In today’s freelance gig economy, manual bidding on platforms like Upwork can be frustratingly time-consuming and inefficient.
Freelancers and collaborative agencies known as Upwork agencies (teams of freelancers who work together under a shared business profile on the Upwork platform to pool their skills and resources to offer a broader range of services) often spend hours crafting personalised proposals for jobs that may never receive a response, leading to a poor return on effort.
Applicants are often competing against automated bidders or freelancers with higher platform rankings. The system favors speed and visibility, which manual bidding can’t reliably deliver.
Additionally, manual bidding doesn't scale well. Applicants are limited in how many quality proposals they can submit in a day, making it hard to test different approaches or improve based on performance. Over time, manual bidding often becomes a race to the bottom — on both time and pricing.
In response, Getmany is an AI-powered automation platform built specifically for Upwork agencies, helping them scale their outbound operations with far greater speed and precision.
Rather than manually browsing job listings and writing proposals, users can automate the entire process—from smart job filtering to customised proposal writing and even automated follow-ups.
I spoke to Kyrylo Kozak, co-founder and CEO at Getmany, to learn more. Born in Ukraine and now based in Portugal, Kozak is familiar with the challenge of applying for jobs on Upwork:
“I did that for 10 years. It takes so much time, and it’s extremely repetitive.
You have to write proposals, answer similar questions again and again, and scroll through irrelevant listings.
But we’re in the AI era now. You can tell a system exactly what you’re looking for, and how to respond, and let it handle that process for you.”
So they built Getmany to do just that. It helps freelancers and agencies find clients by automating the job application process.
Kozak detailed:
“You set up a filter that defines your ideal project — say, a startup from Getmany looking for a backend developer — and Getmany automatically writes and sends tailored proposals.
When someone replies, you take over and begin the real conversation. It saves a huge amount of time.”
At its core, Getmany acts as an AI co-pilot for agencies looking to win more freelance work with less repetitive effort.
Specifically, the platform uses LLMs to generate tailored proposals based on the job post, answer job-specific questions, and even send automated replies to client messages to keep conversations warm.
As a result agencies can apply to hundreds of jobs in the time it would usually take to manually apply to a handful.
Kozak explained that users do need to provide context—information about what they do, examples of work, etc.
“We can’t invent that for them. But we’ve invested a lot in educating our users on how to do this well.
We guide people in crafting prompts and storing background info in a local knowledge base, so that the proposals our system generates feel personal, relevant, and human-like. That’s how our clients stand out compared to people who just copy-paste prompts into ChatGPT and hope for the best.”
I was curious whether hiring companies still care about authenticity in cover letters? Or is it really just about getting to the interview?
Kozak believes that in most cases, short and clear wins.
“We encourage users to add just a single sentence that makes the message personal — like “Hey, we’ve done this five times before, here’s a link.” That can make a big difference.
Many hiring managers still think long, overly professional cover letters are more impressive. But the reality is, people don’t have time to read those anymore. We live in a TikTok-era attention span. Short, punchy messages perform better—and they feel more human too.”
Getmany started off working closely with Claude from Anthropic and also uses OpenAI. Initially, it attempted to build its own language models on top of open weights, such as LLaMA, but it wasn’t worth the trade-off.
Kozak explained:
“We look at job posts, platform activity, and we’ve built examples based on high-performing applications.
But here’s the thing, most people come to us with terrible cover letters. They’re either outdated or pulled from some blog post. So we provide templates and examples based on what actually works today.
Importantly, we don’t train our models on users’ personal data. We don’t reuse cover letters they’ve submitted to jobs. That would be weird—and a breach of trust.”
Getmany has been live for nearly two years, with over 100 agencies using it now—mainly small to mid-sized firms.
According to Kozak, initially, the most challenging part was convincing people that our system could deliver better results than a human employee.
“But once we landed those first 10 clients, everything changed. The Upwork agency world isn’t huge — maybe 7,000 active agencies globally. It’s a tight-knit community, and word spreads fast.”
Furthermore, what sets Getmany apart is its emphasis on genuine performance and seamless integration.
Agencies can monitor success rates, view detailed analytics, and integrate with tools like Slack, HubSpot, and Pipedrive. This results in better proposals that are targeted, tested, and optimized for response. In an increasingly competitive freelance economy, Getmany matters because it helps agencies spend less time hunting and more time delivering.
Looking ahead, the company is also planning on expanding into LinkedIn and email outreach in the future.. Kozak asserts, “It’s the same concept, automated, targeted outreach, but in new channels. That expansion will require investment.
“We bootstrapped everything so far, but to scale into new markets, we’ll be looking to raise funding.”
Lead image: Kyrylo Kozak, co-founder and CEO at Getmany. Photo: uncredited.
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