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> How big a problem is that variant of qualification, really? I think there's a little bit of culture shock going on here between our particular contracting fi

> How big a problem is that variant of qualification, really? I think there's a little bit of culture shock going on here between our particular contracting fields. If you're doing enterprise-ish security contracting, you're not going to get an unemployed person in your lead pile by accident. I get three e-mails from unemployed people a week. I get 20+ leads a month from questionably-funded "startups". The number of revenue sharing posts per day on Craigslist is competitive with the number of police stations in the metropolitan area. etc. Just to have a 30-minute conversation to determine if somebody is funded or not simply does not scale to the number of interested parties. Even reading all the e-mails and throwing them away is a massive time sink. Let alone estimating anything, thinking about the feasibility of anything, etc.

tptacek 15y ago
Why do you entertain any of those projects? Why don't you just ask "is this a budgeted project? What is your allocated budget?" (Seriously asking because I'm curious).
- drewcrawford 15y ago
  There are three reasons: 1) The sort of people who pass through the existing filters I have in place (I show some prices on the contact form) who have unfunded projects will claim that they are funded. The question has a shannon entropy of zero. 2) Everyone, funded or not, is cagey about the actual budget. In the iOS world, "funded" can mean anything from $500 to $500,000. If I say "So, what are you looking to spend?" they will reply "I'm not really sure what the project will cost, can you estimate it for me?" You get this line the same from a CEO or from an intern, from a bank manager or from an unemployed person calling on a payphone. If I say "Our average project cost is X", I am turning away some projects we could legitimately do for less than X with a very comfortable margin while accidentally dangling a carrot in front of a client who has a project that's really 3 * X. The former is an invisible cost, the latter may mean lots of time spent on useless estimates instead of actual billable work. 3) I used to have an e-mail autoresponder that would inquire about budgets, but on a typical day I started spending more time reading replies to my autoresponder than writing actual code. asking the question isn't scalable.

tptacek 15y ago

Why do you entertain any of those projects? Why don't you just ask "is this a budgeted project? What is your allocated budget?" (Seriously asking because I'm curious).

drewcrawford 15y ago
There are three reasons: 1) The sort of people who pass through the existing filters I have in place (I show some prices on the contact form) who have unfunded projects will claim that they are funded. The question has a shannon entropy of zero. 2) Everyone, funded or not, is cagey about the actual budget. In the iOS world, "funded" can mean anything from $500 to $500,000. If I say "So, what are you looking to spend?" they will reply "I'm not really sure what the project will cost, can you estimate it for me?" You get this line the same from a CEO or from an intern, from a bank manager or from an unemployed person calling on a payphone. If I say "Our average project cost is X", I am turning away some projects we could legitimately do for less than X with a very comfortable margin while accidentally dangling a carrot in front of a client who has a project that's really 3 * X. The former is an invisible cost, the latter may mean lots of time spent on useless estimates instead of actual billable work. 3) I used to have an e-mail autoresponder that would inquire about budgets, but on a typical day I started spending more time reading replies to my autoresponder than writing actual code. asking the question isn't scalable.