
Show HN: Moonlight – experienced software developers, on demand - philip1209
https://www.moonlightwork.com
======
philip1209
At my last company Staffjoy, hiring for each position took two to three months
dozens of hours of my time. Under pressure to meet deadlines, I ended up
hiring friends who worked during the day at top companies to help us on the
nights and weekends. They were the kind of engineers I wanted to hire full-
time, and they could start contributing right away. It turns out that working
with part-time engineers is elastic and yields fantastic results. That’s where
the idea for Moonlight began.

We prototyped the whole Moonlight system last year using Zapier, Google
Sheets, Paid Labs, and Typeform. We did six digits in revenue without writing
a line of code. It allowed us to iterate quickly and do lots of research
before building the web app, which we are launching today.

We are a two-person, bootstrapped team living the digital nomad life (hello
from Argentina!). We hire through Moonlight to build the app, and we work
ourselves through the site to avoid raising money.

Let me know if you have any questions. I’m also interested in connecting with
any maintainers of open-source technology who are interested in discussing
Moonlight as an alternative to Patreon.

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raysturm
How's moonlight different from other contracting sites? Who your intended
customer?

~~~
philip1209
We figured out a model that provides high-skill workers at scale. By working
with contractors who have day jobs, we have had thousands of engineers join to
work on projects. This lets us make quality matches between projects and
contractors. It also means that we end up with top talent - ranging from
veteran engineers to Ph.D. students to prominent open-source maintainers.

We are focused on providing a low-touch, self-serve service. There is no phone
call or discussion with a project manager required to start hiring. Our
clients end up being mainly engineering managers and product managers who work
directly with the contractor.

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everdev
How is this different from UpWork or PeoplePerHour?

~~~
philip1209
Here are some differences:

\- Contractors only have to work part-time. Two-thirds have day jobs at top
tech companies (mostly in the Bay area), and moonlight on nights and weekends.
Most talent ends up being from the US.

\- It’s low-touch and self-serve. You directly hire and work with contractors.

\- Skills are the core of matching. We track 150+ technology skills, such as
React.js and TensorFlow. So, when you hire an engineer - you can find somebody
who already knows your software stack. That minimizes the ramp-up time.

\- Because of the specialized contractors and focus on skills, projects tend
to be more specific and with higher hourly rates (we average ~$100US).

Here are some examples of recent projects:

\- A unicorn startup hired Moonlighters to test their coding interview
challenges

\- A YC startup hired an expert in HIPAA-compliant cloud hosting to configure
ETL on AWS for healthcare data

\- A small sales organization contracted a machine learning expert to analyze
their sales data

\- Companies using emerging tech who need reinforcements hire help - e.g.
React Native, Tensorflow, and Kubernetes

~~~
everdev
I think there's a huge need an opportunity here, but what you listed (part
time, self-serve, skills matching) is part of these other platforms already.

It sounds like you're leaning towards extreme quality ($100/hr+ rates). If
that's the case, I think the question is, how is the $100/hr developer 2x
better or faster than the $50/hr developer?

I've been burned many times by low cost developers but I've also found some
fantastic ones. Similarly, I've been charged top-tier rates promising quality,
but delivering the same quality or lower than someone who lives in an area of
the US with a much lower cost of living.

I guess the question is, how do I know that developers on your platform will
be worth their top-tier rates?

~~~
philip1209
This is where the matching based on skills come in. If you use Rails, ReactJS,
and Mongo - we can match you with contractors that know those skills. We find
that much of contract work is not reinventing the wheel - so, if you can find
somebody who has done it before, it's much more efficient. That specialization
justifies a higher hourly rate.

We've had startups start to treat us like a paid Stack Overflow. One project
was just setting up Alembic migrations of a flask app. Starting from zero on
that is tedious. But, if you have done it a couple of times, it only takes an
hour or two.

~~~
everdev
Yes, that makes sense, but I can find contractors based on skill set in those
other platforms as well.

That's where I'm not sure why I'd choose you guys over an established
contractor network like UpWork unless there was some key differentiator I'm
missing.

~~~
philip1209
That's a reasonable question. The short answer is that, when I was trying to
hire contractors at my last startup, sites like Upwork had low-skill labor,
and I had trouble sifting through their communities to find the high-skill
contractors that I needed.

We are working on a smaller, more curated community with startup experience
and more specialization. We are tailoring it for a narrow group of more
experienced talent. Our goal is to avoid the problem that plagues other sites
of having low-skill/low-cost workers displace higher-skill workers as they
scale. We have found a model that provides large amounts of high-skill talent,
and we value contractor quality over scaling.

We think that the market is shifting to more high-skill workers, e.g.
[https://qz.com/1152683/indian-it-layoffs-
in-2017-top-56000-l...](https://qz.com/1152683/indian-it-layoffs-
in-2017-top-56000-led-by-tcs-infosys-cognizant/)

------
motyar
from India, can't complete _Step 3: Get paid_

