

Ask HN: How to respond to a request for custom work with supershort description? - raarts

We sell our product hosted, and on a regular basis we get sales knocking on our door: a customer wants this-and-that report (followed by a 20-word description), how long will that take us, they need it fast?<p>In the past we tried to get more information, it never came, sales looked at us like: &quot;this description looks pretty clear to me, what else do you need to know&quot;, we still estimated, and we ended up losing money, and&#x2F;or the project went completely sideways.<p>Usually these things should take a few weeks at most, so they are small, but as a company we really can use the cash.<p>I always ask the programmer that is intended to do the actual work, but they come back with either no estimate, or with a far too high cover-my-ass estimate, which we cannot sell.<p>What&#x27;s the best way to handle this?
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nfriedly
In theory, you should get better at estimating as you do more of this, but
that probably isn't very helpful right now. Until then you should probably
just charge by the hour (or day or week), and if you give the customer an
estimate, make it clear that it is an estimate and not a guarantee.

Also, you should consider adding a rush fee, partially just to give yourself
some buffer. (But also to separate the folks who _actually_ need it fast from
the ones who are just jerks.)

Oh, and one last note: the customers that pay more tend to be more pleasant to
work with. So those "far too high cover-my-ass estimates" might not be such a
bad idea sometimes ;)

