

Ask HN: Who are trustworthy contractors with low hourly rates to outsource to? - jjets718

Hi everyone,<p>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!
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patio11
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.

~~~
jjets718
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.

------
cracell
"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.

~~~
jjets718
I will definitely learn how to code. Would you recommend doing tryruby.org and
then moving on to Why's Poignant Guide?

~~~
joshuacc
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/>

~~~
jjets718
Thank you for these resources and for responding. I don't have a very good
grasp of programming basics, so I will check out Learn Ruby the Hard Way.

------
SiliconAlley
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

~~~
jjets718
I will definitely learn how to code so I can build out the prototype. Thanks
for your response!

------
startupfounder
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.

~~~
jjets718
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!

------
div
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.

~~~
jjets718
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!

