Freelancing is generally about doing things that are billable. A team of two people who can perform billable work works well when one of the two likes sales. A pure salesperson is the wrong scale for one person with billable skills. Again this is freelance/consult/contract. It’s not a high growth startup. One grows linearly the other geometrically.

Platforms for freelancing operate in the economic where successful sales are not worth doing in house. They connect clients with tiny budgets to freelancers who are so bad at selling that the tiny budget is attractive. EverythingForFiveBucks.com doesn’t spin up a lot of multimillion dollar multi-year projects. That’s the kind of scale where full time sales might make sense.

Furthermore, the further you get from "I will build you a website for $X with these features" and the closer you get to strategic advice, high-value troubleshooting, etc., the harder it is for a sales person to go off and sign a deal with minimal involvement on your part.

At some scale, administrative assistance/client service is helpful, but in my experience dedicated sales for consulting at small scale often doesn't have a huge amount of value.

Most of the ones I've seen subcontract you out in one fashion or another, so they're constantly taking a cut of your billing (or... you're getting a cut of their billing). I don't recall seeing a 'service' that is just warm, qualified leads where you do the rest. They may exist, but I can't recall any, and I'd bet I know why. The qualifying/warm part is where you get to some degree of trust between two parties - for them to explicitly turn around and sell that to someone else they don't really know - it can potentially damage their brand. If they need to get to 'know' you as well (vetting/testing/etc), there's little reason for them to give up either end of that relationship - they're in control at that point.

To me, the main reason is nobody has a big pipeline of good shovel ready projects. Or rather anyone with such a pipeline would be better off keeping those projects in house instead of leaving money on the table for a freelancer. The hard part is selling. Doing the work is fungible.

And here I was thinking that math and physics were the most important subjects in school. Now you are telling me that sales is even more important? Why don't they teach it?

As someone who absolutely hates sales, I'd be happy with a service that takes, say, 10% of my income but takes care of all the sales issues.

If you’re ok with 10% fees, you’ll do well to get an App Store like 30%. And if 30% fees drives off half the freelancers so what?

Freelancing and product development are two different things.

Also, getting an app in an App store requires a high-risk investment.

Further, I wouldn't want to support Apple's developer-unfriendly ecosystem.

Rent extraction is only one thing however.

find a subcontracting firm, and get in there. I've worked with a couple, and while they don't tell me what they bill me out at, in one case I was pretty sure there was a 20% buffer they'd built in. I suspect in other cases it's probably more like 25-30% - you'll get billed out at $100/hr, but they'll pay you $70/hr. But in those cases you don't own the relationship, nor necessarily have much visibility in to the business relationship. You're just a pair of hands at that point.