6 ms·

Poll: What Do You Hate About Contracting?

30 points by ghempton 15y ago

If you are currently doing contracting work, what is your biggest pain point in the process?

zackmorris 15y ago
You forgot acquiring customers and being on call with nearly unlimited liability...
gruseom 15y ago
Not owning the product and lack of creative control.
- orthecreedence 15y ago
  This was a big one for us too, which is why we did half and half. We contracted enough to get by, but also spent a lot of time working on our own projects on the side. What eventually happened though is the contract work slowly took over most of what we were doing. It's hard to strike a balance here.
  - gruseom 15y ago
    I tried that too and found it useless. The product work got starved and ended up receiving far less than the half that was supposed to be its share. But I admit to sucking completely at divided focus.
- ctide 15y ago
  This, but more specifically for me, writing code for features that you find utterly repugnant.
  - rbranson 15y ago
    This happens everywhere where clowns have the money, unfortunately.
drewcrawford 15y ago
Source: I've run an iOS contracting company for the last three years. Here are some big problems: * Lead qualification. This is an enormous problem. Lots of people want revenue sharing deals, etc., and it takes too long to work out whether they're serious about the project and whether I'm the right fit. What do they do for a living? Is this a corporate or personal project? etc. * Client acquisition cost. Most of the options out there for advertising, etc., don't have a good ROI. It's super difficult to measure advertising effectiveness because you only have a handful of "conversions" (new clients) and thus your results are never statistically significant. It's all black magic and voodoo. * Pricing. We do 99% fixed quote so hourly rate isn't really the issue. In my market, you adjust the scope to fit the budget, not adjust the budget to fit the scope. The problem is that clients play very close to the vest on what they want to spend, meaning I have to guess what they want to spend. If I guess right, I get the project, if I guess wrong, I will never hear from them again. The whole market is a game of chance, not a game of skill. * Slow clients. It doesn't matter if the feature takes 1 hour or 5 hours if the client takes 4 weeks to get back to you. Tightening up our business process has improved this considerably from what it used to be, but I imagine a number of contractors experience this schedule unpredictability. * Client education. Milestones, scope, test builds, etc., are just not in the vocabulary for non-software-background clients. Why the Estonian firm quoting $2000 for a $20k project is lying. How to collect crash reports. How to describe issues so that we can reproduce them. etc. These problems are WAY bigger than anything you've listed. But about those: * Project length - Rarely have I thought about this apart from the "Slow client" issue. There are no projects too short, or too long, for me to do, particularly if it's well-paying work. * Good requirements - we usually write them. Being in the fixed quote business, we're pretty good at it. * Scope creep - this is a minor problem for us, but we've tightened up the business process and are close to completely eliminating it as a problem. * On-time payment - Another minor problem, recent changes to the business process are close to eliminating it. * Negotiating the rate - we rarely do hourly work, so our version of this problem is the "Pricing" problem above. If you are working on a startup in this space, please sign me up to give you feedback, as I could go on for hours :-)
- rpwilcox 15y ago
  Amen about the lead qualification. I just had this happen today: I spent a few hours on an email for a potential client whose project sounds like 3-6 man-months of work. Now, does he really have that kind of dough laying around (ie: angel funding), or will I never here from the client again because he was hoping to get it done for $200? (Or worse: profit sharing / equity arrangements. Equity doesn't pay my rent.)
superkinz 15y ago
I hate finding projects. I know they're out there, but it's all word of mouth. Sucks.
- scal84 15y ago
  This is my favourite part - I find it helps if you treat it like the game it is. Meet people, ask about their business, be friendly and before you know it they are asking your advice on an app. Get in there and close the deal, do a good job, get a referral, rinse and repeat. It's all about networking and talking a good game. It doesn't come natural to engineers I admit but once I decided to just go for it I found it can be fun. On the plus side you do get to meet a lot of interesting people and discover interesting ideas for apps.
nicksergeant 15y ago
Scope creep is always the worst for me. It happens with almost every single side-project I take. That said, since I started billing hourly (with nightly updates to work / invoice), it's gotten a lot better.
medinism 15y ago
Getting unlimited calling from clients who are not serious is number one by far! signal to noise ratio in the freelancing market is dismal.
- kls 15y ago
  That is why many of us tend to stop taking non-network referred clients one we pass a certain point. It acts as a filter for the noise. I actually made a pretty big mistake in that I took on a client that bought all of our capacity for the last 2 years. It was great while it lasted but many of my smaller clients have since moved on. So now that that project is winding down, I am back to the high signal to noise ratio while I build back up my client base.
jarin 15y ago
Most parts of my projects go pretty nicely, but getting paid has always been a pain after the first couple of months on a project. Getting a deposit up front definitely helps with clients paying on time the first couple of months. I work with a lot of "green field" projects though, and it seems like many clients operate under the impression that the site is going to start making money right away without any marketing or advertising. I usually help them put together a plan for that (and help them with AdWords), but they are for some reason reluctant to actually start making calls, sending emails, reaching out to bloggers, etc. After a few months, they inevitably start paying later and later as they start to get concerned about running out of money.
rjd 15y ago
People wasting my time with stupid ideas. The amount of Groupon clones I've had come in front of me with "a special twist that will take the market by storm" is ridiculous.
- orthecreedence 15y ago
  Ha we had one of these once, but a Twitter clone. I kept trying to convince the person to just integrate with twitter instead of rebuilding it with a few tweaks, but to no avail. Sadly, we didn't end up taking the job...
  - rjd 15y ago
    The latest Groupon thing I had was a guy who came to with an idea of filling orders. People vote on what they want to do and then companies could see the customer interest and fill the order. He had a mechanism in place that would have a group buying percentage rating, and naturally lower profit per sale for the person filling the order. The first thing I said to him was, customers don't know what they are buying... they are gambling that companies supply something good. From a companies point of this is a great mechanism to drop stock that isn't selling... which for most people would be stock people don't want... I doubt there would be many $99 Touch Pads, and mostly as seen on TV products... He refused to acknowledge his system could be abused in this manner I suggested and the customer experience could end up quite bad (received products below the quality they expected). I asked for some sort of spec, or numbers, or anything around what he wanted and I was presented with "I've told you everything, and you have the designs". The designs where ball point pen sketches he left on a piece of paper we found in a cafe where we had our first meeting. I got a tad concerned at this point and pushed him for some other questions around his funding and sales men. No sales staff, and he was taking out a loan to develop the work. At this point I said I wasn't interested as I got concerned that when money didn't start rolling in I might not get paid. He got really angry with me after I declined and I felt a wave of relief as I assume he would have been the sort of client who would never have been wrong, and would have probably tried some stupid law suit blaming me for bad business decisions.
- rbranson 15y ago
Unosolo 15y ago
Having to work away from home, family and friends.
cperciva 15y ago
Getting paid. I finish work; I send an invoice; I get an email back saying "thanks, we'll process this right away"; and I wait. A month later, I send another email and get told that it "slipped through the cracks" or "got lost", and a week later I get a check in the mail. I think I'm batting roughly a 50% average on getting paid without sending the "uh, where's my money" email. I always get paid eventually and without complaints, so it's not as if people are trying to avoid paying; it just seems that people who hire me almost universally suck at doing paperwork. And really, that's a bad way to suck. I suck at doing paperwork, but I at least pay my bills promptly.
- mgkimsal 15y ago
  Ditto here. Maybe not 50%. Well... some of the work I do involves state agencies, and I've learned to deal with the pace of the machine. That said, once something's been 'approved' (meaning, an invoice has been approved) it's almost always < 60 days with the state. I've had some clients I've worked with start off by saying (couple times a bit rudely) "now look here, we can't pay the day you submit an invoice - don't even think that's going to happen - it'll usually be 2-4 weeks before you get a check!". I figured they'd been burned pretty badly by people pestering them for money. Turns about about 1/3rd of my subcontractors pester me the same, and I encouraged it because I used to paypal money the same day or next day after getting an invoice from them. I can do it, but there are times when I'm dealing with a lot of people, and other work, and simply don't have the time to deal with 'paperwork' but maybe once per week. I don't get the rudeness from people as much as the 'hey, i really need this money to buy food this week' stories. Word to the wise - don't pull that on me - it makes me want to find someone else who won't put me in that position. So... maybe that should be another issue on the list of things you hate about contracting - dealing with subcontractors :)
- dotBen 15y ago
  You need to get 50% payment upfront. Or work in blocks of money on account (eg for a $50k job, you have the client send you $10k in advance and when that is near depleted you have them wire you the next $10k, etc)
  - 15y ago
wavephorm 15y ago
I would say, the unwillingness for companies to outsource the interesting work. IME, most consulting work is just grind, no interesting problems, and the pay rarely really makes up for the real amount of work.
- daeken 15y ago
  Find your niche and only contract in that space. For quite a while, I only did reverse-engineering contracting; I gained a reputation for doing it, and my available work and hourly rate rose as a result of that. Figure out the intersection of what you're interested in, what people are willing to pay for, and what you're good at and you're set.
  - rbranson 15y ago
    Yeah, I actually think you've got a better shot at specializing in interesting work as a consultant. As a staff developer, even if you work on interesting things most of the time, you can still get stuck with bottom-of-the-barrel shit like the equivalent of writing a VB app to track the secretary's time.
  - andrewljohnson 15y ago
    Exactly... we do nothing but mapping apps, leveraging a platform we license out. Our partners know that the apps we produce are going to rank and make money, and so they pay.
- dotBen 15y ago
  I'm a consultant and I get this a lot but I actually agree with it, esp where the client is a larger firm with numerous employees. When I was on the other side of the table, and an employee working in a dev team that also consisted of contractors, the only reason I didn't quit and demand to be rehired as a contractor on 200% of my salary is because the firm only used contractors for grind work. I knew that all of the work that would be interesting and furthering would be farmed out to the employees out of loyalty.
Omnipresent 15y ago
Perhaps finding clients should be there. How are you guys finding clients? Im looking for clients that I can deal with on the side along with my day job. How did you guys go about getting first client
- orthecreedence 15y ago
  Elance got us a lot of ongoing work, believe it or not. It seems like a tool for finding people in Russia to do your work for cheap, but a profile on Elance (at least a few years ago, mind you) got my brother and I two very large, ongoing contracts (which in turn led to more work from others as well). Also, LinkedIn seems to be a very good tool for self-marketing nowadays, I hear a lot of people get work through it very regularly.
- kls 15y ago
  The biggest issue for you will be the side work issue. It limits your ability to take one a larger project. Which are usually the one that give you room to breath. In our group of developers we do have a few moonlighters but we have 5 full-timers as well. My suggestion to you would be until you can get out on your own full-time, team up with some other freelancers. It will broaden the projects that you can service.
orthecreedence 15y ago
Honestly, never had to deal with any of these. My brother and I would only work for people who had the money and knew what they wanted up front. We were very straightforward (and firm) about our rates, and if someone didn't pay us on time, we'd stop all work on their project until they did. Scope creep was never an issue because we worked hourly ;). The thing I didn't like most about contracting was having my time split up so much between different projects. I like to work on one thing for days at a time, and this wasn't always realistic with several projects going at once.
aantix 15y ago
The paperwork, namely creating detailed line-item invoices. That's why I created this gem, Big Bucks No Whammies, to automatically generate my invoices from my git commits. https://github.com/aantix/big_bucks_no_whammies https://github.com/aantix/big_bucks_no_whammies Here's a sample invoice : https://github.com/aantix/big_bucks_no_whammies/blob/master/sample_report.pdf?raw=true https://github.com/aantix/big_bucks_no_whammies/blob/master/...
- tptacek 15y ago
  I'm not sure providing detailed line-item invoices like this is a win. How are you getting cornered into pricing on a commit-by-commit basis?
  - aantix 15y ago
    It's not a commit by commit basis. Time is tracked on a daily basis using a 3rd party program called Timesink. The directions are outlined on the gem's README. https://github.com/aantix/big_bucks_no_whammies https://github.com/aantix/big_bucks_no_whammies
- cperciva 15y ago
  Your clients ask for details invoices? I rarely get more detailed than consisting of "<date> Software development <hours> @ <rate> = <total>" and nobody has ever complained.
andrewljohnson 15y ago
My biggest problem is educating customers on an iterative process. We don't do strict contracting, but we do license our iOS software platform and provide custom development work for the apps. Both for our own products, and partner products, we like to begin beta testing apps at quite an embarrassing, early stage in the process. We also basically refuse to spec anything but the most basic features of the app, until we hear from users. In almost every case, the partner agrees to this structure, but then when it comes down to it, they see what we want to release to beta (50-100 users), and then they push back and try and get us to implement features they think are important, or fix bugs they believe matter. They are somewhat incredulous when we push back and decline to bill them hours. It always works out in the end. When the partner starts hearing the incredibly valuable things users say when they test the apps, they immediately understand the value, and it's smooth sailing from there. But trying to get a company to release crappy, buggy, unfinished software to 100 of their real customers seems to always take some doing. We've never had an issue getting paid, and we always require money up front. I did have to struggle once to get 10% of a contract, but I honestly believe it was just accidentally FUBARed.
pacomerh 15y ago
My biggest issue is synchronizing with the client. You make a perfect schedule with the right set of milestones that works for you and your other projects, but you have to be ready to answer the phone and break your flow to attend a client that is really excited because they got a whole bunch of assets for the site and they'd like to see them live :). So you have to ready to push your calendar and move people around.

30 points by ghempton 15y ago

If you are currently doing contracting work, what is your biggest pain point in the process?

zackmorris 15y ago

You forgot acquiring customers and being on call with nearly unlimited liability...

gruseom 15y ago

Not owning the product and lack of creative control.

orthecreedence 15y ago
This was a big one for us too, which is why we did half and half. We contracted enough to get by, but also spent a lot of time working on our own projects on the side. What eventually happened though is the contract work slowly took over most of what we were doing. It's hard to strike a balance here.
- gruseom 15y ago
  I tried that too and found it useless. The product work got starved and ended up receiving far less than the half that was supposed to be its share. But I admit to sucking completely at divided focus.
ctide 15y ago
This, but more specifically for me, writing code for features that you find utterly repugnant.
- rbranson 15y ago
  This happens everywhere where clowns have the money, unfortunately.

drewcrawford 15y ago

Source: I've run an iOS contracting company for the last three years. Here are some big problems: * Lead qualification. This is an enormous problem. Lots of people want revenue sharing deals, etc., and it takes too long to work out whether they're serious about the project and whether I'm the right fit. What do they do for a living? Is this a corporate or personal project? etc. * Client acquisition cost. Most of the options out there for advertising, etc., don't have a good ROI. It's super difficult to measure advertising effectiveness because you only have a handful of "conversions" (new clients) and thus your results are never statistically significant. It's all black magic and voodoo. * Pricing. We do 99% fixed quote so hourly rate isn't really the issue. In my market, you adjust the scope to fit the budget, not adjust the budget to fit the scope. The problem is that clients play very close to the vest on what they want to spend, meaning I have to guess what they want to spend. If I guess right, I get the project, if I guess wrong, I will never hear from them again. The whole market is a game of chance, not a game of skill. * Slow clients. It doesn't matter if the feature takes 1 hour or 5 hours if the client takes 4 weeks to get back to you. Tightening up our business process has improved this considerably from what it used to be, but I imagine a number of contractors experience this schedule unpredictability. * Client education. Milestones, scope, test builds, etc., are just not in the vocabulary for non-software-background clients. Why the Estonian firm quoting $2000 for a $20k project is lying. How to collect crash reports. How to describe issues so that we can reproduce them. etc. These problems are WAY bigger than anything you've listed. But about those: * Project length - Rarely have I thought about this apart from the "Slow client" issue. There are no projects too short, or too long, for me to do, particularly if it's well-paying work. * Good requirements - we usually write them. Being in the fixed quote business, we're pretty good at it. * Scope creep - this is a minor problem for us, but we've tightened up the business process and are close to completely eliminating it as a problem. * On-time payment - Another minor problem, recent changes to the business process are close to eliminating it. * Negotiating the rate - we rarely do hourly work, so our version of this problem is the "Pricing" problem above. If you are working on a startup in this space, please sign me up to give you feedback, as I could go on for hours :-)

rpwilcox 15y ago
Amen about the lead qualification. I just had this happen today: I spent a few hours on an email for a potential client whose project sounds like 3-6 man-months of work. Now, does he really have that kind of dough laying around (ie: angel funding), or will I never here from the client again because he was hoping to get it done for $200? (Or worse: profit sharing / equity arrangements. Equity doesn't pay my rent.)

superkinz 15y ago

I hate finding projects. I know they're out there, but it's all word of mouth. Sucks.

scal84 15y ago
This is my favourite part - I find it helps if you treat it like the game it is. Meet people, ask about their business, be friendly and before you know it they are asking your advice on an app. Get in there and close the deal, do a good job, get a referral, rinse and repeat. It's all about networking and talking a good game. It doesn't come natural to engineers I admit but once I decided to just go for it I found it can be fun. On the plus side you do get to meet a lot of interesting people and discover interesting ideas for apps.

nicksergeant 15y ago

Scope creep is always the worst for me. It happens with almost every single side-project I take. That said, since I started billing hourly (with nightly updates to work / invoice), it's gotten a lot better.

medinism 15y ago

Getting unlimited calling from clients who are not serious is number one by far! signal to noise ratio in the freelancing market is dismal.

kls 15y ago
That is why many of us tend to stop taking non-network referred clients one we pass a certain point. It acts as a filter for the noise. I actually made a pretty big mistake in that I took on a client that bought all of our capacity for the last 2 years. It was great while it lasted but many of my smaller clients have since moved on. So now that that project is winding down, I am back to the high signal to noise ratio while I build back up my client base.

jarin 15y ago

Most parts of my projects go pretty nicely, but getting paid has always been a pain after the first couple of months on a project. Getting a deposit up front definitely helps with clients paying on time the first couple of months. I work with a lot of "green field" projects though, and it seems like many clients operate under the impression that the site is going to start making money right away without any marketing or advertising. I usually help them put together a plan for that (and help them with AdWords), but they are for some reason reluctant to actually start making calls, sending emails, reaching out to bloggers, etc. After a few months, they inevitably start paying later and later as they start to get concerned about running out of money.

rjd 15y ago

People wasting my time with stupid ideas. The amount of Groupon clones I've had come in front of me with "a special twist that will take the market by storm" is ridiculous.

orthecreedence 15y ago
Ha we had one of these once, but a Twitter clone. I kept trying to convince the person to just integrate with twitter instead of rebuilding it with a few tweaks, but to no avail. Sadly, we didn't end up taking the job...
- rjd 15y ago
  The latest Groupon thing I had was a guy who came to with an idea of filling orders. People vote on what they want to do and then companies could see the customer interest and fill the order. He had a mechanism in place that would have a group buying percentage rating, and naturally lower profit per sale for the person filling the order. The first thing I said to him was, customers don't know what they are buying... they are gambling that companies supply something good. From a companies point of this is a great mechanism to drop stock that isn't selling... which for most people would be stock people don't want... I doubt there would be many $99 Touch Pads, and mostly as seen on TV products... He refused to acknowledge his system could be abused in this manner I suggested and the customer experience could end up quite bad (received products below the quality they expected). I asked for some sort of spec, or numbers, or anything around what he wanted and I was presented with "I've told you everything, and you have the designs". The designs where ball point pen sketches he left on a piece of paper we found in a cafe where we had our first meeting. I got a tad concerned at this point and pushed him for some other questions around his funding and sales men. No sales staff, and he was taking out a loan to develop the work. At this point I said I wasn't interested as I got concerned that when money didn't start rolling in I might not get paid. He got really angry with me after I declined and I felt a wave of relief as I assume he would have been the sort of client who would never have been wrong, and would have probably tried some stupid law suit blaming me for bad business decisions.
rbranson 15y ago

Unosolo 15y ago

Having to work away from home, family and friends.

cperciva 15y ago

Getting paid. I finish work; I send an invoice; I get an email back saying "thanks, we'll process this right away"; and I wait. A month later, I send another email and get told that it "slipped through the cracks" or "got lost", and a week later I get a check in the mail. I think I'm batting roughly a 50% average on getting paid without sending the "uh, where's my money" email. I always get paid eventually and without complaints, so it's not as if people are trying to avoid paying; it just seems that people who hire me almost universally suck at doing paperwork. And really, that's a bad way to suck. I suck at doing paperwork, but I at least pay my bills promptly.

mgkimsal 15y ago
Ditto here. Maybe not 50%. Well... some of the work I do involves state agencies, and I've learned to deal with the pace of the machine. That said, once something's been 'approved' (meaning, an invoice has been approved) it's almost always < 60 days with the state. I've had some clients I've worked with start off by saying (couple times a bit rudely) "now look here, we can't pay the day you submit an invoice - don't even think that's going to happen - it'll usually be 2-4 weeks before you get a check!". I figured they'd been burned pretty badly by people pestering them for money. Turns about about 1/3rd of my subcontractors pester me the same, and I encouraged it because I used to paypal money the same day or next day after getting an invoice from them. I can do it, but there are times when I'm dealing with a lot of people, and other work, and simply don't have the time to deal with 'paperwork' but maybe once per week. I don't get the rudeness from people as much as the 'hey, i really need this money to buy food this week' stories. Word to the wise - don't pull that on me - it makes me want to find someone else who won't put me in that position. So... maybe that should be another issue on the list of things you hate about contracting - dealing with subcontractors :)
dotBen 15y ago
You need to get 50% payment upfront. Or work in blocks of money on account (eg for a $50k job, you have the client send you $10k in advance and when that is near depleted you have them wire you the next $10k, etc)
- 15y ago

wavephorm 15y ago

I would say, the unwillingness for companies to outsource the interesting work. IME, most consulting work is just grind, no interesting problems, and the pay rarely really makes up for the real amount of work.

daeken 15y ago
Find your niche and only contract in that space. For quite a while, I only did reverse-engineering contracting; I gained a reputation for doing it, and my available work and hourly rate rose as a result of that. Figure out the intersection of what you're interested in, what people are willing to pay for, and what you're good at and you're set.
- rbranson 15y ago
  Yeah, I actually think you've got a better shot at specializing in interesting work as a consultant. As a staff developer, even if you work on interesting things most of the time, you can still get stuck with bottom-of-the-barrel shit like the equivalent of writing a VB app to track the secretary's time.
- andrewljohnson 15y ago
  Exactly... we do nothing but mapping apps, leveraging a platform we license out. Our partners know that the apps we produce are going to rank and make money, and so they pay.
dotBen 15y ago
I'm a consultant and I get this a lot but I actually agree with it, esp where the client is a larger firm with numerous employees. When I was on the other side of the table, and an employee working in a dev team that also consisted of contractors, the only reason I didn't quit and demand to be rehired as a contractor on 200% of my salary is because the firm only used contractors for grind work. I knew that all of the work that would be interesting and furthering would be farmed out to the employees out of loyalty.

Omnipresent 15y ago

Perhaps finding clients should be there. How are you guys finding clients? Im looking for clients that I can deal with on the side along with my day job. How did you guys go about getting first client

orthecreedence 15y ago
Elance got us a lot of ongoing work, believe it or not. It seems like a tool for finding people in Russia to do your work for cheap, but a profile on Elance (at least a few years ago, mind you) got my brother and I two very large, ongoing contracts (which in turn led to more work from others as well). Also, LinkedIn seems to be a very good tool for self-marketing nowadays, I hear a lot of people get work through it very regularly.
kls 15y ago
The biggest issue for you will be the side work issue. It limits your ability to take one a larger project. Which are usually the one that give you room to breath. In our group of developers we do have a few moonlighters but we have 5 full-timers as well. My suggestion to you would be until you can get out on your own full-time, team up with some other freelancers. It will broaden the projects that you can service.

orthecreedence 15y ago

Honestly, never had to deal with any of these. My brother and I would only work for people who had the money and knew what they wanted up front. We were very straightforward (and firm) about our rates, and if someone didn't pay us on time, we'd stop all work on their project until they did. Scope creep was never an issue because we worked hourly ;). The thing I didn't like most about contracting was having my time split up so much between different projects. I like to work on one thing for days at a time, and this wasn't always realistic with several projects going at once.

aantix 15y ago

The paperwork, namely creating detailed line-item invoices. That's why I created this gem, Big Bucks No Whammies, to automatically generate my invoices from my git commits. https://github.com/aantix/big_bucks_no_whammies https://github.com/aantix/big_bucks_no_whammies Here's a sample invoice : https://github.com/aantix/big_bucks_no_whammies/blob/master/sample_report.pdf?raw=true https://github.com/aantix/big_bucks_no_whammies/blob/master/...

tptacek 15y ago
I'm not sure providing detailed line-item invoices like this is a win. How are you getting cornered into pricing on a commit-by-commit basis?
- aantix 15y ago
  It's not a commit by commit basis. Time is tracked on a daily basis using a 3rd party program called Timesink. The directions are outlined on the gem's README. https://github.com/aantix/big_bucks_no_whammies https://github.com/aantix/big_bucks_no_whammies
cperciva 15y ago
Your clients ask for details invoices? I rarely get more detailed than consisting of "<date> Software development <hours> @ <rate> = <total>" and nobody has ever complained.

andrewljohnson 15y ago

My biggest problem is educating customers on an iterative process. We don't do strict contracting, but we do license our iOS software platform and provide custom development work for the apps. Both for our own products, and partner products, we like to begin beta testing apps at quite an embarrassing, early stage in the process. We also basically refuse to spec anything but the most basic features of the app, until we hear from users. In almost every case, the partner agrees to this structure, but then when it comes down to it, they see what we want to release to beta (50-100 users), and then they push back and try and get us to implement features they think are important, or fix bugs they believe matter. They are somewhat incredulous when we push back and decline to bill them hours. It always works out in the end. When the partner starts hearing the incredibly valuable things users say when they test the apps, they immediately understand the value, and it's smooth sailing from there. But trying to get a company to release crappy, buggy, unfinished software to 100 of their real customers seems to always take some doing. We've never had an issue getting paid, and we always require money up front. I did have to struggle once to get 10% of a contract, but I honestly believe it was just accidentally FUBARed.

pacomerh 15y ago

My biggest issue is synchronizing with the client. You make a perfect schedule with the right set of milestones that works for you and your other projects, but you have to be ready to answer the phone and break your flow to attend a client that is really excited because they got a whole bunch of assets for the site and they'd like to see them live :). So you have to ready to push your calendar and move people around.