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Show HN: Get Paid to Build Your Next Side Project

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Re: Show HN: Get Paid to Build Your Next Side Project

#261

Post by dnautics »

Sakes wrote: post #35
avaer wrote: post #6

> GET PAID TO BUILD YOUR NEXT PROJECT > Choose a problem below to get started. Get paid to build _my_ next project or _your_ next project? This is clearly a two-sided platform, but the messaging seems conflated: the headline speaks to builders and the instructions speak to end customers.

It appears to me that this is a tool to identify a market / need that is not being met. There are people who simply want a product/service, no desire for ownership. They post what they'd be will to pay for it, as a customer, and you decide if it is worth your time to build it. Anyone? Am I understanding this correctly?

I think also it's possible that by chance you already have something that is a solve and this connects you to people looking...

Re: Show HN: Get Paid to Build Your Next Side Project

#262

Post by s73ver »

bluGill wrote: post #162
baron816 wrote: post #21

I think this has the potential to introduce an interesting auction model. People might want to join in, but not at the initial price point. What if everyone proposed wanting in on project stated their maximum price point, and the winning application to solve would get the price they bid at for everyone above that level. In other words customers_offering_prices = [1,1,4,15,30,30,40,80,100,150,175,10000] winning_applic…

Is that fair though? If something is only worth 5 to me and 40 to you, and the cost of development is 45 - neither of us along can afford the feature, but if we put aside out different contributions the total is enough to make both of us happy, or neither of are. Your model both of use get nothing when we both could be happy on a different model.

Yes, it's fair. If you're not willing to pay what's being charged, you don't get the thing.

Re: Show HN: Get Paid to Build Your Next Side Project

#265

Post by falcolas »

adekok wrote: post #229
falcolas wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll be the negative Nancy here - you'll never get 1000 people to pay $400 each for any OSS software, no matter the price of the competitor. The reason is a simple value estimation. It's open source (and so free to get) therefore its price is $0. Any product that is free signals that the product has correspondingly low value. I think it's simply unrealistic to expect people to put forward $400 for something with such…

> you'll never get 1000 people to pay $400 each for any OSS software, no matter the price of the competitor. Yes and no. I'm doing that right now... The key is that I don't charge for the software as such. I charge for services, etc. around the software. People are happy to pay for value-add, even if the underlying software is free. You just need to show value-add...

Sure - but then you're not really charging $400 for the software. You're charging $400 for the services associated with that software, and a (typically significant) portion of that money will go towards funding the service, not the OSS software.

This change in how the money is allocated is a subtle, but important, distinction. Monetizing a service means you now have a minimum of two products to manage, and from my time at a company which did exactly this I've found that the OSS software development is the product which absorbs any shortfalls. It's hard to watch the budget for OSS development shrink constantly; to watch developers passionate about the OSS software being reassigned to grow the service instead.

It's probably still the best way to handle a crummy situation, but it's not what the OP described.

Re: Show HN: Get Paid to Build Your Next Side Project

#266

Post by boramalper »

devoply wrote: post #256
milesvp wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this joke sums up just about every arbitrage situation I think I've found. I think, naw, it must be an illusion, because the market is so efficient... Means I end up paralysed around starting new endeavours.

Yeah the market for open source is shit. You have tons of corporations deriving billions in total profit off the back of open source that contribute maybe a million back and feel that they have done some great great deed... like say Google. You could easily make the Gimp much much better with a few million in funding. The beauty of capitalism is exactly that it locks out this sort of behavior because of the way that…

And I think copyleft licenses offer a solution here: if you are worried that corporations (or rival corporations) might monetize your product (or derive any profit from it indirectly), licensing it under a copyleft license would make their lives very, very hard. It's near impossible, for instance, to keep an AGPLv3-licensed product within a walled-garden, hence good luck while trying to build a *AAS on that.

Re: Show HN: Get Paid to Build Your Next Side Project

#267

Post by falcolas »

masukomi wrote: post #145
falcolas wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He'd also need the GIMP devs to cooperate: to provide tangible feature sets with timelines, part time PR for updating and managing the Kickstarter campaign, and an part time CFO for managing the sudden influx and management of $360,000 (minus Kickstarter and the payment processor's share), dev salaries, taxes, and such. I would be curious if the GIMP dev team could reach usability parity with Photoshop on only that m…

he could always fork it and pay for other developers if the core team didn't want to participate in this. You'd rather the core team's approval and participation, but you don't NEED it.

If you don't get their support, then that $400,000 has to go a lot further (or you have to work towards a branch reconciliation at the end of the work). Ongoing maintenance is not free.

Re: Show HN: Get Paid to Build Your Next Side Project

#268

Post by devoply »

boramalper wrote: post #266
devoply wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah the market for open source is shit. You have tons of corporations deriving billions in total profit off the back of open source that contribute maybe a million back and feel that they have done some great great deed... like say Google. You could easily make the Gimp much much better with a few million in funding. The beauty of capitalism is exactly that it locks out this sort of behavior because of the way that…

And I think copyleft licenses offer a solution here: if you are worried that corporations (or rival corporations) might monetize your product (or derive any profit from it indirectly), licensing it under a copyleft license would make their lives very, very hard. It's near impossible, for instance, to keep an AGPLv3-licensed product within a walled-garden, hence good luck while trying to build a *AAS on that.

The issue is not to deprive corporations of profit. Profit is good. The issue is how they behave with the profit once they get it. They lock it up in the hands of the very few rather than distributing it far and wide so good stuff can get done all over the world. The concentration of capital or the good is the problem. The more it is concentrated, the more good that gets done is on the terms of the corporations rather than a scrappy hacker or an individualist or anyone else. That shuts down freedom to do, which is bad. That limits choice and freedom, to live how you want because you are providing a good. Rather than live on the terms dictated by those who hoard the capital. Which happens all over the world the way the current system is architected.

Re: Show HN: Get Paid to Build Your Next Side Project

#269

Post by giarc »

kirillzubovsky wrote: post #228

I find it a little funny how unrealistic people can be when evaluating the cost of their problem. Take this one for example: "We have hundreds of images uploaded to our app each day. The issue is some of these images have text that we want cropped out." -- willing to pay? $75/month. Baller! Chances are this is a problem for a data-mining / ai-training platform that wants to create a better image set. They are chargin…

Sounds like a project for Mechanical Turk.

Re: Show HN: Get Paid to Build Your Next Side Project

#270

Post by jpetso »

ReverseCold wrote: post #232
GoToRO wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as casual user is concerned, it didn't. Large corporations instead enjoy a very nice free ride (all the servers).

Chromebooks are already outselling Macs. A lot of (most, even?) American schools are buying Chromebooks for students to use because they're simple and work well. ChromeOS uses the Linux kernel.

I'd add that to the list of free rides for large corporations.

Students getting Chromebooks aren't sucked into the Linux ecosystem and open source community that encourages you to improve parts of the system yourself. Instead, it leaves system maintenance (and learning experience) entirely to the administrator and really only provides Chrome as the operating system, with all implications.

Control your data locally? Why not upload it to Google Drive instead. Learn git commands? Better find that hidden Developer Mode switch, because crosh isn't going to get you very far. Get involved in improving Linux or Chromium? Nah, better edit some JavaScript in a web view with someone else's proprietary online code editor.

Google can (and will) swap Linux out of Chromium whenever they want to, because none of the interfaces and none of the community overlap. When Fuchsia gets swapped in, neither you nor the students will notice, and it won't have made a difference other than Linux having helped Google's locked-down, centrally controlled platform to succeed.

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