

Ask HN: Would you pay $1K to have your web app prototyped? - floatingboat

A few days ago, someone posted a note offering to prototype someone's web application for $500.<p>I've got most of a PhD in computer science and am fairly fluent in Django, Rails, PHP and the like. I think this'd be interesting to offer as a service more seriously in the vein of a photoshop-to-html conversion service.<p>So, HN, and especially nontechnical founders with ideas, I'd like to get a sense of whether there's a market for this.<p>How many of you would you pay $1000 for a screenshot-to-rails prototype conversion in 3 days, installed and built with no fuss with full functionality, suitable for testing the market or to potential investors?  You send in the screenshots and a complete spec of functionality, and we install it and produce it.<p>How many of you would pay $2000 for the same service?  $2500?
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patio11
One of my early consulting prospects was someone who basically wanted me to do
that for their app, at a similar price point. As I recall, the project went
nowhere after they didn't follow up about signing a contract and I didn't
follow up about following up.

In hindsight, after learning more about consulting, I am _so_ glad I dodged
that bullet.

You are setting yourself up for catastrophic failure in every way with this
offering. You will not receive a complete spec from your clients. There are
people capable of writing complete specs. They have done successful software
development before. They will run screaming from your offering, because
they're looking at $1k and 3 days and concluding "He's either insane,
inexperienced, or out to swindle us." I plead a combination of insanity and
inexperience for saying "Yes, that sounds reasonable for $2,000" to my
prospect.

If you get takers, they will be the napkin crowd. The napkin crowd believe
they have specs. They do not have specs; they have napkins. You can turn a
napkin into a prototype; you cannot turn a napkin into a prototype in 3 days
if it is not your napkin, because you will chew far more than 3 days of
calendar time and $1,000 (or $2,500) in billable time just doing requirements
analysis.

There are also jobs which, if one is not acquainted with reality as
experienced by engineers, one might think are doable in three days.

Would you really love to receive this email? "Here's a screenshot. Make it
work. I'll pay you a thousand bucks."

[http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/this-
is-n...](http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/this-is-not-a-
spec.png)

Edit to elaborate:

If you're a good Rails/Django programmer, you are at least 20% of the way to a
successful consulting business. The market is signaling in a very strong way
that it needs them right now. (Ditto mobile anything.) That last 80% is very
important, though. It includes things like getting good at estimation and
prospecting. I ended up charging off about two months of calendar time to
goodwill because I was ludicrously optimistic about estimation and how hard
project management would turn out to be.

With regards to prospecting: There are plenty of people on HN who make good
consulting clients. _waves to consulting clients_ There are also many people
on HN who, and I mean this in the nicest possible way, are not good clients at
this point in their lives. Good clients have a clear idea of how the process
operates. Good clients cut checks for five or six figures, in a timely manner,
without complaining. Good clients have reasonable expectations for what $1,000
will buy them at market rates from someone who is actually capable of
delivering projects in Rails/Django. (Hint: not much programming.)

~~~
dspillett
> The napkin crowd believe they have specs. They do not have specs; they have
> napkins.

Ah, like my boss you mean. Only he uses flip-charts or white-boards instead of
napkins.

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lukestevens
I'll soon be in the market for similar services (i.e. a consultant to build a
web app I've mocked up), but having been on the other side of the fence, all I
can say is woe to you if you ignore what Patrick/patio11 says :)

However, what I think there is a bit of a market for is web-app-as-a-commodity
-- well, not actually the web app itself, but the billing, membership,
marketing site integration stuff that's all _generally_ (and I stress
_generally_) pretty common. Or, at least, developers who market themselves
that way -- "I'll take care of all the x, y and z, and focus on making your
app idea as good as it can be (and here's how many times I've done it
before)". Boom, great, take my money, get it done.

The actual web app part though is an absolute wild card, and that's where you
should be aiming to make the $$$ -- provide everything around it as a done
deal, and focus on getting the MVP/app idea right (which is 90% communication
& email with the client, and 10% actual coding).

Remember, people want their hand held. There's a million different things to
worry about. Thinking is hard. It's time consuming. Make it as easy as
possible, hold their hand, allocate way more time than you think is reasonable
(and you'll still get burned), and charge a fair rate for it. After all,
that's what you're doing - it's still time-for-cash, it's just a question of
how you market those services.

Finally, don't forget:

> The napkin crowd believe they have specs. They do not have specs; they have
> napkins.

Good luck! ;)

------
dcpdx
I'm currently working with a freelance Rails dev on an hourly basis to build
my MVP and the thing that bothers me most is not knowing how much time it will
take to get to the point I want to be. I have every screen mocked up in
Illustrator and most of the pages coded in HTML/CSS.

Depending on how much work had to go into the app, I'd be willing to pay
$5,000 or more for a service like this. The challenge would be putting
together a structure that allows for payment flexibility according to how
complex the project is; comparing any two projects side-by-side, the amount of
work required would vary greatly and it'd be hard to be able to throw out a
universal price for everyone.

Check out <http://ibuildmvps.com/> , it looks like this guy is doing exactly
what you're proposing.

If you're looking for some work get in touch, I'd be interested in hearing
more about what sorts of projects you'd like to work on and what your
capabilities are. Email's in the profile.

~~~
rcavezza
Hey, I'm the iBuildMvps guy. Most of the inquiries are people who have done no
customer development - I usually send them away to talk to customers - very
few come back after that.

I don't do fixed charges, hourly rates seems to avoid problems.

We're not trying to build the ground floor of a successful product, we're
trying to get something minimally viable to prove a concept. This seems to
help non tech guys find their "technical cofounder" by proving people are
interested in what they're doing.

Very few projects come out of iBuildMvps, but a lot of startup, customer
development and marketing discussions. I think I'm doing good just by saving a
few people hours/weeks/months/years of their lives chasing something that will
never amount to anything.

~~~
nolite
I like.. do you charge for those discussions too?

~~~
rcavezza
Nope - rcavezza@gmail.com

------
discordance
We recently did just this with a client.

They weren't sure if the idea they had would float. They had a potential
investor and the investment weighed in on if their idea would actually work in
practice. We recognised that we could build their MVP pretty quickly, so we
agreed to do it for a thousand box, so long as they agreed that if their
investor liked it and they got funded, we would get an extra (substantially
bigger) amount to finish and polish the job.

We developed the MVP for them for 1k and they ended up getting funded by their
investor. So that part turned out well. We have now proceeded to polish the
product for them at the higher fixed rate.

For the most part it has been a success in that it has helped another startup
realise their idea, and we have and will be getting paid accordingly. We
placed quite a bit of faith in our client in following through with the
subsequent job that justified our initial time investment, and that is
something we were only able to do once we met with the client and formed a
trust with them. Knowing your client and forming a trust is something more
valuable than any web form/screenshot submission or even a contract.

What we have learnt from this exercise: * The initial agreement period took a
far longer than expected, almost a couple of months for a really simple $1k
prototype. * The customer pivoted several times in terms of functionality,
feature creeping all over us. We tried to account for this to begin with, but
the amount their idea changed was quite unexpected. * Our client was very
organised in terms of getting real users for beta tests. Every week we
produced a new build, and tested it with a significant amount of real users.
This helped the product turn into something valuable very quickly. We are
going to try and make this mandatory for every client we work with from now. *
We would not have taken on the $1k prototype job if we weren't confident that
they hire us to finish the job for the extra substantial fee.

So in summary, I think the $1k prototype is a great idea as long as you find a
client you can trust who understands the outcome of the MVP, and also that you
believe in their idea.

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ankitshah
I think this all depends on the nontechnical cofounder you're dealing with.
Some have an idea and just want it built, and, as rcavezza mentioned, have
done no customer development. As a nontechnical founder myself, I don't think
it's reasonable to start seeking a web consultant or a technical cofounder
until a solid amount of work (read a month or two developing the business) has
been done. Customer development is only one piece of the pie, but thinking
about how the iterations of the product might look, actually designing the
site (at the least on a mockup software with the UX clearly defined), and
really having understanding of what the consumer wants and rationale for why
the product is to work the way it does is all extremely important. A very
concrete vision for the product and what future versions of it would look like
(contingent upon user feedback and usage, of course) is also crucial. None of
that comes in a week of work. It takes lots of time and a huge amount of
conversations with users, entrepreneurs, and people who understand the space
you're working in.

That said, after that work was done and the nontechnical founder could
reasonably say they were ready for their prototype to be built as an MVP, then
sure, I'd go with $1000 - 2000 to get it built. Again, to reiterate what
others have noted, this depends on the complexity of the product. I don't like
the idea of saying "get it done in three days." Too arbitrary. Building a
minimum VIABLE product takes communication, and I'm not sure if enough
communication would be done in 3 days to actually build something viable.

For those of you that are interested in a JS/jQuery-heavy project with a RoR
backend, I am actively looking for someone to help me with this. I have been
actually working on this business full time for the last 1.5 months, and I'd
like to say I am finally ready to work with someone technical to make this
happen. Feel free to contact me @ a[dot]shah811[at]gmail[dot]com

------
floatingboat
Thanks for the extensive feedback, warnings, and suggestions, HackerNews.

The problems raised here seem to be problems with the existing model of web-
development-for-hire and consulting: this is a system that's focused on
iterative design in a client-consultant model, not in prototyping as a
product.

The key question to whether this can work is this – can we product-ize web
application prototyping to make it less like contract hell and more like a
turnkey product? I think it's possible.

There are two problems that were highlighted here. I think both of them are
addressable, so I'll mention each in turn.

The first is the lack of a specification.

While in a PSD-to-HTML conversion, the screenshot is a spec by itself, in a
PSD-to-rails conversion, screenshots aren't specs. There's a way around this;
the practice of reducing ideas to specifications is the process we undertake
as engineers, so it certainly can be done without any special skills, and
shunting this work to the customer as a prerequisite before they can use the
service doesn't seem to be a problem.

The second problem pointed out is treating this as contract/consulting work
with extensive one-to-one communication rather than a quasi-automated service
of compiling apps from a spec, and dealing with the agony that goes with it.

Contract work often ends in debacles (I've experienced it myself). The key to
success here would be to _not_ implement this as one-on-one contract work. The
goal would be to offer turnkey product prototyping as a product.

I believe that enough automatic barriers on what's uploaded can force a
customer both to define specifications and prevent the endless back-and-forth
that happens on mercenary work. I'll think about this a bit more and we'll see
what can be put together.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
_the practice of reducing ideas to specifications is the process we undertake
as engineers, so it certainly can be done without any special skills_

I simply don't understand how you can reach this conclusion. I can say that
"the practice of reducing specifications to code is what we undertake as
engineers, so it can certainly be done without any special skills" and I'd be
hopelessly, completely wrong!

I think your idea has merit, but I can only see it working with sophisticated
clients who understand exactly what they're getting. The vast majority of the
others will expect a huge body of work for that $1000 because they have no
idea what the difference is between a "prototype" and a finished product and
simply explaining it to them will be useless -- they have to have experienced
it to realy understand it.

If you aim this product/service at busy IT departments or startups who need to
offload a little work, then I'd say you're onto something. If you are
targeting the average small business owner, you'll lose your shirt.

~~~
a3camero
I assume the target is people that need to build _something_ (re: anything) to
show to investors. Kind of like a brochure.

Orrrr he lives somewhere very inexpensive (not the case).

The former is actually not a bad idea.

------
Shenglong
Three days may be stretching it. Even having a template for a website without
a back-end made a while back, I ended up sending over 70 emails discussing
details. What will you do if you produce something that the customer finds not
quite right?

I love the idea, but just a warning on the time frames.

~~~
tptacek
You really think it's a good idea for him to do a 99designs-style Rails
prototyping service? "Working version of screenshot for under $3000"?

~~~
Shenglong
I might not use it, but I'm sure someone would... especially all those people
who can't find technical cofounders, and want to start something really badly.
I haven't really thought that hard about market viability, so you may be
right.

~~~
tptacek
There are people that will use the service, but his pricing has ensured that
those people will tend to be among the most pathological customers.

~~~
Shenglong
$1,000 for website with back-end code isn't that bad is it? If I somehow had
assurance of the quality, didn't have a technical friend in mind, and couldn't
do it myself, I'd probably heavily consider it as a solution. I say this
because I do have a project in mind (but taken care of).

I feel this spiraling back into the technical co-founder discussion.

~~~
tptacek
It's far too cheap.

------
run4yourlives
Along with Ataraxy here: What is a prototype?

I think you could easily get into a situation where you spend more time in
disputes around a misunderstanding of the deliverable than you do earning
income.

For example: How many bugs are you going to fix? If the prototype requires a
dataset, do you populate one? What if it needs at least two people from every
known area code in North America to work (hypothetical here)? You going to
populate that too?

I think the need is probably there, but you'd really need to target what the
deliverable is so there is no room for error.

------
Ataraxy
I would go for something like this, but I have difficulty quantifying what a
'prototype' could be considered as. I think what I have in mind would be more
then what the average person would consider a prototype (at least technically
speaking), but not exactly a full blown application either.

As to your question, there's absolutely a market for such a thing I think,
however it would be difficult to put a blanket pricing scheme in place due to
several reasons.

~~~
paulitex
I agree, scope can change so drastically. Consider the difficulty in cloning
twitter (pretty simple for basic utility, easily done in 3 days), versus a new
CRM (many moving pieces, high bar of feature set to be considered
competitive).

~~~
ckluis
I was about to say. I have a concept for a CRM that I would willing pay 1,000
to have prototyped. But, is it possible in 3 days... I doubt it.

------
nolite
Its a great thing you're offering, just keep in mind that alot of people with
ideas, don't really have "concrete" ideas. If ONLY they had specs of
functionality, or screens, their projects would have a much better chance of
success. But many people don't even have that, so.. that's the bigger problem.
Its more of a communications problem, not so much the actual implementation
(which they could easily pay for if they had better communication)

------
zachh
$1000 to $2000 seems reasonable for a moderately complex project (not just an
HTML text page, but decent design with some complex PHP/Javascript
functionality). I'm in the market for something like that.

That said, I would spec it out completely. Others may not, and so that might
not be worth your time and energy. For a well spec-ed project with reasonable
and agreed upon complexity, a few thousand seems reasonable.

------
Ataraxy
As a follow up, I think that having a proper 'template' of what you would
consider ideal specs would go a long way in helping those that can produce
such a thing as well as weeding out those that may not be up to the task.

I could get rather detailed, but my fear is that the more detailed I get, the
larger scope of a project it will appear as.

------
jdp23
I would potentially go for something like this, assuming I could then use the
code as a basis for ongoing tweaking. $1000 seems reasonable, maybe higher,
depending on how much is getting prototyped.

~~~
tptacek
A working Rails version of a screenshot is _maybe_ worth more than $1000?

------
ckluis
Perhaps you should consider $$$ per page. Thus a CRM with 50 different pages:
accounts, contacts, billing, reports, dashboard, etc would scale in price with
the complexity.

~~~
dspillett
You would need to be _very_ careful how you define what a page is, or any
other unit of work that you intend to charge for.

People will try a great many things to stretch what they think should be
included in one unit.

I can see it now: It'll all be AJAX! It won't need more than one web page that
updates itself!

~~~
ckluis
Understood, but you get the jist of what I was trying to do. Offer a scaling
mechanism.

~~~
a3camero
I think the danger in this approach is that you're moving towards just being a
regular consultant which sort of defeats the purpose of what I think he's
trying to do. I think this illustrates why consulting is really what lots of
people are after even though they like the idea of fixing costs. You can't
have it both ways.

------
sallard
Great idea. I would pay $2000 or even $4000, depending on the technical
difficulties of the prototype.

------
seanMeverett
Step 1: stop by a top 10 business school Step 2: ask this question Step 3:
profit tremendously

------
marketer
This is exactly what web consulting is

