30 pounds in 30 days

http://fullstack360.wordpress.com/2013/01/28/30-pounds-in-30-days/

by TheFullStack • 13 years ago

263 90 13 years ago

fullstack360.wordpress.com

Two developers working for 3 months feels more like 1.0 than MVP territory to me.

$60k is a lot of investment simply to test a concept, and would be a luxury out of the price range of most small businesses, let alone individual entrepreneurial subject matter experts who want to build a product - even really committed ones with money to spend.

Assuming you actually want to win the business, why not pitch a much smaller project to help them tease out some mockups and build 1 or 2 of the main application flows to MVP level?

This wins you the smaller engagement now with the likelihood of the bigger piece of work once the customer has been away and shown the concept to customers.

This is why I don't really like these $2k and $5k MVP packages that people are pitching on HN lately. Your iterations should start with mockups rather than an MVP.

kranner• 13 years ago

> Four weeks and $6,000? Sure, why not. IF I was shooting for a contract. Therein lies the key. I didn’t care what happened after each of those meetings. My plate is pretty full right now. My hunch is that the people who quoted much lower estimates and timeframes were shooting for the development work.

Apparently, OP is not particularly interested in getting the job. The point of this post isn't entirely clear to me.

recycleme• 13 years ago

His job was to consult and help guide the projects.

mbesto4• 13 years ago

> OP is not particularly interested in getting the job

It depends on what job you're referring to. A job that pays and keeps your profit margin and revenues consistent, or a job that could potentially end up costing you way more than you thought?

He's pointing out that many clients come to him with completely unrealistic views on developing, and yet are asking an expert (him) to advise him on how to properly develop something.

tudorizer3• 13 years ago

True. 3 months and two devs does sound like a pretty solid idea, beyond MVP. The problem could be on the client side who demands too much from a risky idea.

mbesto4• 13 years ago

I've tried it before...people don't simply want to pay for mockups and vendors don't want to waste time developing them for free (in the hope that they may win the business).

I think the OP rightfully addresses a deeper issue at stake here - "I have no vested interest in the outcomes of any of the projects and I wish them best of luck." Or perhaps more aptly put - stop trying to cater to these people, it's a waste of your time.

The world is full of people thinking that what people like Gates, Zuckerberg, etc. have accomplished is both simple and repeatable.

readme• 13 years ago

If you're willing to work more closely with your developers, and you're a cool person, you can skip wireframes altogether.

Ever build an app for yourself? Did you wireframe it? I bet you didn't.

seivan2• 13 years ago

For most iOS applications you don't necessarily need a designer and two developers. Trim the fat.

One developer is more than enough for most iOS applications that doesn't cross into games and physics.

You also don't need an "Mobile UX, UI, iOS designer expert" either. Just get a good developer that can do both, instead of mixing science with snake oil.

In the end, one guy to be the product owner, develop and design will be leaner, and far more better than involving more people.

Less is more.

robmcm3• 13 years ago

Less that can do more in less time is normally more expensive. Seperating out areas into design, front end and back end development also splits your risk.

seivan2• 13 years ago

Not true at all. You tie your risk into multiple factors that can go wrong.

It's easier to replace one entity with another, than several parts.

Knowing the SDK and design elements beats a designer that only knows design.

And the API consumer would probably develop a better API than some guy who generally doesn't consume most of his API for a living. That being said, that assumes the front-end guy also knows back-end. Rare, but exists. points to self

I generally dislike "Mobile UX, UI, IOS Design expert" if they can't code their design. Either for Cocoa or (S)CSS CS/JS depending on platform.

bguthrie• 13 years ago

Not necessarily. Yes, the comparative advantage of roles playing to their strengths can net you a lot of short-term gains, but you run a tremendous risk of getting stuck if one person quits or get hit by a bus, for example. Knowledge sharing via cross pollination of roles is a good risk mitigation strategy.

eloisant• 13 years ago

"Unfortunately, the developer used Phone Gap and when they needed to access more complicated native API’s in an upgrade, the developer couldn’t get past that barrier with the PhoneGap SDK"

The guy was not a good PhoneGap developer, you can write plugins to access any native API you need.

robmcm3• 13 years ago

"the developer couldn’t get past that barrier"

I guess you are right!

steverb• 13 years ago

Funny part is, THAT guy got the MVP done on time and under budget. It was only when they went for the next that the developer ran into trouble.

rhizome4• 13 years ago

It's a nice bit of sophistry the writer uses to blame the developer rather than the company. If your MVP becomes something you want to build upon, a "VP," then you get some staff or something and get serious. It's not the MVP dev's job to be the future source of code. They did their job, the company just tried to be lazy about it.

bricestacey• 13 years ago

Hybrid apps are prtty decent, but fall apart as the complexity grows. I'm working on integrating custom native video players into a hybrid app. It's not hard to extend features to your javascript SDK, but there is overhead and complexity communicating and syncing state with your javascript runtime, where you'd prefer most of the code to be. Native apps with webviews sprinkled here and there are great, but when native code sits as a second class citizen to html/js (like phonegap), it's a nightmare.

brudgers6• 13 years ago

"Every group I worked with in the past six months spent several orders of magnitude more than that [$60,000] on their iOS products"

$6,000,000. $60,000,000. But only if you act now. This is a limited time offer. Operators are standing by.

   Offer not valid in all areas. Certain
   restrictions apply. Shipping and handl-
   ing not included. Void where prohibited.
   Results may not be typical.

PanMan• 13 years ago

Exactly. While I'm sure there are apps that cost > 6 million (How much has Path spend sofar?), the "several orders of magnitude" seems highly overstated for an MVP.

loceng• 13 years ago

It all depends on how honest of a person you are, and if you're willing to take advantage of someone who might not know or perhaps not care how much they are spending. If you have a bigger budget, sure you can do a lot more experimentation - pay others to do experimentation and thinking for you, that is - but if you are good at building relationships to feel out honest people, have some direction yourself and are good at communicating it, then you can come out on the lower end of costs.

cncool• 13 years ago

He could mean base 2. So 60,000*2^2=240,000

brudgers6• 13 years ago

Base -2 would get us cleanly to the $15,000 project mentioned in the article. A sort of "Lose £30 in 30 days," approach.

However, I am not a mathematician. I don't know that base -2 complies with the laws of mathematics.

tudorizer3• 13 years ago

These type of clients smell like deja vu to me and the post is a good light education for these kind of clients.

For people who get shocked at 60K for a full stack solution: go with the devs from [insert any outsourcing country here] or with the friend and keep a journal of how things went. I'd be damn curious to read it... (even though I already know the outcome).

GFischer6• 13 years ago

Ok, when I start development of my app here in Uruguay I will :) .

My guess is that we will find the normal troubles of any other development project.

It's kind of cheating though, since I'll be here to supervise and collaborate, and that eases most of the communication problems.

VLM• 13 years ago

I'm most surprised the MVP effort can be so consistently estimated. It might be that the pool of "apps" is extremely shallow, so they're just reimplemention #1231 of "XYZ" therefore estimation is simple based on extensive past experience reimplenting #1230, #1229, etc. "fart app #2935315" takes just as long to MVP as doggcatcher or evernote?

Also a major problem I've experienced is trying to force what I consider the technical requirements for a MVP past the non-technical people barrier, I didn't see that in the discussion, maybe it was assumed. For example, in my opinion, at least some minimal backup strategy is part of the MVP, whereas the non-technical types just reply "well, if THE hard drive crashes, we'll just sue the hosting provider, my buddy is a lawyer so he'll work cheap" or "if it blows up, you'll just work 36 hours straight on salary to fix it, right, so don't waste money/time preventing it from blowing up or adding debugging code or monitoring code, just work on features for the PR checkboxes".

ajlburke2• 13 years ago

His quote does seem a bit high. In my experience (Rails and iOS developer) if your back end is mostly RESTful resources and a simple data structure, and your front end is standard iOS components like simple tableviews and a NavigationController, you can get an MVP done in the $5k-$10k range in a week or two.

HOWEVER: everybody has a different opinion of what is meant by "Minimum", "Viable", and "Product". $5k gets you only bog-standard UI components and a simple data model. Animations? Fancy graphics? Optimized performance? Search? Custom UI? Graceful error handling? Localization/Internationalization/Translation? Integrating with Facebook and dealing with their constant poorly-documented changes to their API? These tend to be little bullet points in the spec, but each on their own can take as much work as the MVP does.

With modern tools it's pretty easy to build a basic version of an app quite quickly. But it turns out that most people don't actually want a basic version. Often they have to see the basic version first to realize that, though.

So the question ends up being: how important is schedule/cost to you compared with details/performance?

To be honest, though, most people who come to me wanting a simple iOS app are better off with a mobile-optimized webapp instead. Much quicker to build, already cross-platform, and no deployment delays while waiting for App Store approval. Mobile apps might not be as sexy as a native app, but saving lots of money is also pretty sexy.

wardb• 13 years ago

Reading you comment reminds me of the costs vs. investment discussion. If the app will not make you any money it's probably an slightly expensive hobby. From a business perspective it makes a lot of sense to spend 100k USD if expect to earn it back tenfold. It's not about efficiency, but about effectiveness. It's about understanding the user goals and solve them in the best way possible. Not in the cheapest way possible.

zavulon• 13 years ago

> His quote does seem a bit high. In my experience (Rails and iOS developer) ..., you can get an MVP done in the $5k-$10k range in a week or two.

That's because your experience is limited to development only. There's a lot more steps involved in making a successful app or a site. Brand identity, architecture, UX design (mockups/wireframes), and UI design are all steps that have to be done BEFORE development even starts. The cost of that can be 20-30K by itself.

There's also the cost of QA on different platforms, system analysis, professional copy, etc. So yeah, his quote is actually on a low end.

Too many people seem to think that they can get away with hiring a developer only.. then they wonder why their app/site doesn't do as well as they wanted it to.

Source: I run a web/mobile development agency.

ajlburke2• 13 years ago

Sure - although the amount of upfront work required varies with your definition of "Minimum" and "Viable".

I've done full-cycle apps with branding, architecture, UX, QA, promotion, etc. and yes they start at $30k - but they're finished polished products, while the discussion here seems to be about MVPs.

As I said above, the biggest conflicts I see between developers and clients are over the meanings of "Minimum" "Viable" and "Product".

MatthewPhillips• 13 years ago

Fast, good and cheap. Pick any two.

julien_c• 13 years ago

Or one.

venus• 13 years ago

Or none. That's the thing - that "pick two" saying actually applies only to competent practitioners. Actually getting two is the best case scenario!

I have seen projects where the implementers happily go way over time, way over budget, and fail to deliver anything at all.

netcan2• 13 years ago

"How long is a piece of string? It's impossible to answer that question. But, if I had to guess... in my experience, the string is 19 inches long."

This is the kind of thing a lot of consultants seem to post, including the anecdotes of clients going with the cheap guys and the project failing. At the end of the day, the OP's answer is no more convincing then the hypothetical "outsource to Pakistan for 1/10th the cost." I think it's a consequence of someone trying to "sell" to an inappropriate market. If you expect to pay $120 for a mattress, sitting you down and lecturing you on why you need a $1,200 mattress is unlikely to convince you. If you expect to pay $10 for a meal, a $100 restaurant will not be getting your business. This post is the chef hanging out with other chefs and restaurant people to have a chuckle at those lame tourists who expect to pay $10 for a meal. The problem is that you are dealing with people who don't go to restaurants. They're comparing eating out to things they do know about like buying food in a shop.

The reality is that pricing development is tricky. Getting an "app" developed if you know nothing about making software is tricky, even if you are willing to pay "well". A lot of projects fail. A lot of projects are not realistic to begin with. Cost, development time, quality, the definition of MVP, exactly how "bespoke" a project is, etc. all vary hugely. Quality is not always correlated to price. You can pay $60k for your MVP and have that die too. Developers will blame the clients and the clients will blame the developers.

brudgers6• 13 years ago

An experienced consultant - that is someone who is experienced in the technical area as well as experienced consulting in that area can fairly accurately estimate the amount of time a project will take. They can because they know how they work and know how to lead the process to match their workflow.

I've been in architecture for more than twenty years. I estimate how much and what resources will be required all the time. Nobody has been developing iOS apps that long, of course, and the iOS app industry doesn't go back to the days of Vitruvius. Reading the article, I am reminded of stories about the early days of building websites.

netcan2• 13 years ago

The issue is that if you are dealing with an inexperienced client, the project you are quoting for and the project another consultant is quoting for is not the same project, especially if it's an "MVP".

I like your comparison to website building during its early days. Gives us the benefit of hindsight. One consultant was going to take a html page from a previous project. Find and replace the client's colours in. Make 5 pages (home, about us, product catalogue..) and then wait 6 months for his client to fax over the "content."

Another consultant was going to use coldfusion to make a dynamically updating copyright notice, & contact form and use templates to make the site "ecommerce ready". He was going to hire a copywriter to work with the client. And (as an optional extra), do CSS.

robomartin2• 13 years ago

"I've been in architecture for more than twenty years. I estimate how much and what resources will be required all the time. Nobody has been developing iOS apps that long"

I do not mean this as a personal attack or an insult aimed at you. Not at all. I've heard versions of this idea from others.

This is a really naive view of software engineering.

Recruiters are famous for firewall-ing good candidates because they think they don't qualify. The conversation goes something like this:

    R: How much iOS experience do you have
    C: Two years
    R: Oh, our client requires three years
    C: Sure, but I have 15 years of software development experience. 
       Most of it doing OO work on various platforms.
    R: Well, sir, my client needs someone with three years experience in iOS, sorry.

I've had highly qualified friends not get jobs because of such ignorance. Whenever I've worked with recruiters I have made sure they understood my instruction to not filter-out anyone due to rigid metrics on the targeted platform. A good software engineers is far more than the "bling-bling" they happen to know about today.

I have been developing software and hardware for more than twenty years. iOS is just a new platform to work with. From the perspective of an experienced software engineer there really isn't anything particularly different, special or challenging about creating product for the platform. With such new landscapes it is down to learning the language and the API's and libraries available. Not a big deal. If you've been in this game long enough you've done that exact thing many times over.

In the case of an experienced software engineer, the idea that "Nobody has been developing iOS apps that long" somehow correlates to not being able to estimate time and costs is nonsense. Yes, one can draw from past experience and have a reasonable idea. And, yes, if you've been around, you probably resort to applying some multiplier to your estimate because, well, you've been there and you've seen what happens. And, yes (number three), you have to have invested some time (three to six months, that's it) to get into the new platform.

I've done quite a bit of building construction (tenant improvement and other major projects in commercial buildings). Estimating architectural projects can be far more accurate because in places like the US things are hugely standardized. Unless you are doing something way off the norm or run into snags everything is fairly well known and quantifiable. Foundation, framing, electrical, plumbing, low voltage wiring, A/C&Heating, drywall, stucco, paint, finish, install built-ins, flooring, etc. On the other hand, there are projects where you get hit with surprises that you could not have foreseen. I had the experience of doing a fairly large commercial TI project where we discovered that the soil had been contaminated with chemicals by the prior owner. It had to be removed properly and replaced with clean soil. Hundreds of truckloads of dirt were removed. This blew the budget right out to the moon.

Software is different in that, save language structures (if, for, while, switch, etc.) and patterns, everything can be different from project to project. And, of course, the other problem is that naive clients can inject features and functionality into a project that can easily double the amount of work required to complete it. Not to mention the lack of specs altogether.

It's like hiring an architect, pointing to a house down the street and saying "build me a house like that". Then, of course, no input or solid specs exist for anything inside or outside the house. This would be costly.

Or, even better, a client asking to build a house raised off the ground and supported by a single column, completely solar and wind powered. The client also does not want the solar panels to be visible from the ground or the wind generator's noise to be heard. The client also wants the house to rotate so that a room of his choosing faces the sunrise every day. They he scoffs at you for suggesting that this is going to cost more than doing a typical home design of average American specs. Oh, yes, he is happy to point out that he can hire an architect in Pakistan who will do the design for 1/10 of what it costs of doing a typical house design in the US.

frogpelt• 13 years ago

In life in general, you don't have to compromise as much as you think you do in most negotiations. Sometimes you just have to keep searching until you find the right person to negotiate with.

Consultants are empowered by having to redo another's work and sometimes they are convinced that their answer is the right answer for everyone and every project.

Maybe it's not.

FredFredrickson2• 13 years ago

In my experience, as a graphic designer, who has seen my type of work be outsourced (right in front of me) to some cheapo place overseas, I think it's best to just shut up and let the client do it.

Most of the time, they will get something back that is awful, and if they actually have an eye for quality, it'll make them better appreciate the work you do. You might even get some more work from them after they've satisfied their fantasies of cheap labor.

If they don't have an eye for quality, and they go with the garbage the outsource comes up with, then you probably didn't want them as a client in the first place.

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

This is a great policy. Sometimes a follow up at just the right time can really help too. Always be respectful, after all it's the client's choice, and be understanding that they are going to feel a bit embarrassed when the first results come back from the cheap place. Have a supporting story that lets them save face "I can see you're really a cost conscious guy, that usually correlates with a good sense of value too, while my stuff is a bit more expensive let me share with you what we do to make sure you will be satisfied ..."

mmsimanga• 13 years ago

Seems most comments are nitpicking some of the amounts and references he uses to make some of his points. This is what I read into it as a developer who has been in similar types of meetings:

1. Charge what you are worth not what the person who has the App idea wants to pay you which in some cases is next to nothing. 2. Pay no attention to people saying, "but my friend says can do it in 3 days". Tell the truth and if they can't accept the truth move on. There is no point in explaining to someone that the most sustainable way to lose weight and keep it off is years of eating well and exercise.

GFischer6• 13 years ago

I live in Uruguay, and I can definitely believe it can be made for a lot less than U$ 60.000 (for comparison, that's 3 years of my salary).

I actually have a quote from a local company called XSeed ( http://www.xseed.com.uy/ ) for an app for both Android and iOs, and it comes out for a third of the amount.

Yes, you can be burned if you don't know the locals, like the guys with the Egyptians, or the Pakistanis. That's why many companies here in Uruguay get the jobs - the ones that are responsible cost twice or three times as much as the cheap Egyptian, Indian, etc.. companies, but they deliver, while being vastly cheaper than US or European counterparts. The really good ones can charge very close to US prices (go globalization :) ).

peterkelly3• 13 years ago

> I can definitely believe it can be made for a lot less than U$ 60.000

How can you make that judgement without knowing what was actually involved in the projects?

GFischer6• 13 years ago

You're right, I should have clarified that it's based on the article's premise of "two qualified engineers working full time ... and take about three months"

"At 12 weeks, that comes out to about $60,000"

That's what I'm talking about. I know that I can get two competent engineers working three months for far less, for example the company above.

muyuu• 13 years ago

I will keep the link.

I also know people from Belarus and Ukraine who do quite a decent job.

DanielShir• 13 years ago

This reminds me of a conversation I had back when I was freelancing.

It was along the lines of:

Client - "Aren't you afraid that Pakistani/Indian developers would undercut you and everyone would go there for their apps?"

Me - "If everyone were going to outsource there, I'd have more work fixing that stuff up, not less"

GFischer6• 13 years ago

While there probably are bad developers in Pakistan, India, Egypt or Uruguay, I'm sure there's a huge cost asymmetry which should work out in those countries' favor, and by that I mean good developers over there (and here in Uruguay) that are earning a fraction of what an equivalent U.S. developer is making.

What they need is somebody that can filter the good ones from the chaff (knows the locals), AND has contacts and good standing among the buyers, AND has the project management skills to make the outsourced team deliver.

InvisibleCities• 13 years ago

>good developers over there (and here in Uruguay) that are earning a fraction of what an equivalent U.S. developer is making.

As it turns out, people from India/Pakistan/Uruguay who are smart enough to build complex software systems are also smart enough to go on glassdoor, realize they are being fucked, and then come over here (or start charging higher rates). The only ones who keep charging 1/10th the cost are the ones who have to.

wiremine• 13 years ago

This reminds me a lot of the discussions I was having 12 or 13 years ago about developing a website. "You want me to pay how much for a website?!?!? My cousin can do that for 1/10th of that you're quoting."

Today, the difference between the plain-old website market and the mobile market is that few people on the demand side of the mobile market have any frame of reference or experience. How many people have bought a mobile app, compared to the number of people who have built a reasonably sized website? My guess the difference is a few orders of magnitude, maybe more.

Beyond that, I think it is also the sign of an immature supply side. If you wanted a blog 12/13 years ago, you had to pay someone to make it. Now you get one for free with blogger or wordpress. If you want a decent ecomm solution, you don't have to role your own.

Eventually both sides will figure it out: the supply side will add niche/task specific tools [1], and the demand side will gain the experience sorting through the options. [2]

[1] We see this this with a few of the dumb "hey, add your RSS feed" options for mobile apps.

[2] Also, equally likely in my mind: the raw horsepower of mobile hardware will make skinny clients more of an option, disrupting the app economy in general.

peterkelly3• 13 years ago

What is an app?

The problem with this discussion is that you could be talking about anything from a simple program that displays some content (e.g. for marketing purposes), to some basic social interaction, right up to a full-scale word processor or 3D modelling program.

The amount of time and effort required to build a product can differ by orders of magnitude depending on what that product is. So it's senseless to talk about "$X is an reasonable/unreasonable price to build an app" without any context about what it is you want built.

andybak• 13 years ago

In software there is a correlation between spending money and getting good quality work done. However - it's only a correlation.

Yes - some people get their nephew to build a modern, well coded, SEO-friendly and accessible, ajax-driven, e-commerce site for $800 but they probably just got lucky. A lot of nephews get out of their depth and never deliver.

And yes - some people spend a couple of million on the project with the same specs and get given a piece of crap in return. But on the whole - like good whiskey - the price tag is a good indicator of quality and a good way to reduce risk.

So - like many areas of enquiry - anecdotes aren't incredibly useful. If anyone has got any tips on finding the magic nephew, however, I'm all ears.

onemorepassword• 13 years ago

I have no tips on finding the magic nephew, but I can point you to plenty of software shops that will gladly burn a couple of million for you and give you a piece of crap in return. And maybe worst of all: they're not even deliberately trying to screw you.

The magic nephew may be rare, but my 25 years worth of anecdotal evidence suggests the latter example is quite common. And it's this experience that makes people very wary of spending a lot of money on software development.

cma• 13 years ago

This is ridiculous, the Simpson-Bowles commission didn't come up with a recommendation:

"The Commission shall vote on the approval of a final report containing a set of recommendations to achieve the objectives set forth in the Charter no later than December 1, 2010. The issuance of a final report of the Commission shall require the approval of not less than 14 of the 18 members of the Commission."

They never had that vote.

http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/the-bowle...

mbesto4• 13 years ago

From the Project management triangle:

Like any human undertaking, projects need to be performed and delivered under certain constraints. Traditionally, these constraints have been listed as "scope," "time," and "cost".[1]

It's amazing how often I need to reiterate this to clients and potential clients.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_management_triangle

tylerc2302• 13 years ago

It's so true. I've been a freelance iOS developer for a year now and half of my contracts have been fixing amateur looking code of large consulting firms. Is this endemic of iOS work or all software development? My theory is that consulting firms have trouble hiring senior engineers because working for a consulting firm isn't "sexy".

tudorizer3• 13 years ago

define "sexy" here

tylerc2302• 13 years ago

High profile companies outside of tech circles.

unstoppable• 13 years ago

60k might be a bit much... we can often get a mostly functional app off the ground for 30k. It just depends on specs.

Web MVPs (landing page with a signup form) can be done easily from anywhere between $200-1000. Yes, I realize there's stuff like unbounce, but even with those, they still take a couple hours to set up and properly split test. If you've never done this before, you can easily burn through that very quickly, and even if you have done this before, and you're valuing your time as any good founder should, then you're burning through that value allotment very quickly.

As for the foreign quotes, I've taken over plenty of jobs where it was started by a foreign firm for a tenth of the cost of what US firms charge... quality is usually terrible, and the reason I took over is because they couldn't get it finished. It's occasionally been so bad that we had to scrap their entire project within 6 months.

bdreadz• 13 years ago

I've had a lot of these types of meetings. Everyone has an app idea. I'm always ears though because ideas have come to me that are very interesting. The noise to signal ratio though is pretty terrible.

It's always interesting to have them reference apps and designs that they think their app should end up looking like. Very quickly a general breakdown of things in regards to the app they are looking to build can follow. Even taking the approach of outsourcing and painting a picture of how that works.

A lot of times I've gone the route with at least doing the mockups of the pages with a little on how the UI will work. It's something that I know I'm selling that will be of value to them even if they choose not to have us continue on with the development and to just really boil down the idea and even more importantly what kinda of money and time it's going to take to develop the idea.

beering• 13 years ago

When we needed native Android and iOS versions of our app, we contracted it out to a couple Indian developers. We figured that the development was pretty straightforward - it was essentially a port of our mobile webpage that had some performance issues, so we had all the server-side endpoints and a working example to copy from.

Was their work output buggy? Sure. But they got it done at a reasonable speed and cheaply, and they fixed the bugs as we noticed them (and we were paying them to...). For us, being cash-strapped and needing apps just to say we have them, it was pretty OK. I think it worked for us because we didn't expect a perfect, polished app, and the requirements were well specified from the get-go.

kamelot• 13 years ago

This article really got my goat on so many levels.

Nice response here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5129675

Full disclosure: I am an investor in the response posted to the OP.

gtirloni• 13 years ago

1 pound every day.. that sure ain't a very healthy diet. Go easy, bro.

logn• 13 years ago

I make $48/hr at my fulltime job. I take an odd freelance job here and there and charge the same rate to my clients. Sure, I could charge more but I don't have a huge portfolio. So, he charges $125/hr and has 3 examples of clients whose previous devs failed. Must mean he's correct.

desireco42• 13 years ago

Excellent metaphor, I like how this post explained simply difficult problem.

I can expand on it that I also ran into, like most of us, on similar comparisons and while I don't think it is wrong to seek help overseas, especially in places like India/Pakistan, I think that it is completely wrong to have clueless person seek help and then when they get burned, come back running to me and tell me about those bad, bad, people over there.

So again, excellent metaphor.

darkarmani• 13 years ago

Thinking about the title, I just kept thinking of Christian Bale losing 60 pounds in 4 months. If that took him 4 months, I don't know how you'd lose 30 pounds in 30 days (well in a health way). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machinist#Production

startupstella• 13 years ago

We deal with educating clients on the cost of apps and MVPS all the time at matchist. We get clients who have been burned and understand the value of not outsourcing overseas, yet I think there is still sticker shock at the costs associated with building exactly what you want. What do you think is the solution to this?

jiggy20112• 13 years ago

Software dev pricing is weird since it is so easy to grossly undercut yourself or overprice yourself by an entire order of magnitude.

I can certainly sympathise with people who have sent reasonable estimates and have received somewhat borderline insulting responses like "Wow, I could buy a used car for that!" or "That's nearly what my plumber charges!".

However in a certain sense I can't help but feel the industry has brought this upon itself. I remember ~2000 when websites were a new thing.

There were contractors around who would happily go in and quote very large sums of money for really very small amounts of (often very poor quality) work. Since the market had not really had a chance to self-adjust it's prices yet people would often just accept these costs without understanding what they were buying.

I remember a popular tactic being for designers to literally rip the HTML for a competitors website, switch the logos around and come back with a $10,000 bill.

So naturally the smart teenagers with a lot of free time to learn saw an opportunity to rebuild these websites better for the price of a few pizzas. This taught the market that costs could be significantly lower and also that the correlation between price and quality was very loose.

These kids also figured out the value of sharing code and ideas with each other, leading to a sort of open source renaissance.

Now that those teenagers have grown up and have to feed their families during a global recession those in developing nations are basically pulling the same trick on them that they had pulled back in the day.

You also have the added problem that there a sort of "iceberg" going on here. For example one can build an impressively featured website in around an hour simply by uploading one of the popular CMS and shopping cart systems to a shared webhost and copy pasting some content.

Of course, once you do such a thing you will get the familiar "this is great buy wouldn't it be ever greater if this drop down menu just sort of did this? I mean this entire thing took you an hour , so that change should take like 10 seconds right?" , "Well actually, I will need to develop a custom module to do X and then interface with Y so it's probably 4-8 hours depending.."

At that point it might be hard to convince a customer that you are not somehow trying to pull a fast one..

pjungwir• 13 years ago

This article (and the comments here) remind me of something I read in Managing the Professional Service Firm by David Maister: whether you're hiring a lawyer, a car mechanic, or anything in between, you usually have little ability to asset their technical merits, so you have to choose based on other factors. That could be price, but it can also be things like reputation, responsiveness, patience & clarity in answering your questions, etc. Realize it's the same way when someone is thinking of hiring you. The article & these comments mostly focus on technical questions, and indeed if the tech is bad enough you have project failure. But if you're talking with technically un-savvy clients, you should help them realize you have more to offer than just a lower risk of botched tech, certainly more than just "better code." Particularly as a sole contractor, you can offer them a more personal relationship with wise guidance that they aren't going to get by hiring their cousin or the cheapest programmer they can find on elance.com.

shwetanka• 13 years ago

Response to OP: http://blog.launchyard.com/response-to-30-pounds-in-30-days

arvcpl• 13 years ago

Funny, I have a completely opposite experience :)

It really depends on people, not about location. Talent can be EVERYWHERE, as well as not so talented ones :)

timjahn• 13 years ago

Amen brother.

To me, the key is right here: "My hunch is that the people who quoted much lower estimates and timeframes were shooting for the development work."

Firms/individuals/groups that quote dirt cheap prices are probably either a) desperate for the work (which makes ya wonder why) and/or b) not caring about the work they do at all (therefore producing a sub par final product).

A big mission of my new startup matchist (http://matchist.com/talent) is to filter out these clients for freelance developers, so they only deal with those who aren't looking for 30 lbs in 30 days.

We're not 100% there yet but we're working damn hard at it.

30 pounds in 30 days

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