5 weeks.
And the most telling part: later, ProCrea got so busy delivering client work that they paused active bidding for a while. They didn’t even respond to some inbound messages simply because they didn’t have capacity—yet the system and inbound interest kept going in the background.
So instead of “hunt every day or pipeline dies,” they moved to a more stable dynamic: automation keeps outreach running, and profile work increases the quality and volume of incoming opportunities.
Results
Over time, ProCrea’s outreach turned into a measurable system, not a daily founder chore.
- 4,070 proposals sent through GigRadar to date
- LRR: ~14–15% overall across scanners
- Some scanners performed higher (around 24%), while others were lower (around 14%) — which matches a real-world multi-scanner setup where performance varies by niche/filtering.
But the biggest “result” wasn’t only the numbers. It was the shift in how the agency operates day to day: more time for delivery, leadership, and growth decisions—instead of repetitive execution.
ROI
Their ROI calculation was founder-time-based, and that’s exactly why it was so fast.
Evgeny estimated that GigRadar freed up 3–4 hours every day. When you value those hours at a founder’s effective hourly rate, the payback becomes almost immediate.
“ROI — we paid it back in two days… it freed up 3–4 hours every day.”
In other words, the return didn’t depend on “maybe a future deal closes.” It came from reclaiming time that was already being spent—every single day—just to keep Upwork outreach alive.
Takeaway
ProCrea’s story is about making the channel that already works (Upwork) operationally sustainable. They tested other outbound paths, but the breakthrough came from removing manual load and turning Upwork bidding into an automated system—so leadership time could go into growth.
