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I specialize in the ability to competently and fully build from the ground up your whole business from design, development, system administration, deployments,
by joshmanders 4y ago
I specialize in the ability to competently and fully build from the ground up your whole business from design, development, system administration, deployments, testing, seo and other stuff as a single person.
My rate is $10,000/week pre-paid monthly.
- TruthWillHurt 4y agoI'm assuming you do Frontend? What else? What frameworks would you suggest? I feel I could definitely build a project myself, but I find FE to be very time consuming.
- joshmanders 4y agoI do it all. Have for 25 years. Frontend is actually my weakest skillset (but I'm still awesome at it)
- kishinmanglani 4y agoHow do you usually find clients?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- joshmanders 4y ago100% word of mouth and when I was looking, the "Freelancers to be hired" monthly threads here have brought in a ton of money for me too.
- ryanSrich 4y agoThis is a great rate. I’d love to know how you find clients willing to pay this amount. Most people I’ve come across that need a new site/app built have extremely low budgets. Like $10,000…total for an app. Certainly not $10,000 for a week.
- scrollaway 4y agoSimply put: Talk to people who have more money and higher expectations, and highly value efficiency (OP's selling point of being a "single person" means not dealing with a whole team, back&forth comms, etc). Don't talk to your local barber who wants a website to show up on google maps. I have a similar weekly rate but $200 hourly; How I bill depends on the client (though yes, gravitating more and more towards weekly over time).
- mwint 4y agoCould you give some examples of those people?
- ryanSrich 4y agoThis doesn’t answer my question. How do you find people “who have more money and higher expectations, and highly value efficiency”? > “Don't talk to your local barber who wants a website to show up on google maps.” The specific case I was referring to was a series seed funded startup that needed to build an MVP. Even for them $10,000 was too much. They ended up finding someone for half that to build their entire V1. This was maybe 5 years ago. They’ve since rebuilt everything in house and are doing very well now.
- lumost 4y agoA tech seed round can easily be 7 figures these days. A new initiative at a non-tech fortune 50 could start in 8 figures. Hiring someone at 10k per week who can kickstart the project to working production system isn't a bad deal at these budgets.
- OhNoNotAgain_99 4y agoyou seem to be on the low side, i do 4000p/day not less
- jononomo 4y agoI recommend that you double your rates -- you're worth more than you think.
- oefnak 4y agoI believe they're worth even more! Double it again!
- FBISurveillance 4y agoLike Dr Evil said: "One! Million! Dollars!"
- mypalmike 4y agoOne million per day? Or per hour?
- joshmanders 4y agoOne million to open the email.
- joshmanders 4y agoI chuckled. For you, if you want any work done, my rates are $20k/week pre-paid monthly.
- moneywoes 4y agoHow did you get your first client
- joshmanders 4y agoI offered to build someone a website for $100 in 2001.
- rtlfe 4y agoHave you tried asking for more? If you're actually good at everything you say, you could be making the same amount of cash plus benefits at a FANG, so I'd expect the contracting rate to be much higher.
- osigurdson 4y agoOP didn’t say they were good at competitive programming.
- joshmanders 4y agoLess that and more that I don't play the FANG game of being under pressure to whiteboard the process of unlinking a doubly linked list or show bubblesort algorithm stuff for a position where all I am doing is stringing some divs together in a React codebase. I mean if you enjoy that stuff by all means do it, but I prefer to build real stuff that make impact not practice showmanship.
- wpietri 4y agoWhy's that? Large companies generally don't need single generalists; what they mostly have is teams of specialists, people who can get much deeper into a subject than a generalist can. Is there some role at a FAANG where generalists would thrive?
- rtlfe 4y ago> Is there some role at a FAANG where generalists would thrive? In my personal experience everything except infrastructure and mobile UI favors generalists. The people I worked with were constantly jumping around between backends, protocols, business logic, web UI, test suites, architecture, data analysis, small-scale UI design. This was on public-facing products. I'd expect internal tool teams have even greater need for generalists.
- cromd 4y agoAlso, the two types of generalists aren't quite the same. Being a generalist in a 10k person company feels different from having to do everything alone at a 5 person company. I think some heuristic like "earn double a FAANG income" isn't going to go over well with companies that are getting off the ground. Are the companies stupid for not paying that? Maybe sometimes. But there are definitely way more companies willing to hire someone at $200/hr than at $500/hr. The calculations are just different for the companies. An operation spending $1B gains a lot by shaving off 1% (and small improvements are not strictly in the domain of specialists). But a new venture with $0 in revenue may have a very real risk of running out of cash one day, even if their product idea is great and well-built. "Hire the best people in the world" seems more prudent for a company who is certain it will pay off. But to be fair, I guess one should occasionally try asking for high amounts anyways. I think jaquesm had recommended aiming to have 50% of your clients turn you down on the basis of price, to find the sweet spot for a rate.
- candiddevmike 4y agoFor those drooling at this: you probably don't want this work. The clients who pay this amount are typically soul crushingly bad to work with, and you're under the gun to deliver 10k worth of value both to secure future work with the client and ensure your reputation stays clean. One bad experience can sink you with other clients, folks talk. IMO, build something for you and sell it vs building something for other people.
- spaetzleesser 4y agoThat wasn't at all my experience when I was doing contract work at higher rates. The more I made the better I got treated and the more forgiving things were. The worst contracts were with penny pinchers. As soon as something cost $500 more they were gone.
- joshmanders 4y agoThis is not accurate at all. I've found people who pay these rates are better to work with and demand less. You know that trope all startup people say "raise your prices and get rid of the low value high cost customers" Same thing.
- shoulderfake 4y ago
- amelius 4y agoNow I'm very curious how you find clients and what software stacks you work with.
- joshmanders 4y agoI've replied below on various other comments asking similar, but for easier use, I'll repeat here: > how you find clients Word of mouth & referrals from existing clients > what software stacks you work with Next.js React-Query Prisma Tailwind CSS Kubernetes PostgreSQL Caddy
- 4y ago
- holler 4y agoWhat's your go-to tech stack? Do you find a lot of your work is crud apps?
- joshmanders 4y agoNext.js React-Query Prisma Tailwind CSS Kubernetes PostgreSQL Caddy
- elendee 4y agoany chance you have open source codebases?
- ciocan42 4y agosearch for t3 stack
- joshmanders 4y agoI am building a little open source toolkit on top of Next that hopefully alleviates alot of repetition. https://github.com/aniftyco/next-saas https://github.com/aniftyco/next-saas I open source as much as I can tbh: https://github.com/aniftyco https://github.com/aniftyco
- rco8786 4y agoWhat’s your strategy for finding clients, if you don’t mind me asking? And how do you handle ongoing maintenance/sysadmin?
- joshmanders 4y ago> What’s your strategy for finding clients, if you don’t mind me asking? Referrals from existing clients, HN monthly threads. > And how do you handle ongoing maintenance/sysadmin? $10k/week, pre-paid monthly. I don't do hourly because I don't work hourly. You're paying for my skills and expertise not the geo coordinates of the chair I am sitting in for however long I am working. I charge accordingly. The price is for your slot in my workload and that is it. Need maintenance then you pay me weekly for any maintenance work.
- rco8786 4y agoAmazing. Any oncall type of work? What if things go down at 3am?
- ChainOfFools 4y agoA client who's paying one person effectively a half million dollar a year rate to be a 'slot' in their workload, which presumably implies they take on multiple such clients at once, would also presumably not blink at pouring another 5,000 or 10,000 a month off onto a robust cloud platform to make sure things don't go down at 3:00 a.m. for trivial reasons.
- rco8786 4y agoThose huge cloud deployments are exactly the ones that do unexpected bs at 3am
- joshmanders 4y agoNothing I do is on-call worthy. I may build the product but I don't run the product after it's built.
- indigodaddy 4y agoFYI, first load of your personal website (redirected from Twitter) was surprisingly slow. Subsequent reloads were fine however. Could have been something on my end though or likely just Twitter redirection(s?) process taking its sweet time..
- joshmanders 4y agoProbably that, it's just a ghost blog deployed to a k8s cluster on aws.
- SavageBeast 4y agoId think your ability to re-use piece parts from one project to another would help save a lot of time too. There are really only say 10 things to build and once you do, simply re-arranging them for different systems probably levels out the workload significantly.
- fb03 4y agoJosh!!! It's Cadu :) Nice to see you on HN <3 Where's my hugs?
- joshmanders 4y agoI LOVE YOU BUDDY <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3
- mixmastamyk 4y agoI do these as well, wonder if you happen to know competent people from the sales/marketing/product-design areas to team up with? I can build 'em but don't have time to help folks show up and take notice.
- jollybean 4y agoIf you say the word 'business' you're hustling a bit ... ... if you say 'product', then ok. The 'product' part for many businesses is often very easy to do; sales, channel development, marketing etc. which lead to making a 'business' is the hard part. If you're opening up major clients, or large numbers of small clients through channel sales then you're really worth something.
- intelVISA 4y agoI have a similar skillset is there a good route into this as a side gig?
- ThinkBeat 4y ago""your whole business"" How does that work? Business plan, hiring, locale, factory, ???? , ERP, ? Or "your website" ?