When I left the 70-employee consulting firm I had co-founded, I was starting from zero again.
No pipeline.
No brand.
No safety net.
So I applied to Toptal — and was accepted.
I already knew of both Toptal and Upwork, but once I actually worked through them, I realized they serve very different purposes.
That difference ended up mattering a lot.
Toptal vs Upwork (from the inside)
Upwork is an open marketplace.
Anyone can join. Clients post jobs. Freelancers bid. There is constant price competition, and a huge range of quality on both sides. You can absolutely build a business on Upwork — but it tends to reward volume, speed, and responsiveness more than depth.
Toptal is curated.
They screen aggressively. They reject most applicants. They position themselves as a network of senior practitioners rather than a marketplace of freelancers.
The practical effect of that is:
- Clients come expecting to pay for experience
- Engagements are usually longer-term
- The work is usually more ambiguous and strategic
- You're not competing on price — you're competing on fit
On Upwork, you sell yourself.
On Toptal, the platform does most of the selling for you — and your job is to perform once you're placed.
That difference alone changes the entire dynamic.
The kind of work I did on Toptal
On Toptal, I was placed primarily in the Project Manager / Program Manager vertical. My engagements were less about writing code and more about making complex initiatives actually move.
Some of the projects I worked on included:
Program Manager for a large analytics platform, where I managed a portfolio of initiatives across a globally distributed team in the U.S., India, and the Czech Republic.
Technical Project Manager for Yara International (the world's largest fertilizer company), helping build an internal knowledge and analytics platform using graph databases.
Product Manager for Agoro Carbon Alliance — a carbon credits startup backed by Yara International and IBM — where I worked on global sales enablement systems, Salesforce customization, funnel analytics, and event-driven architectures to support a complex carbon-sequestration business.
More specifically:
- I managed the global sales enablement product suite.
- Designed and implemented Salesforce workflows for multiple regions.
- Built analytics around customer journeys and funnel performance.
- Worked on digital marketing, lead generation, and sales performance tooling.
- Collaborated with McKinsey's venture builder on go-to-market, analytics, and operational strategy.
I also worked on extending Salesforce to support multiple locales (India, Spain, Brazil, Russia, the U.S., and the EU), and on building systems to support not just internal sales teams but also channel partners and their sales organizations.
Technical Project Manager on a financial analysis and planning implementation using Anaplan.
And a number of other projects that don't fit neatly into a single category.
They were all interesting.
They were all challenging.
They all paid well.
And over the course of about two years, that work added up to roughly $500,000 USD in revenue.