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I started off my career at 19 years old building custom 468x80 pixel web banners back in 2000. I found customers on EBAY (yes, literally EBAY's web section) an

by aresant 11y ago

I started off my career at 19 years old building custom 468x80 pixel web banners back in 2000. I found customers on EBAY (yes, literally EBAY's web section) and charged $9.95 a pop which was a fraction of the big agency rate. I would pour hours into designing and tweaking the banners to fit into the 15k size allotment of the day while also being aesthetically beautiful. After hundreds of iterations I learned how to not only make beautiful banners, but banners that drove CLICKS & conversions which was all the customer ultimately cared about. As the free market took hold in my own life the customers that were showing up for the cheap rate were pushed aside from the customers that wanted to harness the value I was delivering and were happy to pay increasing fees. On the back of those customer relationships I've spent 15 years building amazing businesses and exceeding my highest expectations for where a lowly photoshop jockey could go in the world. My point is while this 18F project is fascinating as a thought experiment the publicity alone for the winning bidder @ $1.00 disqualifies that from being the actual "rate". This isn't an experiment in "I'll deliver quality, high-skill work for $1.00" this is an experiment in "Who wants a SHOT" at making a name, an intro, or have a permanent stand-out line on their resume. If you want to see what kind of work really gets accomplished for $1.00 at scale, go poke around Mechanical Turk or Fivver.

xhrpost 11y ago
Sorry, off-topic, but if you have those banner ads from 2000 sitting around, you should look into throwing them on archive.org if you haven't already. Nice little piece of Internet history you may have there.
eli 11y ago
Charging $1 is less ridiculous when you consider how many people also donate software design and development work for free to causes they believe in all the time. How many developers do you think Bernie Sanders has who have effectively bid $0 to create projects for his campaign?
ap22213 11y ago
Back in 2004, I worked for a SaaS startup that sold reverse auctioning services for low-cost suppliers (e.g. China) to huge US manufacturers. The biggest problem that we faced was that the final auction price would end up ridiculously low. The manufacturers were super happy until they found out much later that the supplier couldn't deliver. Then, we came up with a new scheme to do certification and auditing on low-cost suppliers. We even had a large team of scouts combing through these countries and conducting reviews. That way the manufacturers could limit their auctions to only suppliers that passed certain filters. Again, the manufacturers were happy. The lowest bid price would always go really low. They were happy, that is, until the suppliers started to quickly game the system. They'd pass the review criteria but they'd use other tricks - outsourcing to other companies, degrading other parts of their service offering, etc. Then, it just ended up being an 'arms race': we'd enhance our criteria and they'd find somewhere else to cut corners. Needless to say, our company was sold for a loss (mainly for our patent portfolio) and absorbed into our investor's other companies)

by aresant 11y ago

xhrpost 11y ago

Sorry, off-topic, but if you have those banner ads from 2000 sitting around, you should look into throwing them on archive.org if you haven't already. Nice little piece of Internet history you may have there.

eli 11y ago

Charging $1 is less ridiculous when you consider how many people also donate software design and development work for free to causes they believe in all the time. How many developers do you think Bernie Sanders has who have effectively bid $0 to create projects for his campaign?

ap22213 11y ago

Back in 2004, I worked for a SaaS startup that sold reverse auctioning services for low-cost suppliers (e.g. China) to huge US manufacturers. The biggest problem that we faced was that the final auction price would end up ridiculously low. The manufacturers were super happy until they found out much later that the supplier couldn't deliver. Then, we came up with a new scheme to do certification and auditing on low-cost suppliers. We even had a large team of scouts combing through these countries and conducting reviews. That way the manufacturers could limit their auctions to only suppliers that passed certain filters. Again, the manufacturers were happy. The lowest bid price would always go really low. They were happy, that is, until the suppliers started to quickly game the system. They'd pass the review criteria but they'd use other tricks - outsourcing to other companies, degrading other parts of their service offering, etc. Then, it just ended up being an 'arms race': we'd enhance our criteria and they'd find somewhere else to cut corners. Needless to say, our company was sold for a loss (mainly for our patent portfolio) and absorbed into our investor's other companies)