

Ask HN: Place for developers & designers to barter small units of work? - jayliew

E.g. I'll build you a site if you'll design my logo &#38; vice versa? (roughly equivalent in effort for each person, say X hours of coding for X hours of design - or however the two parties agree to is fair)<p>The key here is that you're exchanging something relatively easy for you to produce in exchange for something that's relatively difficult for you to do but relatively easy for someone else to do. Not a big upfront commitment, i.e. a job or contract.<p>It's generally hard to be an expert at it all: back-end, front-end, design &#38; UX. Is there a place for people to barter their services? If there isn't, maybe there should be ;)<p>Related (also posted on Quora): http://www.quora.com/Is-there-a-place-where-back-front-end-developers-designers-trade-work
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swanson
I wish there was a good way to find designers that are trying to build a
portfolio or just like making stuff for the hell of it. I hack around on
weekend projects for fun all the time, but I don't have much desire to start a
business or try to make it big -- it would be nice if there was a good way to
find like-minded designers that would throw together a logo or color scheme.

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kennet
I'm trying to prevent myself from being baited into making a website out of
all this--i'm booked, but it is definitely something that the HN community
should band together and provide. It _sounds_ _very useful_.

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alexkiwi
Don't worry. It already exists, found an awesome developer through the
service. <http://www.builditwith.me/>

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akkartik
Neat idea. All these things, however, require feedback. Even if you don't have
the skills you often need to drive the trajectory of things we try out. Given
that, perhaps we should instead barter 'pairing time'. "If we can work on my
project for a day today, then I'll help you with your project for a day."

You can modulate the 'promiscuity' of this idea, from pairing with random
people you meet on some site, to having a handful of people you pair
repeatedly with. The latter seems to kill two birds with one stone: you get
something done on your site _now_ , and also make progress finding and trying
out potential co-founders.

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jambo
It's a great idea for a founder who isn't a U.S. citizen or national.

Sadly:

The IRS requires barter value to be reported as income:
<http://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc420.html>

and barter exchanges have to send out 1099s:
[http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=113437,00....](http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=113437,00.html)

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jayliew
<http://www.thesuperfluid.com/>

I saw this as a response to my question on Quora .. I wonder how they do it

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abulafia
superfluid has functionality for commercial (with IRS-reporting, per jambo)
and non-commercial efforts. So it handles both the barter exchange and favor-
bank sort of model. -The IRS has exclusions for non-commercial services.

superfluid:p2p is international, superfluid:business is US-only, for now.

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proexploit
I've posted a couple topics before trying to get something like this going as
I've had a lot of fun working with some other guys on HN. I don't know of a
site like this but my thought is it's better done informally. Maybe a google
group that's invite-only (not exclusive, but able to restrict membership as an
alternative for feedback)?

While we're on the subject: I'm a designer / front-end guy always open to
bartering. Logos aren't my think but Design/UX/HTML/CSS/HAML/SASS is what I'm
good at. I've got a ton of different side projects in tons of different
languages I'm learning to hack away on.

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jgv
Forrst is a community that has both designers and developers interacting,
although it's not explicitly about bartering.

<http://forrst.com>

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unignorant
Inspired by this post, I built <http://hacklikeme.heroku.com/> this afternoon.

More details here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1931985>

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ndaugherty18
We use each others wisdom all the time at the co-working facility I frequent.

I wouldn't call it bartering but knowledge transfer or "mentoring"

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tdavis
Not yet, but we're building it!

<http://swaptitude.com>

