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> I'll never depend on a 3rd party dev as the main means of production again. He spent over half of his money on it as well. I've had more than one person com

> I'll never depend on a 3rd party dev as the main means of production again. He spent over half of his money on it as well. I've had more than one person come to me with their business idea, and they have a terrible website (or app) that they have spent 100, 200, or even 300k on. And it doesn't even work. If you aren't staring out WITH customers, you either have to code it your damn self, or have a technical co-founder. It also makes me realize that I'm in the wrong business.

danielvaughn 4y ago
Seriously, sign me up for that contract. Give me 100k-300k for a single website? That website is gonna be a thing of beauty.
- mstade 4y ago
  You say that now, but in my experience most people able to shell out this kind of money very often doesn't really have a clue about what it is they actually need and have no reasonable go to market strategy beyond "let's just build it and they will come", and then it fails spectacularly. I've been on the receiving money end of this kind of project several times in the past and as much as you try to help and guide, there's almost always an atmosphere of "I'm the one paying the invoice so let's just do as I say" even though everything points to them being absolutely wrong. I've also been on projects like this where the buyer has a strong vision, is able to communicate it, but is also very hands off when it comes to implementation. With regular reporting (weekly or bi-weekly being ideal) to do course correcting they've gotten tremendous value out of the $100k-$300k spend. To be fair, being a buyer for tech projects is really quite difficult – especially if you don't have a very clear and communicable vision of the end goal.
  - sarchertech 4y ago
    I’ve had the same experience. It’s almost never 100-300k to build an app where the client knows exactly what they want. It’s $100-$300k to spend a year helping the client figure out what they want to build.
    - TuringNYC 4y ago
      > It’s $100-$300k to spend a year helping the client figure out what they want to build. This is one aspect, and having a CEO/Founder with a Product Manager hat on is critical to cost-effectiveness (MVP, low fi design, phasing, derisking, etc.) I cringe every time I see a founder spend money on design before the MVP is figured out and before functionality exists. But another is cycling thru multiple dev agencies, each of which exploit them in different ways (see my other comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34595540 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34595540)
  - EarthLaunch 4y ago
    Same experience. I have turned $100k-300k contracting projects into multimillion dollar successes in a short time. But those ones had a good business plan, and were hands-off on technical matters because they were semi-technical themselves. These successful projects are the ones you feel good about, and the ones to put on the resume. The other type, where they give you a lot of money to "do what we say", but don't have good ideas...they're unsatisfying. The work feels pointless because it's not going anywhere. It's weak on the resume, the client isn't ongoing after it fails, you usually don't get references out of it. If you're short on money then the second type is fine, but you try to build toward only taking the first type of work. (I believe this applies to employment, too.)
- swamp40 4y ago
  It probably looks like this: Use real-time APIs to find the best price from: Travelocity, Hotels.com, Expedia One, Scott’s Cheap Flights, Priceline, Hotwire, Google Flights, Hertz, Kayak. Sync up flights with hotels and rental cars. Add 15% to everything, book and resell automatically, making it look like it all came from your app. That 300K is all gone into the backend in a flash.
- TrackerFF 4y ago
  Well if you want some numbers - I was on the board of some real-estate business with around 350 units. They had this ancient website with a basic web form for potential tenants. Just a simple application where you entered your name and information, what type of apartment you'd like, and that would get sent to the operations manager as a PDF file. It was probably made in the early 00s. The owners wanted something similar, but new looking - so really no added new functionality. Just a design do over, along with better hosting (the webpage was being hosted on the local server of the original designer, some retired dude in his 70s. If you wanted any changes, you'd have to call him and he'd apply changes to the HTML files). Our cheapest option was a local student who'd charge us $3k for the job. But the owners wanted "24/7 support", so that went out the window. Next in line, a local design shop quoted us around $7k. Still, no VIP support or whatever. And we'd still have to deal with hosting ourselves. I had gotten a bunch of other quotes in the same ballpark, but the owner apparently knew a guy in one of the larger IT consulting firms, and they'd offer to do the job for a cool $20k (or around that ballpark), which came with 24/7 support and hosting for a around $2k / year. So they went for that. Remember, this was just a simple landing page with a typical signup form, and a "modern design". Nothing more, nothing less. Total visitors a year? Probably under 1000. I can only imagine the prices if they'd want some web app with user registration, login, tools, and what not. I can easily see some consulting firm charging hundreds of thousands for that kind of stuff.
- icedchai 4y ago
  Heh. I worked with a guy that dropped at least 200K on his "prototype." The prototype was a mock up of the product, which looked like it worked if you moved through the demo in exactly the right way. It was all hard coded. He said it was a bargain, since it let him raise real money (a couple of million.) Of course, he spent all that too, along with most of his life savings. The company got no real traction and was eventually sold in a fire sale.
- FrontierPsych 4y ago
  I got $1,000. What am I going to get from you? Nothing is not an acceptable response.
hahla 4y ago
Not really I know of a non technical founder who spent $300k on developing their website/app. I was a user of that platform, and while it wasn't fancy, could have been better, and someone eventually did do it better, it did what it was supposed to do. They had first mover advantage and funny enough it got bought out by that same company that did it better for $20-30m. Sure being a non technical founder is harder, but it can be done.
- moneywoes 4y ago
  What was their gtm ?
TuringNYC 4y ago
>> If you aren't staring out WITH customers, you either have to code it your damn self, or have a technical co-founder. Agree. Also note that if you are starting out with customers and POs -- and fully outsource -- it isnt the end of the world (as hopefully you have enough money to re-build properly with a tech team that has aligned interests long term) but you'll find that your supplier (outsourced dev) will capture ever greater portions of your profit. This is especially true if they have access to transaction systems where they get to see your revenues, because they will be able to see your pressure point and charge you just enough to extract most of the profits, but without putting you in the red. It becomes a classic Porter's Five Forces (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porter%27s_five_forces_analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porter%27s_five_forces_analysi...) where the supplier's force becomes ever more powerful.
idopmstuff 4y ago
I would wager heavily that this could've been a Shopify store. A few hundred bucks for a premium theme, a few hundred a month to run it, and maybe some overseas VAs at a few bucks an hour to help fill in the vendor/event details. OP's LinkedIn shows he's never worked at a very early stage startup. I really can't recommend that enough before starting a company - being immersed in a culture where things are scrappy helps to instill a reflexive reaction of "how can we do that faster/cheaper" when someone tells you something is going to cost tens of thousands of dollars.
- abirch 4y ago
  Too many people are addicted to code and making things from scratch. Your suggestions are spot on. Oddly enough developers' and contractors' costs usually expand to any budget size.
- exadeci 4y ago
  Definitely! And the migration to a proper custom-made platform would have been easy, just a matter of migrating the database instead of getting developers to start on a mess of tech dept.
_fat_santa 4y ago
> If you aren't staring out WITH customers, you either have to code it your damn self, or have a technical co-founder. The other day I estimated how much I would have spent on development costs for my side business if I didn't know how to code and had to shop it all out. The number I arrived at was somewhere around $80-$120k depending on where I hired the devs (were about a year into development). I get why non-technical folks go into tech but if you're not able to build the thing yourself or have a cofounder that can build it themselves, it's going to be prohibitively expensive and probably won't work.
P_I_Staker 4y ago
Yeah, don't want to say the industry, but our software suppliers absolutely hose us on a regular basis. We're theoretically supposed to be held to a high standard, or at least our customers are very demanding with quality. Our suppliers routinely deliver junk, yet somehow have the ability to just say "it is what it is, take it or leave it". It's not a pure outsourcing type of arrangement either, and they have other direct relationships to our customers, also. These aren't some randos with questionable reputation. These are big industry players, one of whom a lot of people in engineering would be familiar with, yet they seem to be able to launder their responsibilities.

danielvaughn 4y ago

Seriously, sign me up for that contract. Give me 100k-300k for a single website? That website is gonna be a thing of beauty.

mstade 4y ago
You say that now, but in my experience most people able to shell out this kind of money very often doesn't really have a clue about what it is they actually need and have no reasonable go to market strategy beyond "let's just build it and they will come", and then it fails spectacularly. I've been on the receiving money end of this kind of project several times in the past and as much as you try to help and guide, there's almost always an atmosphere of "I'm the one paying the invoice so let's just do as I say" even though everything points to them being absolutely wrong. I've also been on projects like this where the buyer has a strong vision, is able to communicate it, but is also very hands off when it comes to implementation. With regular reporting (weekly or bi-weekly being ideal) to do course correcting they've gotten tremendous value out of the $100k-$300k spend. To be fair, being a buyer for tech projects is really quite difficult – especially if you don't have a very clear and communicable vision of the end goal.
- sarchertech 4y ago
  I’ve had the same experience. It’s almost never 100-300k to build an app where the client knows exactly what they want. It’s $100-$300k to spend a year helping the client figure out what they want to build.
  - TuringNYC 4y ago
    > It’s $100-$300k to spend a year helping the client figure out what they want to build. This is one aspect, and having a CEO/Founder with a Product Manager hat on is critical to cost-effectiveness (MVP, low fi design, phasing, derisking, etc.) I cringe every time I see a founder spend money on design before the MVP is figured out and before functionality exists. But another is cycling thru multiple dev agencies, each of which exploit them in different ways (see my other comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34595540 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34595540)
- EarthLaunch 4y ago
  Same experience. I have turned $100k-300k contracting projects into multimillion dollar successes in a short time. But those ones had a good business plan, and were hands-off on technical matters because they were semi-technical themselves. These successful projects are the ones you feel good about, and the ones to put on the resume. The other type, where they give you a lot of money to "do what we say", but don't have good ideas...they're unsatisfying. The work feels pointless because it's not going anywhere. It's weak on the resume, the client isn't ongoing after it fails, you usually don't get references out of it. If you're short on money then the second type is fine, but you try to build toward only taking the first type of work. (I believe this applies to employment, too.)
swamp40 4y ago
It probably looks like this: Use real-time APIs to find the best price from: Travelocity, Hotels.com, Expedia One, Scott’s Cheap Flights, Priceline, Hotwire, Google Flights, Hertz, Kayak. Sync up flights with hotels and rental cars. Add 15% to everything, book and resell automatically, making it look like it all came from your app. That 300K is all gone into the backend in a flash.
TrackerFF 4y ago
Well if you want some numbers - I was on the board of some real-estate business with around 350 units. They had this ancient website with a basic web form for potential tenants. Just a simple application where you entered your name and information, what type of apartment you'd like, and that would get sent to the operations manager as a PDF file. It was probably made in the early 00s. The owners wanted something similar, but new looking - so really no added new functionality. Just a design do over, along with better hosting (the webpage was being hosted on the local server of the original designer, some retired dude in his 70s. If you wanted any changes, you'd have to call him and he'd apply changes to the HTML files). Our cheapest option was a local student who'd charge us $3k for the job. But the owners wanted "24/7 support", so that went out the window. Next in line, a local design shop quoted us around $7k. Still, no VIP support or whatever. And we'd still have to deal with hosting ourselves. I had gotten a bunch of other quotes in the same ballpark, but the owner apparently knew a guy in one of the larger IT consulting firms, and they'd offer to do the job for a cool $20k (or around that ballpark), which came with 24/7 support and hosting for a around $2k / year. So they went for that. Remember, this was just a simple landing page with a typical signup form, and a "modern design". Nothing more, nothing less. Total visitors a year? Probably under 1000. I can only imagine the prices if they'd want some web app with user registration, login, tools, and what not. I can easily see some consulting firm charging hundreds of thousands for that kind of stuff.
icedchai 4y ago
Heh. I worked with a guy that dropped at least 200K on his "prototype." The prototype was a mock up of the product, which looked like it worked if you moved through the demo in exactly the right way. It was all hard coded. He said it was a bargain, since it let him raise real money (a couple of million.) Of course, he spent all that too, along with most of his life savings. The company got no real traction and was eventually sold in a fire sale.
FrontierPsych 4y ago
I got $1,000. What am I going to get from you? Nothing is not an acceptable response.

hahla 4y ago

Not really I know of a non technical founder who spent $300k on developing their website/app. I was a user of that platform, and while it wasn't fancy, could have been better, and someone eventually did do it better, it did what it was supposed to do. They had first mover advantage and funny enough it got bought out by that same company that did it better for $20-30m. Sure being a non technical founder is harder, but it can be done.

moneywoes 4y ago
What was their gtm ?

TuringNYC 4y ago

>> If you aren't staring out WITH customers, you either have to code it your damn self, or have a technical co-founder. Agree. Also note that if you are starting out with customers and POs -- and fully outsource -- it isnt the end of the world (as hopefully you have enough money to re-build properly with a tech team that has aligned interests long term) but you'll find that your supplier (outsourced dev) will capture ever greater portions of your profit. This is especially true if they have access to transaction systems where they get to see your revenues, because they will be able to see your pressure point and charge you just enough to extract most of the profits, but without putting you in the red. It becomes a classic Porter's Five Forces (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porter%27s_five_forces_analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porter%27s_five_forces_analysi...) where the supplier's force becomes ever more powerful.

idopmstuff 4y ago

I would wager heavily that this could've been a Shopify store. A few hundred bucks for a premium theme, a few hundred a month to run it, and maybe some overseas VAs at a few bucks an hour to help fill in the vendor/event details. OP's LinkedIn shows he's never worked at a very early stage startup. I really can't recommend that enough before starting a company - being immersed in a culture where things are scrappy helps to instill a reflexive reaction of "how can we do that faster/cheaper" when someone tells you something is going to cost tens of thousands of dollars.

abirch 4y ago
Too many people are addicted to code and making things from scratch. Your suggestions are spot on. Oddly enough developers' and contractors' costs usually expand to any budget size.
exadeci 4y ago
Definitely! And the migration to a proper custom-made platform would have been easy, just a matter of migrating the database instead of getting developers to start on a mess of tech dept.

_fat_santa 4y ago

> If you aren't staring out WITH customers, you either have to code it your damn self, or have a technical co-founder. The other day I estimated how much I would have spent on development costs for my side business if I didn't know how to code and had to shop it all out. The number I arrived at was somewhere around $80-$120k depending on where I hired the devs (were about a year into development). I get why non-technical folks go into tech but if you're not able to build the thing yourself or have a cofounder that can build it themselves, it's going to be prohibitively expensive and probably won't work.

P_I_Staker 4y ago

Yeah, don't want to say the industry, but our software suppliers absolutely hose us on a regular basis. We're theoretically supposed to be held to a high standard, or at least our customers are very demanding with quality. Our suppliers routinely deliver junk, yet somehow have the ability to just say "it is what it is, take it or leave it". It's not a pure outsourcing type of arrangement either, and they have other direct relationships to our customers, also. These aren't some randos with questionable reputation. These are big industry players, one of whom a lot of people in engineering would be familiar with, yet they seem to be able to launder their responsibilities.