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I had two customers. One came to me after he couldn't get a company in the Ukraine to cooperate. He had already paid them $25k and the website was barely useful
by firefoxd 4y ago
I had two customers. One came to me after he couldn't get a company in the Ukraine to cooperate. He had already paid them $25k and the website was barely useful. This was an san fransisco exGoogle product manager with more money than sense, zero coding skills, and in love with subscription services.
I charged him half for 2 months of work and got the website in front of paying customers. Then $1000 a month for maintenance. He hired other devs after me who dragged him along for a year before he went on to the next team.
Today he has closed shop and got a job.
My other customer was a hairstylist, who put together a wordpress website by dragging and dropping. The website is pathetic, amateurish, sluggish, but damn it makes money. To this day she sends me message like "how can I download the pixel", to which I append another tracking script to the footer, and get paid 50 bucks. She probably paid me around $1500 over the 10 years I've been helping her.
She has zero coding skills, and is as close to computer illiterate as you can be, but she is willing to get her hands dirty. She is about to appear on good morning America again, and I don't think her website will hold... Again.
- pc86 4y agoProbably bogged down by downloading too many pixels ;) On a serious note though there is something extremely impressive about someone with no coding experience creating a website that makes them money. Even if they're not coding. It'd be like asking someone who can't cook to open a successful restaurant. If it happens at all it's impressive, but doubly so if you don't even hire a chef you just figure it out as you go along.
- 999900000999 4y agoHer product isn't the website. It's the same reason Craigslist is still in business. Craigslist works very very well for what it needs to do. In fact, HN works well and could of easily been built in the 90s. We create usernames, post here and share content. No need for tons of CSS. Now I'm wondering if Ghost Blog would handle load better... No reason for a non-technical person to spend thousands of dollars to build a basic informative website.
- sowbug 4y agoI'd say it's more like someone who has a successful restaurant learning to wash dishes. Adding a website to an already successful business that can manage without one is very different from basing a new business on a new technology.
- bemmu 4y agoThey probably still knows more about computer terminology than I know about hairdressing terminology.
- greyhound_7 4y agoLol, sell her the "hacker news hug of death plan" and put her website on the Cloudflare free plan. It's like an hour of work...
- EleanorKonik 4y agoI'm still immensely grateful to all the HN folks who helped me recover from my hug of death a year or so ago by teaching me the Cloudflare tricks. I'm with Ghost Pro now instead of Wordpress, but man, IDK what I would have done without the Cloudflare advice in the meantime!
- bob_theslob646 4y agoMay you reference what they are talking about? Does cloudflare prevent you from DDOS?