Poll: What Do You Hate About Contracting?

You forgot acquiring customers and being on call with nearly unlimited liability...

Source: I've run an iOS contracting company for the last three years. Here are some big problems:

* Lead qualification. This is an enormous problem. Lots of people want revenue sharing deals, etc., and it takes too long to work out whether they're serious about the project and whether I'm the right fit. What do they do for a living? Is this a corporate or personal project? etc.

* Client acquisition cost. Most of the options out there for advertising, etc., don't have a good ROI. It's super difficult to measure advertising effectiveness because you only have a handful of "conversions" (new clients) and thus your results are never statistically significant. It's all black magic and voodoo.

* Pricing. We do 99% fixed quote so hourly rate isn't really the issue. In my market, you adjust the scope to fit the budget, not adjust the budget to fit the scope. The problem is that clients play very close to the vest on what they want to spend, meaning I have to guess what they want to spend. If I guess right, I get the project, if I guess wrong, I will never hear from them again. The whole market is a game of chance, not a game of skill.

* Slow clients. It doesn't matter if the feature takes 1 hour or 5 hours if the client takes 4 weeks to get back to you. Tightening up our business process has improved this considerably from what it used to be, but I imagine a number of contractors experience this schedule unpredictability.

* Client education. Milestones, scope, test builds, etc., are just not in the vocabulary for non-software-background clients. Why the Estonian firm quoting $2000 for a $20k project is lying. How to collect crash reports. How to describe issues so that we can reproduce them. etc.

These problems are WAY bigger than anything you've listed. But about those:

* Project length - Rarely have I thought about this apart from the "Slow client" issue. There are no projects too short, or too long, for me to do, particularly if it's well-paying work.

* Good requirements - we usually write them. Being in the fixed quote business, we're pretty good at it.

* Scope creep - this is a minor problem for us, but we've tightened up the business process and are close to completely eliminating it as a problem.

* On-time payment - Another minor problem, recent changes to the business process are close to eliminating it.

* Negotiating the rate - we rarely do hourly work, so our version of this problem is the "Pricing" problem above.

If you are working on a startup in this space, please sign me up to give you feedback, as I could go on for hours :-)

Scope creep is always the worst for me. It happens with almost every single side-project I take. That said, since I started billing hourly (with nightly updates to work / invoice), it's gotten a lot better.

Most parts of my projects go pretty nicely, but getting paid has always been a pain after the first couple of months on a project.

Getting a deposit up front definitely helps with clients paying on time the first couple of months.

I work with a lot of "green field" projects though, and it seems like many clients operate under the impression that the site is going to start making money right away without any marketing or advertising. I usually help them put together a plan for that (and help them with AdWords), but they are for some reason reluctant to actually start making calls, sending emails, reaching out to bloggers, etc.

After a few months, they inevitably start paying later and later as they start to get concerned about running out of money.

Having to work away from home, family and friends.