Ask HN: Who are trustworthy contractors with low hourly rates to outsource to?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2853958

by jjets718 • 15 years ago

10 14 15 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Hi everyone,

I'm in high school and I'm working on a startup. Our team is looking for a trustworthy individual to outsource our coding work to for a prototype. This individual should also have a very reasonable hourly rate as we do not have too much capital to use. We're looking for either Ruby on Rails developers or Django developers. The name of my startup is Selfey. Let me know if you have anyone in mind! Thanks!

div• 15 years ago

What is stopping you from learning RoR or Django yourself ?

That would solve both your budget and trust problem.

If you absolutely can't implement your prototype yourself, try asking around in your high school if there are any hacker types out there. You'll see them often enough to build up trust and their rates should be reasonable.

jjets7186• 15 years ago

I am going to learn how to code. My problem is I want to get something built quickly, but we only have so much money. Thanks for your response!

cracell• 15 years ago

"Cheap, Fast, Good. Choose two" is a pretty true statement.

I did Rails contracting for several years for various startups and the biggest mistake I've seen over and over is startups relying on contractors solely for development. A contractor has no emotional investment in your product. Your huge downtime emergency is just another task to deal with for them. The bug that has your customers pissed off is just another task for them. And if you don't have any developer experience yourself you have no idea when they are lying to you or giving you the run around. Or how to even evaluate whether their rate of work is reasonable.

You don't want to put the livelihood of your company in someone's hands who the company succeeding or failing makes little difference too. There are always more contracts in the sea for them.

And as div suggested picking up RoR or Django yourself is probably a good route to go. It will take longer than outsourcing it but you'll end up in a much more stable place. The other route I would suggest would be a technical founder. But that's a hard thing to find.

Also a great bonus if you go the learn it yourself route and the startup ends up failing, you've learned a very valuable life skill (programming). And a job skill (RoR) that pays quite well.

jjets7186• 15 years ago

I will definitely learn how to code. Would you recommend doing tryruby.org and then moving on to Why's Poignant Guide?

joshuacc• 15 years ago

If you already have a decent grasp of programming basics, then Michael Hartl's Rails tutorial[1] is a good place to start. If you need more introduction to the basics, then Learn Ruby the Hard Way[2] may be better. Both of these are available for free on their respective websites.

[1] http://ruby.railstutorial.org/

[2] http://ruby.learncodethehardway.org/

patio11• 15 years ago

Hiya. I think that it's wonderful that you're showing initiative and trying to do something of significance while in high school. I am about to say a lot of discouraging things. It is not because I do not want you to succeed. It is because I don't want you to fail catastrophically.

That said: you're in direct competition with my customers for trustworthy Ruby on Rails developers. My customers will spend more money on their projects in the average month than you have spent on everything in your life. It is entirely possible that there exists a Rails developer charging $5 an hour somewhere who can successfully deliver projects. I wouldn't bet on that, but let's hypothetically stipulate that he exists, somewhere.

If he does, after he gets out of therapy for terminal self-esteem issues, he can raise his rates to $80 an hour and be swamped with takers right now. If you say "Hey, I have a tradition of bringing projects in on-time and on-budget and by the way I also speak English and respond to emails within a day", you will be mobbed like Justin Bieber at a Twilight convention. The market is on fire right now. Therefore, if you find a cheap Rails coder, he is broken somehow. It is possible he is broken in an "insufficient business skills" way and just undercharging, but it is far more likely that he is unskilled and unable to deliver projects, and no matter how little you pay him you will just be setting that money afire.

There are non-monetary considerations in working with people. I'm not saying this to discourage you, I'm just trying to send a quick message from reality prior to you being in charge of somebody's livelihood: the non-monetary considerations do not suggest working with you. You are inexperienced at managing projects. You don't know what you want. You have a name picked up for your startup but you don't have nearly sufficient plans ready to start coding it, and you don't appreciate how expensive generating that sort of documentation is. You have wildly unrealistic expectations about what you are about to get into. Good clients have high expected future values after the current project is over: even supposing you and your freelancer successfully build Selfey, which is vanishingly unlikely, the expected value of your custom is zero over the next five years. You also do not know yet the scariest thing about entrepreneurship, which is that even if I gave you a magic Selfey-spitting wand and you brought it into being tomorrow, you would probably still fail because making products is not the primary source of business success in our industry.

My suggestion: without damaging your current academic career, learn to code on the side. Even if you hypothetically eventually end up buying someone's time, you will become a much better customer very rapidly once you start to appreciate more of what you're asking.

jjets7186• 15 years ago

Hey! Thanks so much for responding! The first idea I ever had I ended up outsourcing the work, which was a big mistake. Part of the mistake was I did not validate my concept and idea with the people who I was targeting, and I ended up with a lot of code for something no one wanted to use. One of the best things I've learned after attending events like Startup Weekend is that validation of the idea is critical. We think we've found enough validation after talking with a number of businesses and their customers to go out and build this. Thank you again for the advice; I really appreciate completely honest feedback like this.

Sargis• 15 years ago

This advice should be shown to every kid in high school that's considering to pay someone to build his web start-up.

OP, I hope you realize that the costs to maintain the website will, in the long run, probably be a lot higher than the costs of building the initial website. My advice is the same: Learn to code. Your view of what makes a good start-up will change for the better after having built a few small websites of your own.

throwaway12121• 15 years ago

> he can raise his rates to $80 an hour and be swamped with takers right now.

I think it's late enough that I'm not diverting the thread here.

Any suggestions on how a developer can get himself noticed in this on-fire market? I'm competent, but nothing special by HN standards. Typical biz app type stuff that wouldn't impress anyone here. As far as I know I have no serious red flags: I have a modest portfolio of completed work, I'm friendly, responsive, etc.

My local economy is huddled up in turtle mode, there's not much going on locally. I find work sometimes from my personal network, and sometimes from Craiglist ("scrounging"). My former clients like me, but they rarely have any leads for new work.

(Note, I'm not actually a RoR developer. Looking for general advice. Also, I can't relocate, and I typically work remotely.)

I read comments like yours, and I think I must be missing something important. I know there are a lot of freelancers who have cracked the nut and have work coming to them. However, there's also a lot of other ones like me that can't seem to get any momentum going.

Any general advice for guys who'd like to be on fire, but somehow seem to be damp wood?

startupfounder• 15 years ago

Learn to code yourself.

If you are in high school you are between the ages of 14 and 18.

If you follow the Malcolm Gladwell theory of 10,000 hours/10 years of practice makes you an expert, then by the time you are 24-28 you will be an expert at hacking and the world will be your oyster, for reals.

Along the way you will learning by doing and building startups.

Don't waste the money to outsource.

Follow: http://krainboltgreene.heroku.com/log/2

Build the Selfey prototype yourself, this will do two things: 1) you won't have to pay a developer to do it for you and all the tools are free. 2) good developers will see your effort and will more likely be attracted to your project.

Do it and don't look back.

jjets7186• 15 years ago

With learning to code would you recommend going through tryruby.org and then doing Why's Poignant Guide? After doing these do you think I would be able to a prototype of Selfey? Thanks for responding!

SiliconAlley• 15 years ago

I had a friend asking me essentially the same question as the OP a week ago (I'm a professional iOS dev who also picks up a lot of loose ends in a production Django app for an established NY startup and have a couple pet Rails projects I work on on the weekends). Said friend had a product idea and was eager to invest a few thousand dollars into an MVP but does not have a programming background. He insisted on majority ownership and "just needed someone to build it". I told him that he needed to be more respectful of the fact that the product he wanted to sell was a PIECE OF SOFTWARE. Though a lot of people here will tell you about the importance of user acquisition, etc. the software in a software business cannot be regarded as secondary. My breakdown of his options I presented to him is below:

(1) solicit quotes -- if you get one that you can stomach from someone not in a third-world country, go with it, but I wouldn't be too hopeful.

(2) Consider partnering with a young and ambitious person with technical ability, and be prepared to give him at least 50% percent ownership in respect of his 100% authorship of the product that is at the core of your business.

(3) Do it your damn self. This is what I most strongly suggest and there's a massive community out there eager to give you assistance and encouragement. You could truly own the thing AND not be vulnerable to your technical co-founder/serf deciding he doesn't like you and wants to, say, expose all user data and get you sued and/or arrested.

Furthermore, it's very, very fun: (resources I pointed my friend to below. note: friend was interested in building an iPhone app) http://rubyonrails.org, https://www.djangoproject.com, etc. <--- for your backend http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/navigation/ <--- for your client (or, if your lazy, http://jquerymobile.com/) http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/ <--- for hosting http://git-scm.com/ <--- so you don't break shit http://www.gnu.org/s/bash/ in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Terminal or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xterm <--- so you learn shit

jjets7186• 15 years ago

I will definitely learn how to code so I can build out the prototype. Thanks for your response!

Ask HN: Who are trustworthy contractors with low hourly rates to outsource to?

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