8 ms·

I'm not an enterpreneur, I'm a dirty hack

158 points by maxklein 17y ago

robotrout 17y ago
$12K/month, but unwilling to quit his job to start a company. Must be a sweet job.
zaidf 17y ago
If anyone is looking for tips on working with offshore programmers, read Max's few but timeless points! He nails his experience about getting designers from Romania. They have really great taste! And Russians for math-related complicated programming. And India for cheap average quality programming work(btw, Indian designers are in general pathetic). These have been my experiences too over 8 years of being on both sides of the outsourcing market(as a freelancer and as someone who has hired folks offshore). It is an art working with people offshore and if you can manage it, it can give you a real edge especially in starting phases. Curious, are you deep into affiliate marketing?
- icey 17y ago
  I feel like there are whole marketplaces I'm not aware of - where do people go to find offshore help? I've universally found poor quality, which ends up with me paying people I know personally a ton of money to grind out boring crap (or doing it myself), when I'd much rather pay them to work on the interesting things.
  - catfish 17y ago
    The key lies in documentation. The better you explain it on paper, the better the result. Especially with India.
    - zaidf 17y ago
      Bingo! A lot of my programming projects, I do the db schema design and post it along with the other specs. Dumb it down as much as you can. Of course, at some point if a project takes off you would want someone longterm. That's a whole different game(hiring a full-time developer offshore).
  - maxklein 17y ago
    A lot of it comes from experience. After outsourcing for a year, you can judge pretty accurately within the first paragraph what a person is good for. The way they communicate will tell you a lot.
    - icey 17y ago
      I'd definitely be interested in hearing more about this.
      - zaidf 17y ago
        I always felt like someone should write a quick, to-the-point ebook for outsourcing newbies on working through the outsourcing world. May be I'll pen that one day:)
        icey 17y ago
        One of the things that I really like about HN is that I feel like most of the people here have information worth sharing, and information that's valuable enough that I'd pay for a PDF of that information. I'm kind of surprised we don't have an HN ebook marketplace going yet, to be honest.
        allantyoung 17y ago
        Zaid - I love your blog so your future ebook will probably be good too. If you have extensive experience outsourcing, I want to learn from your trails. So please do it. Here are some helpful links to get you started. I'm looking forward to reading your ebook. http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/03/you_should_writ.html http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/03/you_should_w... http://www.squidoo.com/howtomakeanEbook http://www.squidoo.com/howtomakeanEbook http://www.problogger.net/archives/2009/09/16/thirteen-steps-to-write-and-publish-a-free-ebook-in-thirteen-hours/ http://www.problogger.net/archives/2009/09/16/thirteen-steps...
        zaidf 17y ago
        Thanks for the encouragement Alex. I will start putting together my ideas and bring it together one of these weekends!
  - zaidf 17y ago
    Start at rentacoder.com(lots of individual coders). Another option is elance.com(better for larger projects; more companies bidding). I was a top coder there in high school(early 2000). These days I use it exclusively to hire coders and designers for very specific projects.
    - RACNicole 17y ago
      Hi, this is Nicole from Rent a Coder. I'd like to thank you for recommending our service. A couple of important points about Elance: 1. Elance workers can't make more than 3 bids a month unless they pay a subscription fee ($9.95/month for 20, $19.94/month for 40 or $39.95/month for 60). This could reduce the number of qualified bids you receive -- and workers may pass these fees on to you in the form of a higher price. (There are no such restrictions at Rentacoder.) 2. Elance charges $199 - $399 for each arbitration case, and its mandatory pre-arbitration processes allow an abusive worker to stall the start of arbitration (consequently preventing you from accessing your money for weeks... 21 business days in fact). Making matters worse, Elance's arbitration process is tricky with each part of the process elongated with 3 - 15 business days in-between. Rentacoder doesn't work like that because it places time limits on arbitration responses. As a result, 45% of Rentacoder's arbitrations are completed under a day. 75% under a week. What can be particularly frustrating is that Elance doesn't publish the detailed rules of its arbitration process. Rentacoder does, of course. There are of course, many differences between our service and Elance's. You can compare the 7 major services through this link to discover even more: http://www.rentacoder.com/RentACoder/DotNet/misc/CompetitorInformation/WhyRentACoder_ForBuyers.aspx http://www.rentacoder.com/RentACoder/DotNet/misc/CompetitorI... If you have any questions, please let me know. You can also call in to talk to a facilitator 7 days a week, or email us (see http://www.rentacoder.com/RentACoder/misc/Feedback.asp http://www.rentacoder.com/RentACoder/misc/Feedback.asp). Nicole www.rentacoder.com
- catfish 17y ago
  Philippines = best SMO posters in the world and cheap.
  - zaidf 17y ago
    Interesting. What exactly do they do under "SMO" umbrella?
    - rantfoil 17y ago
      wince SMO = spam social networks with garbage posts to get better page rank. That's the kind of stuff we have to spend hours and hours banning. sigh
      - catfish 17y ago
        SMO != spam in every case. This is not the kind of stuff you spend one second banning since none of it is posted to your sites. It is strictly created by and for and posted on the sites owned by the clients. When you step out of the box and think, you can find plenty of legitimate ways to leverage low cost content providers, for profit. You can stop wincing now...
        zaidf 17y ago
        I agree, there is a right way and a wrong way to do SMO. I think you'll agree that most people offering their SMO services are either selling snake oil or spam. Few seem to know how to do it right. You seem to be in the minority so I'd love to learn more, especially in the context of what the folks overseas do. Are we talking about them writing quality copy for your website that hit on specific keywords? That would be SEO territory but I know people using Mechanical Turk and other services to get decent-quality copy written for cheap.
        catfish 17y ago
        I graduated from Mechanical Turk to full timers about 2 years ago when our client load increased. Though SEO is a part of our work, the real money is in traffic. We achieve a better than 1/100th CPA cost with SMO as compared to PPC with Google. Think about it. Someone who clicks through to your page from Twitter/Facebook/Linked In is a known quantity. What do you know about someone that clicks on a paid link in google. Nothing. What does it cost for that click? Only your monthly publishing cost per account divided by total clicks per month. And when someone walks through the door from SMO, you got a @name, you can look up their bio, you got their thoughts in their tweets, and you know where they are from. And it cost a fraction of the price you pay Google for an unqualified, anonymous click. And with Twitter you have zero click fraud. I have cracked the code on CPA using Twitter and it begins with killer content. And I use staffing in the Philippines which cost 1/15th American dollars for same person, no taxation, no flooring cost, no legal issues. If I were Google, I would definitely figure out how to buy Twitter before it eats their PPC lunch. There are a whole lot of us X-PPC guys who no longer pay ridiculous fees to the search engines. As for the Turk, the cost is a little more than the PI and with your own staffing, you get the added bonus of continuity. You also get the benefits of knowing your staff, weekly quality review meetings, standardization of process, and a consistent quality that I found missing with Mechanical Turk. I would still recommend MT though for anyone running a few sites who needs less than full time commitment for projects.
- shakedown 17y ago
  A company I worked for used a relatively big web company in Romania, hiring a few developers over there to work full time on their site. The HTML and CSS they wrote were generated using Dreamweaver, and their PHP was a mess with tons of copying and pasting. It was impossible to get the company's higher level management team to understand why continuing to use these guys was bad idea, because they saw the front end 'just working', yet it was so hard for us to modify and understand any of their code. If you intended to have a site that one day has skilled programmers working on it and is actually maintainable, be careful about things 'just working' with outsourced code.
  - zaidf 17y ago
    Yes, quality of code is a huge concern for me which is why I always have a growth plan: if a certain project takes off, I will quickly hire another proven full-time programmer to recode or completely understand the project. I also am not a huge fan of working with offshore companies. There is enough friction already in talking remotely. I don't like another layer of management in between developers. Though for bigger projects, you need a project manager of some sort.
  - gvb 17y ago
    "...mess with tons of copying and pasting." I call this "ransom note programming." http://images.google.com/images?q=ransom+note http://images.google.com/images?q=ransom+note Nasty stuff, not even enough pride in their work to run an autoindent program on it.
  - bad_user 17y ago
    Hi, I also live in Romania. > relatively big web company in Romania Little quiz ... what should set your alarm on? The "big" size of that "web company" or its location? For me it's a no-brainer ... simply because for a consulting company to scale to that "big" factor ... you need to hire a lot of third-rate, cheap code-monkeys ... that's business 101 ;) Second of all ... your company should've asked for a portfolio of the actual developers that ended up working for you, simply because the quality of the employees varies greatly even in well-respected organizations. Or was there some kind of manager acting as a proxy between you and those doing the actual work? And out of curiosity, in your country there aren't any "big software companies" that are doing consulting work of dubious quality? This seems to me that it was more a problem with your management. Blaming it on "outsourcing" is not really accurate. BTW ... in my small company that does consulting work, we aren't taking outsourced projects very often. We don't do it simply because those kind of clients that would outsource to us are of very poor quality, leading to poor communications, unmet deadlines, unmet payments and generally disastrous results.
- petercooper 17y ago
  People's personal experiences are interesting, but are potentially ridiculous generalizations.. like saying Jews make better bankers, the British are good tailors, the French are great chefs, or what not. I doubt all Indian designers are useless..
  - zaidf 17y ago
    Accurate generalizations can be very helpful.
yannis 17y ago
>I don't invent shit. Look at what is invented already and make it a bit easier to use This is great advice!
- vibhavs 17y ago
  He also says: >I stay 2-3 years behind the trend. After the early adopters have left, there is this gap that can be filled by people who are willing to learn from the failures of the early adopters That sounds great in theory, but can anyone expand on that? What are some specific examples?
  - yannis 17y ago
    There are many examples, the whole Japan growth in the eighties was based on this model. They took existing technologies and refined them. Stackoverflow is one example of redefining forums (they essentially killed a lot of programming forums). thesixtyone.com redefined indie music!
  - tewks 17y ago
    Do pardon me if I'm being obvious or not addressing your question, but the following examples spring to mind: pets.com, etoys, et al. -> zappos, altavista, goto, yhoo, et al. -> goog, broadcast.com, real media, "quicktime TV" -> youtube These examples were all established a few years after the original players came in fully loaded with cash, hype, etc yet failed to solve or even identify underlying problems.
    - yannis 17y ago
      One way to get ideas is to visit your local library and go through all the technology magazines of +- 3 years ago.
      - TheSOB88 17y ago
        +3 years ago?
scootklein 17y ago
what is the point in separating the two, can't you be both? i would be willing to bet that the majority of people here that consider themselves "entrepreneurs" or are working in startups would identify with almost every single one of those points. are we all hacks? or is there one point on there that makes you a NON-entrepreneur compared to everyone else who thinks they are?
- maxklein 17y ago
  I'd put it this way: Some people are born to be independent businessmen. They read the theory, they talk the talk, then they take the step and start off in business. There is the other way - just making money on the internet, and there is no grand plan behind it. It's more of a thing that just develops itself without some type of enterpreneurial drive or theory behind it.
  - ekanes 17y ago
    Max - what's with the picture above your post? Not sure I understand what you're trying to say with it. Edit: Nevermind. It's late and I skimmed your post too quickly.
- socmoth 17y ago
  so obviously, he is very entrepreneur-ing, but he is choosing to differentiate himself from people who call themselves entrepreneurs. The reason he wants to do this are what he is writing about. basically, he gets things done and makes money, even though he is using old tech. he isn't buzz worthly, but he is successful in his own way. for what it is worth, i really like working with people with this attitude. (except the next step is often looking for bigger markets)
  - allantyoung 17y ago
    He's done a good job of positioning himself as the "anti-entrepreneur" and it works. He is obviously very entrepreneurial and all the actions he describes are central to bootstrapping.
ErrantX 17y ago
You see, there are lots of enterprenuers out there His description of entrepreneurs is, I think, not very good. Im sure there are lots of people like he describes who would call themselves entrepreneurs. But every good one that I've met or "seen" doesn't even half fit such a stereotype. In fact I suspect most really good entrepreneurs are hacks just the same :) Dont mix pretenders with the real thing!
jorsh 17y ago
"I make about $12k a month, which is not very much in the global scale of things, but it's fine." I'm sorry, what?
- SwellJoe 17y ago
  That's about what one can make doing contract work, assuming you're good and reliable and get a bit of referral and repeat business happening. But, the point of starting a company is usually to do better than contracting, eventually. You trade current comfort for a steadily rising income that, hopefully, some day far surpasses what you could make doing contract work, or working for a major corporation, and most importantly does not scale based on the number of hours you can work, but instead scales on how effectively you build your organization. With taxes, health insurance, retirement savings, having a place big enough to work out of, etc. $12k/month is comfortable, but not particularly wealthy. It's a modest goal by most startup founders ("entrepreneurs") standards, I would think. I think most tech startup founders are at least looking for "fuck you" money, which is somewhere in the millions for most people. It'd take ~10 years at $12k/month to reach multiple millions. So, yes, $12k/month isn't very much for the audience he's speaking to, though it's certainly respectable.
  - wgj 17y ago
    He ended by implying he still has his day job. If I read that correctly, that means $12K above his salary and benefits, and with only part time effort.
    - SwellJoe 17y ago
      Right...that does make a difference, doesn't it? So, yeah, I reckon $12k/month for part-time effort is awesome.
    - gcheong 17y ago
      Actually he ended by saying that he wouldn't quit his job to start a company. This could mean that he started a company on the side and quit once it got to where it paid enough.
mattmaroon 17y ago
"After a while, however, the feeling disappears. Seeing your daily revenue go from $1000 to $2000 starts to mean nothing. It's all just business. That's no longer where the excitement is." Not true at all. It never gets old watching the average daily profit rise.
- SwellJoe 17y ago
  Folks are different. I find I have to make myself care about those numbers. I tend to fall into a comfort zone, where my brain has decided, "Yes, we have enough money coming in to keep us in food and houses, so we're OK. Think about more important things, now." I've made myself stop dealing directly with our technology lately, and begun to focus more on the money side of things. I've only recently started doing regular bookkeeping and monthly revenue reports and such. And, it is satisfying to watch the numbers increase, but it's not as satisfying as building something new, to me.
  - bemmu 17y ago
    After the first $1000 / month I started caring a lot less, because I could eat and pay rent. After $2000 I stopped caring some more, because that is enough for budget travel, which is the biggest "thing" I want. Now I've found my next motivation to be "for each extra $2000 I make, I can have these things some month in the future when I've lost my revenue source".
prgmatic 17y ago
Certainly being a web entrepreneur is considered "not following the herd", but within the "not following the herd" there is also two paths, and one is indeed another herd. I love his philosophy, do not follow the herd. Do your own thing.
krakensden 17y ago
What is his business? I can't find a link anywhere...
- antidaily 17y ago
  "niche sites" according to his twitter.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - zaidf 17y ago
    Usually code for affiliate/seo/ebook business. I have a few friends making a killing doing this. It isn't as easy as it sounds. And it isn't as scammy as it sounds. When done right, it can make good money.
    - wallflower 17y ago
      The classic Parrot eBook gold mine: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=516215 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=516215
nzmsv 17y ago
Very nice. Someone who outsources all his work to poorer parts of the world boasting about judging people by the country they come from. Sounds just a little bit like picking your new "employees" at a slave market.
- lhuang 17y ago
  Cheap shot... I understand your greater point but I think its misdirected in this case and not entirely fair to Max. What Max is doing in his post... how is that any different from making generalized statements about companies and the quality of products they churn out? Though I agree that because we are dealing with actual people perhaps more tact should be used. That said, we do live in a global economy. Chances are that the clothes you're wearing now were made by some "slave" in a poor developing country.
- catfish 17y ago
  It's not slavery if you pay an amount that is fair for the foreign employee. In the Philippines, $275.00 USD is equivalent to a 2k job here in the states. That's not slavery. As far as classifying quality of work effort by country, try it yourself and in a short time you will learn that different cultures deliver different types of workers, and thinking, and creativity. I know that sounds strange, but it is true. And here is the funny part of the entire deal. If you suddenly found yourself transported to Russia, Romania, India, the Philippines, or China, good luck getting work as Americans are mostly viewed as fat, lazy, complaining do nothings, who barely understand the concept of a hard days work for a fair wage. Ask every foreign employee that works for me and not one of them would agree with your comment. They are grateful to have the work, to work at home, to raise their families well, and to do so by using their brains. I don't feel the least bit bad for outsourcing either. Americans are the hardest employees to manage, and rarely deserve their high cost. There is a huge downside to working with the ME generation. Most think that a job is an entitlement. Ugh...
  - nzmsv 17y ago
    OK, outsourcing does not equal slavery. That said, we all do stereotype all the time. For example, you probably thought from reading my comment that I'm a fat, lazy American teenager with a sense of entitlement :) I lived in Russia in the 90s, and I saw exactly the opposite effect from the one you describe first-hand. There were people coming from English-speaking countries who could get management-level jobs mostly by virtue of coming from an English-speaking country. I knew some personally, and I don't hold it against them at all. They were seen as having an understanding of how the capitalist world works, and this was valued (whether or not this was true). After a decade, the people were not seeing the quick returns from the switch to capitalism that they were hoping for. As a result, the general attitude towards the West in Russia has changed. You can read all about it in the news. I also have friends back in Russia, who work for an outsourcing company. The majority of programming jobs there that pay a livable salary are outsource. There are few Russian companies that work on original products of their own (Parallels comes to mind). I hold no illusions. As long as the US market remains the largest, that's where the money will be, and outsourcing will remain a viable strategy. Does the idealist in me wish that the people working outsourced positions could access this market directly, without effectively paying a middleman? Or better yet, have a thriving local market? Yes, but I realize this just won't happen.
rms 17y ago
Can you share one of your sites? I think we're all pretty curious to see. We won't make fun of you.
robryan 17y ago
The dropbox comment sounds a little cheap. Making $12k and going out of your way to avoid paying $10 for a quality app?
- lhuang 17y ago
  eh incentives. we all do this to some degree on a daily basis. e.g. downloading your favorite song for free instead of paying .99 for it on itunes, etc.
- maxklein 17y ago
  The only webservice I pay for is DabbleDB. Dropbox I can live with the restriction, but you absolutely need a database when you need to track a large amount of items. I'm REALLY suprised that there are not cheaper alternatives to DabbleDB - if there had been anything a bit cheaper or a bit more ajaxified, I'd have gone for it. Also, the main reason I don't pay for dropbox is that you need to pay for EACH user! So at just 5 users I'm paying $50 a month. That's crazy wasted money!
  - domodomo 17y ago
    If you are only sharing a subset of folders that are under the free limit, I'm pretty sure the other side can still use the free account. I'm doing this with a friend right now, I have the paid account and am using 30+GB, he has a free account, and we share just the folders we need to.
adriand 17y ago
Perhaps this got traction on HN just because it's against the usual grain here, which focuses on high standards, good design, and taking pride in one's work. But I still don't really get why this post is deserving of the upvotes it got. Is it really any surprise that you can make lots of money if you use cheap labour, if you're okay with releasing - and perhaps even selling, though I hope not - garbage software ("Release a really crappy version", "I don't spend money on design"), and if you're content without innovating or trying to break new ground? The world is full of people who do that, and yes, many of them get by just fine, and some make lots of money. But there's far more to life, and work, than that. For me, that's what's so great about HN: it is full of inspirations for a web developer like myself. Inspirational companies and inspirational people who don't rest until they get it right. Who push the envelope. Who care deeply about the experience of using their software. This post contains nothing inspirational like that. I've worked for people like this before. Never again.
- hnhg 17y ago
  Yeah, I was expecting to find myself disagreeing with you but I find it a little bleak too. I don't know if it makes me a ridiculous idealist but I do care about doing things to a certain level of quality.
- catfish 17y ago
  I up voted it because I like the fact that this guy is a realist. So few of us who read HN will touch the heavens above no matter how bright, or thoughtful, or elegant our work might be. Luck and timing have more to do with success than inspiration. This story is a reflection of those of us without timing or luck, who grind it out day in day out. It is a nice counter balance to the inspirational, but largely unobtainable heights discussed in the stories normally posted here. Maybe in the beginning you can take the high road, and find "more to life" than this guy does. But for those of us who left the high road long ago, and are raising families, and paying mortgages, and grinding out a living online, this guys approach is sage advice. The truth gets up voted.
- 10ren 17y ago
  As far "release a crappy version", it's just a blunter way of saying release early, release often And the following part "No response, abandon. Complaints, improve" is just the concept of the minimal prototype; also used in "Discovery-driven planning". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_driven_planning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_driven_planning You seem to be speaking from a professional mind-set, which is perfectionistic. An entrepreneurial mind-set is a little different: why perfect something if no one wants it? Or, as pg says "build something people want". Find out what they want first, then perfect it.

158 points by maxklein 17y ago

$12K/month, but unwilling to quit his job to start a company. Must be a sweet job.

zaidf 17y ago

If anyone is looking for tips on working with offshore programmers, read Max's few but timeless points! He nails his experience about getting designers from Romania. They have really great taste! And Russians for math-related complicated programming. And India for cheap average quality programming work(btw, Indian designers are in general pathetic). These have been my experiences too over 8 years of being on both sides of the outsourcing market(as a freelancer and as someone who has hired folks offshore). It is an art working with people offshore and if you can manage it, it can give you a real edge especially in starting phases. Curious, are you deep into affiliate marketing?

icey 17y ago
I feel like there are whole marketplaces I'm not aware of - where do people go to find offshore help? I've universally found poor quality, which ends up with me paying people I know personally a ton of money to grind out boring crap (or doing it myself), when I'd much rather pay them to work on the interesting things.
- catfish 17y ago
  The key lies in documentation. The better you explain it on paper, the better the result. Especially with India.
  - zaidf 17y ago
    Bingo! A lot of my programming projects, I do the db schema design and post it along with the other specs. Dumb it down as much as you can. Of course, at some point if a project takes off you would want someone longterm. That's a whole different game(hiring a full-time developer offshore).
- maxklein 17y ago
  A lot of it comes from experience. After outsourcing for a year, you can judge pretty accurately within the first paragraph what a person is good for. The way they communicate will tell you a lot.
  - icey 17y ago
    I'd definitely be interested in hearing more about this.
    - zaidf 17y ago
      I always felt like someone should write a quick, to-the-point ebook for outsourcing newbies on working through the outsourcing world. May be I'll pen that one day:)
      - icey 17y ago
        One of the things that I really like about HN is that I feel like most of the people here have information worth sharing, and information that's valuable enough that I'd pay for a PDF of that information. I'm kind of surprised we don't have an HN ebook marketplace going yet, to be honest.
      - allantyoung 17y ago
        Zaid - I love your blog so your future ebook will probably be good too. If you have extensive experience outsourcing, I want to learn from your trails. So please do it. Here are some helpful links to get you started. I'm looking forward to reading your ebook. http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/03/you_should_writ.html http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/03/you_should_w... http://www.squidoo.com/howtomakeanEbook http://www.squidoo.com/howtomakeanEbook http://www.problogger.net/archives/2009/09/16/thirteen-steps-to-write-and-publish-a-free-ebook-in-thirteen-hours/ http://www.problogger.net/archives/2009/09/16/thirteen-steps...
        zaidf 17y ago
        Thanks for the encouragement Alex. I will start putting together my ideas and bring it together one of these weekends!
- zaidf 17y ago
  Start at rentacoder.com(lots of individual coders). Another option is elance.com(better for larger projects; more companies bidding). I was a top coder there in high school(early 2000). These days I use it exclusively to hire coders and designers for very specific projects.
  - RACNicole 17y ago
    Hi, this is Nicole from Rent a Coder. I'd like to thank you for recommending our service. A couple of important points about Elance: 1. Elance workers can't make more than 3 bids a month unless they pay a subscription fee ($9.95/month for 20, $19.94/month for 40 or $39.95/month for 60). This could reduce the number of qualified bids you receive -- and workers may pass these fees on to you in the form of a higher price. (There are no such restrictions at Rentacoder.) 2. Elance charges $199 - $399 for each arbitration case, and its mandatory pre-arbitration processes allow an abusive worker to stall the start of arbitration (consequently preventing you from accessing your money for weeks... 21 business days in fact). Making matters worse, Elance's arbitration process is tricky with each part of the process elongated with 3 - 15 business days in-between. Rentacoder doesn't work like that because it places time limits on arbitration responses. As a result, 45% of Rentacoder's arbitrations are completed under a day. 75% under a week. What can be particularly frustrating is that Elance doesn't publish the detailed rules of its arbitration process. Rentacoder does, of course. There are of course, many differences between our service and Elance's. You can compare the 7 major services through this link to discover even more: http://www.rentacoder.com/RentACoder/DotNet/misc/CompetitorInformation/WhyRentACoder_ForBuyers.aspx http://www.rentacoder.com/RentACoder/DotNet/misc/CompetitorI... If you have any questions, please let me know. You can also call in to talk to a facilitator 7 days a week, or email us (see http://www.rentacoder.com/RentACoder/misc/Feedback.asp http://www.rentacoder.com/RentACoder/misc/Feedback.asp). Nicole www.rentacoder.com
catfish 17y ago
Philippines = best SMO posters in the world and cheap.
- zaidf 17y ago
  Interesting. What exactly do they do under "SMO" umbrella?
  - rantfoil 17y ago
    wince SMO = spam social networks with garbage posts to get better page rank. That's the kind of stuff we have to spend hours and hours banning. sigh
    - catfish 17y ago
      SMO != spam in every case. This is not the kind of stuff you spend one second banning since none of it is posted to your sites. It is strictly created by and for and posted on the sites owned by the clients. When you step out of the box and think, you can find plenty of legitimate ways to leverage low cost content providers, for profit. You can stop wincing now...
      - zaidf 17y ago
        I agree, there is a right way and a wrong way to do SMO. I think you'll agree that most people offering their SMO services are either selling snake oil or spam. Few seem to know how to do it right. You seem to be in the minority so I'd love to learn more, especially in the context of what the folks overseas do. Are we talking about them writing quality copy for your website that hit on specific keywords? That would be SEO territory but I know people using Mechanical Turk and other services to get decent-quality copy written for cheap.
        catfish 17y ago
        I graduated from Mechanical Turk to full timers about 2 years ago when our client load increased. Though SEO is a part of our work, the real money is in traffic. We achieve a better than 1/100th CPA cost with SMO as compared to PPC with Google. Think about it. Someone who clicks through to your page from Twitter/Facebook/Linked In is a known quantity. What do you know about someone that clicks on a paid link in google. Nothing. What does it cost for that click? Only your monthly publishing cost per account divided by total clicks per month. And when someone walks through the door from SMO, you got a @name, you can look up their bio, you got their thoughts in their tweets, and you know where they are from. And it cost a fraction of the price you pay Google for an unqualified, anonymous click. And with Twitter you have zero click fraud. I have cracked the code on CPA using Twitter and it begins with killer content. And I use staffing in the Philippines which cost 1/15th American dollars for same person, no taxation, no flooring cost, no legal issues. If I were Google, I would definitely figure out how to buy Twitter before it eats their PPC lunch. There are a whole lot of us X-PPC guys who no longer pay ridiculous fees to the search engines. As for the Turk, the cost is a little more than the PI and with your own staffing, you get the added bonus of continuity. You also get the benefits of knowing your staff, weekly quality review meetings, standardization of process, and a consistent quality that I found missing with Mechanical Turk. I would still recommend MT though for anyone running a few sites who needs less than full time commitment for projects.
shakedown 17y ago
A company I worked for used a relatively big web company in Romania, hiring a few developers over there to work full time on their site. The HTML and CSS they wrote were generated using Dreamweaver, and their PHP was a mess with tons of copying and pasting. It was impossible to get the company's higher level management team to understand why continuing to use these guys was bad idea, because they saw the front end 'just working', yet it was so hard for us to modify and understand any of their code. If you intended to have a site that one day has skilled programmers working on it and is actually maintainable, be careful about things 'just working' with outsourced code.
- zaidf 17y ago
  Yes, quality of code is a huge concern for me which is why I always have a growth plan: if a certain project takes off, I will quickly hire another proven full-time programmer to recode or completely understand the project. I also am not a huge fan of working with offshore companies. There is enough friction already in talking remotely. I don't like another layer of management in between developers. Though for bigger projects, you need a project manager of some sort.
- gvb 17y ago
  "...mess with tons of copying and pasting." I call this "ransom note programming." http://images.google.com/images?q=ransom+note http://images.google.com/images?q=ransom+note Nasty stuff, not even enough pride in their work to run an autoindent program on it.
- bad_user 17y ago
  Hi, I also live in Romania. > relatively big web company in Romania Little quiz ... what should set your alarm on? The "big" size of that "web company" or its location? For me it's a no-brainer ... simply because for a consulting company to scale to that "big" factor ... you need to hire a lot of third-rate, cheap code-monkeys ... that's business 101 ;) Second of all ... your company should've asked for a portfolio of the actual developers that ended up working for you, simply because the quality of the employees varies greatly even in well-respected organizations. Or was there some kind of manager acting as a proxy between you and those doing the actual work? And out of curiosity, in your country there aren't any "big software companies" that are doing consulting work of dubious quality? This seems to me that it was more a problem with your management. Blaming it on "outsourcing" is not really accurate. BTW ... in my small company that does consulting work, we aren't taking outsourced projects very often. We don't do it simply because those kind of clients that would outsource to us are of very poor quality, leading to poor communications, unmet deadlines, unmet payments and generally disastrous results.
petercooper 17y ago
People's personal experiences are interesting, but are potentially ridiculous generalizations.. like saying Jews make better bankers, the British are good tailors, the French are great chefs, or what not. I doubt all Indian designers are useless..
- zaidf 17y ago
  Accurate generalizations can be very helpful.

yannis 17y ago

>I don't invent shit. Look at what is invented already and make it a bit easier to use This is great advice!

vibhavs 17y ago
He also says: >I stay 2-3 years behind the trend. After the early adopters have left, there is this gap that can be filled by people who are willing to learn from the failures of the early adopters That sounds great in theory, but can anyone expand on that? What are some specific examples?
- yannis 17y ago
  There are many examples, the whole Japan growth in the eighties was based on this model. They took existing technologies and refined them. Stackoverflow is one example of redefining forums (they essentially killed a lot of programming forums). thesixtyone.com redefined indie music!
- tewks 17y ago
  Do pardon me if I'm being obvious or not addressing your question, but the following examples spring to mind: pets.com, etoys, et al. -> zappos, altavista, goto, yhoo, et al. -> goog, broadcast.com, real media, "quicktime TV" -> youtube These examples were all established a few years after the original players came in fully loaded with cash, hype, etc yet failed to solve or even identify underlying problems.
  - yannis 17y ago
    One way to get ideas is to visit your local library and go through all the technology magazines of +- 3 years ago.
    - TheSOB88 17y ago
      +3 years ago?

scootklein 17y ago

what is the point in separating the two, can't you be both? i would be willing to bet that the majority of people here that consider themselves "entrepreneurs" or are working in startups would identify with almost every single one of those points. are we all hacks? or is there one point on there that makes you a NON-entrepreneur compared to everyone else who thinks they are?

maxklein 17y ago
I'd put it this way: Some people are born to be independent businessmen. They read the theory, they talk the talk, then they take the step and start off in business. There is the other way - just making money on the internet, and there is no grand plan behind it. It's more of a thing that just develops itself without some type of enterpreneurial drive or theory behind it.
- ekanes 17y ago
  Max - what's with the picture above your post? Not sure I understand what you're trying to say with it. Edit: Nevermind. It's late and I skimmed your post too quickly.
socmoth 17y ago
so obviously, he is very entrepreneur-ing, but he is choosing to differentiate himself from people who call themselves entrepreneurs. The reason he wants to do this are what he is writing about. basically, he gets things done and makes money, even though he is using old tech. he isn't buzz worthly, but he is successful in his own way. for what it is worth, i really like working with people with this attitude. (except the next step is often looking for bigger markets)
- allantyoung 17y ago
  He's done a good job of positioning himself as the "anti-entrepreneur" and it works. He is obviously very entrepreneurial and all the actions he describes are central to bootstrapping.

ErrantX 17y ago

You see, there are lots of enterprenuers out there His description of entrepreneurs is, I think, not very good. Im sure there are lots of people like he describes who would call themselves entrepreneurs. But every good one that I've met or "seen" doesn't even half fit such a stereotype. In fact I suspect most really good entrepreneurs are hacks just the same :) Dont mix pretenders with the real thing!

jorsh 17y ago

"I make about $12k a month, which is not very much in the global scale of things, but it's fine." I'm sorry, what?

SwellJoe 17y ago
That's about what one can make doing contract work, assuming you're good and reliable and get a bit of referral and repeat business happening. But, the point of starting a company is usually to do better than contracting, eventually. You trade current comfort for a steadily rising income that, hopefully, some day far surpasses what you could make doing contract work, or working for a major corporation, and most importantly does not scale based on the number of hours you can work, but instead scales on how effectively you build your organization. With taxes, health insurance, retirement savings, having a place big enough to work out of, etc. $12k/month is comfortable, but not particularly wealthy. It's a modest goal by most startup founders ("entrepreneurs") standards, I would think. I think most tech startup founders are at least looking for "fuck you" money, which is somewhere in the millions for most people. It'd take ~10 years at $12k/month to reach multiple millions. So, yes, $12k/month isn't very much for the audience he's speaking to, though it's certainly respectable.
- wgj 17y ago
  He ended by implying he still has his day job. If I read that correctly, that means $12K above his salary and benefits, and with only part time effort.
  - SwellJoe 17y ago
    Right...that does make a difference, doesn't it? So, yeah, I reckon $12k/month for part-time effort is awesome.
  - gcheong 17y ago
    Actually he ended by saying that he wouldn't quit his job to start a company. This could mean that he started a company on the side and quit once it got to where it paid enough.

mattmaroon 17y ago

"After a while, however, the feeling disappears. Seeing your daily revenue go from $1000 to $2000 starts to mean nothing. It's all just business. That's no longer where the excitement is." Not true at all. It never gets old watching the average daily profit rise.

SwellJoe 17y ago
Folks are different. I find I have to make myself care about those numbers. I tend to fall into a comfort zone, where my brain has decided, "Yes, we have enough money coming in to keep us in food and houses, so we're OK. Think about more important things, now." I've made myself stop dealing directly with our technology lately, and begun to focus more on the money side of things. I've only recently started doing regular bookkeeping and monthly revenue reports and such. And, it is satisfying to watch the numbers increase, but it's not as satisfying as building something new, to me.
- bemmu 17y ago
  After the first $1000 / month I started caring a lot less, because I could eat and pay rent. After $2000 I stopped caring some more, because that is enough for budget travel, which is the biggest "thing" I want. Now I've found my next motivation to be "for each extra $2000 I make, I can have these things some month in the future when I've lost my revenue source".

prgmatic 17y ago

Certainly being a web entrepreneur is considered "not following the herd", but within the "not following the herd" there is also two paths, and one is indeed another herd. I love his philosophy, do not follow the herd. Do your own thing.

krakensden 17y ago

What is his business? I can't find a link anywhere...

antidaily 17y ago
"niche sites" according to his twitter.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- zaidf 17y ago
  Usually code for affiliate/seo/ebook business. I have a few friends making a killing doing this. It isn't as easy as it sounds. And it isn't as scammy as it sounds. When done right, it can make good money.
  - wallflower 17y ago
    The classic Parrot eBook gold mine: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=516215 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=516215

nzmsv 17y ago

Very nice. Someone who outsources all his work to poorer parts of the world boasting about judging people by the country they come from. Sounds just a little bit like picking your new "employees" at a slave market.

lhuang 17y ago
Cheap shot... I understand your greater point but I think its misdirected in this case and not entirely fair to Max. What Max is doing in his post... how is that any different from making generalized statements about companies and the quality of products they churn out? Though I agree that because we are dealing with actual people perhaps more tact should be used. That said, we do live in a global economy. Chances are that the clothes you're wearing now were made by some "slave" in a poor developing country.
catfish 17y ago
It's not slavery if you pay an amount that is fair for the foreign employee. In the Philippines, $275.00 USD is equivalent to a 2k job here in the states. That's not slavery. As far as classifying quality of work effort by country, try it yourself and in a short time you will learn that different cultures deliver different types of workers, and thinking, and creativity. I know that sounds strange, but it is true. And here is the funny part of the entire deal. If you suddenly found yourself transported to Russia, Romania, India, the Philippines, or China, good luck getting work as Americans are mostly viewed as fat, lazy, complaining do nothings, who barely understand the concept of a hard days work for a fair wage. Ask every foreign employee that works for me and not one of them would agree with your comment. They are grateful to have the work, to work at home, to raise their families well, and to do so by using their brains. I don't feel the least bit bad for outsourcing either. Americans are the hardest employees to manage, and rarely deserve their high cost. There is a huge downside to working with the ME generation. Most think that a job is an entitlement. Ugh...
- nzmsv 17y ago
  OK, outsourcing does not equal slavery. That said, we all do stereotype all the time. For example, you probably thought from reading my comment that I'm a fat, lazy American teenager with a sense of entitlement :) I lived in Russia in the 90s, and I saw exactly the opposite effect from the one you describe first-hand. There were people coming from English-speaking countries who could get management-level jobs mostly by virtue of coming from an English-speaking country. I knew some personally, and I don't hold it against them at all. They were seen as having an understanding of how the capitalist world works, and this was valued (whether or not this was true). After a decade, the people were not seeing the quick returns from the switch to capitalism that they were hoping for. As a result, the general attitude towards the West in Russia has changed. You can read all about it in the news. I also have friends back in Russia, who work for an outsourcing company. The majority of programming jobs there that pay a livable salary are outsource. There are few Russian companies that work on original products of their own (Parallels comes to mind). I hold no illusions. As long as the US market remains the largest, that's where the money will be, and outsourcing will remain a viable strategy. Does the idealist in me wish that the people working outsourced positions could access this market directly, without effectively paying a middleman? Or better yet, have a thriving local market? Yes, but I realize this just won't happen.

rms 17y ago

Can you share one of your sites? I think we're all pretty curious to see. We won't make fun of you.

robryan 17y ago

The dropbox comment sounds a little cheap. Making $12k and going out of your way to avoid paying $10 for a quality app?

lhuang 17y ago
eh incentives. we all do this to some degree on a daily basis. e.g. downloading your favorite song for free instead of paying .99 for it on itunes, etc.
maxklein 17y ago
The only webservice I pay for is DabbleDB. Dropbox I can live with the restriction, but you absolutely need a database when you need to track a large amount of items. I'm REALLY suprised that there are not cheaper alternatives to DabbleDB - if there had been anything a bit cheaper or a bit more ajaxified, I'd have gone for it. Also, the main reason I don't pay for dropbox is that you need to pay for EACH user! So at just 5 users I'm paying $50 a month. That's crazy wasted money!
- domodomo 17y ago
  If you are only sharing a subset of folders that are under the free limit, I'm pretty sure the other side can still use the free account. I'm doing this with a friend right now, I have the paid account and am using 30+GB, he has a free account, and we share just the folders we need to.

adriand 17y ago

Perhaps this got traction on HN just because it's against the usual grain here, which focuses on high standards, good design, and taking pride in one's work. But I still don't really get why this post is deserving of the upvotes it got. Is it really any surprise that you can make lots of money if you use cheap labour, if you're okay with releasing - and perhaps even selling, though I hope not - garbage software ("Release a really crappy version", "I don't spend money on design"), and if you're content without innovating or trying to break new ground? The world is full of people who do that, and yes, many of them get by just fine, and some make lots of money. But there's far more to life, and work, than that. For me, that's what's so great about HN: it is full of inspirations for a web developer like myself. Inspirational companies and inspirational people who don't rest until they get it right. Who push the envelope. Who care deeply about the experience of using their software. This post contains nothing inspirational like that. I've worked for people like this before. Never again.

hnhg 17y ago
Yeah, I was expecting to find myself disagreeing with you but I find it a little bleak too. I don't know if it makes me a ridiculous idealist but I do care about doing things to a certain level of quality.
catfish 17y ago
I up voted it because I like the fact that this guy is a realist. So few of us who read HN will touch the heavens above no matter how bright, or thoughtful, or elegant our work might be. Luck and timing have more to do with success than inspiration. This story is a reflection of those of us without timing or luck, who grind it out day in day out. It is a nice counter balance to the inspirational, but largely unobtainable heights discussed in the stories normally posted here. Maybe in the beginning you can take the high road, and find "more to life" than this guy does. But for those of us who left the high road long ago, and are raising families, and paying mortgages, and grinding out a living online, this guys approach is sage advice. The truth gets up voted.
10ren 17y ago
As far "release a crappy version", it's just a blunter way of saying release early, release often And the following part "No response, abandon. Complaints, improve" is just the concept of the minimal prototype; also used in "Discovery-driven planning". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_driven_planning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_driven_planning You seem to be speaking from a professional mind-set, which is perfectionistic. An entrepreneurial mind-set is a little different: why perfect something if no one wants it? Or, as pg says "build something people want". Find out what they want first, then perfect it.