Case study
How Graphfull turned auto-bidding into 43 Upwork contracts in eight months
A small Bucharest design agency runs its Upwork pipeline on Vollna: one auto-bidding setup per service line, an AI qualifier reading every matched job, and 3–7 new contracts every month.
Overview
Graphfull sells design work — branding, web design, ad creatives, email design, and presentations — and Upwork is a primary client channel. The catch with design jobs on Upwork: they get buried fast. Popular postings collect dozens of proposals within hours, and a two-person team can't watch five service categories around the clock.
The challenge
Bidding by hand, Graphfull got a reply on 4.7% of proposals. Speed was the problem: by the time someone spotted a good job and wrote a proposal, they were applicant #15 or later. Coverage was the other half — jobs posted overnight or on weekends were simply gone.
What changed
In October 2025 Graphfull moved bidding to Vollna. Instead of one generic pipeline, they built a dedicated auto-bidding setup per service line — each with its own job filter, its own proposal template, and its own daily limit. The AI Job Qualifier reads every matched job against their criteria before a single connect is spent.
Across those eight months the system read 12,494 matched jobs on the team's behalf — screening no two-person agency could do by hand — and spent connects only on the strongest of them.
How they run it
- Separate setups for branding, web design, ad creative, email design, and presentations — running 24/7.
- Each setup pairs its own job filter with its own proposal template, so a branding pitch never goes out on a web-design job.
- AI Job Qualifier on every setup; their flagship setups also use pre-screening, so borderline jobs go to the team for a quick approve/skip before the bid goes out.
Results
Bidding by hand, the team had a 4.7% reply rate. Auto-bidding delivered 8.7% and 43 contracts, at $19.22 in connects per client conversation. The volume matters as much as the rate: 300–380 proposals go out every month whether or not anyone is watching the feed, and 3–7 of them turn into contracts.
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