1) Mainly personal thoughts combined with interviews with several early users.
2) There were couple of reasons. First, there is a huge amount of work that should be done to manually pick the best offering. Second, we feel like we need to keep a high bar for our gigs for it to be truly valuable and thus, promoted content didn't simply seem right.
3) We wanted to launch it as soon as possible to a) test the idea b) start helping people who feel need to solve this problem, so some features are yet in our roadmap. Right now we choose only totally remote offerings, but plan to expand to other categories and verticals if the service will prove itself useful.