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The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Hiring Freelancers

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Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Hiring Freelancers

#11

Post by chaoz_ »

jollybean wrote: post #8
strimp099 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They built a marketing strategy for me. It breaks the effort into pre-launch/awareness, launch, and post-launch/systematize. They gave me insight into what to do when. They'll do the work or I can outsource. I've done a mix of both.

Thanks. What were the top items in each phase, I'm curious to know the details. Also, did you find that those things were specifically effective, i.e. did 'Twitter' bring you material attention? Sorry, don't mean to bother, just that I've worked with agencies as well and found them only somewhat effective.

+1 for the Q. Are there any questions I could ask from an agency to understand if they know what they're doing? Many agencies offer their services with wide price range, but I heard very mixed reviews of all the price segments.

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Hiring Freelancers

#13

Post by jdasdf »

strimp099 wrote: post #9
jollybean wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. What were the top items in each phase, I'm curious to know the details. Also, did you find that those things were specifically effective, i.e. did 'Twitter' bring you material attention? Sorry, don't mean to bother, just that I've worked with agencies as well and found them only somewhat effective.

They were more than somewhat effective. That said, they absolutely helped me frame the marketing effort. You want to DM me on Twitter? I'll send it to you @jasonstrimpel or email jason.strimpel [at] gmail [dot] com.

> They were more than somewhat effective. That said, they absolutely helped me frame the marketing effort.

Do you mind sharing the name of the agency?

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Hiring Freelancers

#14

Post by janosdebugs »

Step 4: 2 years down the line the code touched by dozens of freelancers becomes so brittle that you can't launch a feature without breaking two others. Greenfield projects are easy, long-term maintenance is hard.

Edit: during my career, I had numerous projects needing cleanups after developers only interested in shipping the next feature and rotating frequently. If the long term maintenance isn't your problem, the incentive to slap it together is strong.

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Hiring Freelancers

#16

Post by satyrnein »

janosdebugs wrote: post #14

Step 4: 2 years down the line the code touched by dozens of freelancers becomes so brittle that you can't launch a feature without breaking two others. Greenfield projects are easy, long-term maintenance is hard. Edit: during my career, I had numerous projects needing cleanups after developers only interested in shipping the next feature and rotating frequently. If the long term maintenance isn't your problem, the in…

Incentives matter, but it's not like early code written by founders/employees with equity doesn't need to be cleaned up later.

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Hiring Freelancers

#18

Post by is0tope »

This resonates with me also. I've gotten into a nasty habit of always trying to do everything myself.

I recently launched a project for tracking crypto market data and suggesting trades. I went to Fiverr to see if I could get someone to design me a UI, and after going around one guy quoted me ~1.2k USD.

I decided that I could do it myself, and proceeded to spend multiple evenings working on it. I did learn something true, but it delayed the launch by weeks and if I factored my hourly rate in i probably "overpaid" several times over.

Getting past this "do it all" mentality is going to be one of my goals for the remainder of the year.

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Hiring Freelancers

#19

Post by alexanderisora »

janosdebugs wrote: post #14

Step 4: 2 years down the line the code touched by dozens of freelancers becomes so brittle that you can't launch a feature without breaking two others. Greenfield projects are easy, long-term maintenance is hard. Edit: during my career, I had numerous projects needing cleanups after developers only interested in shipping the next feature and rotating frequently. If the long term maintenance isn't your problem, the in…

This is the biggest pain of the modern software development process. Freelancers or outsource companies are not interested in your business, they are interested in charging you for hours spent. This approach is counter productive and is against common sense. Especially if you are a solo maker, not a $$$$ backed startup.

I believe to change this, we need to invent a completely new way of how software is built.

I recently met a guy who came up with an idea. He created a whole new methodology of coding stuff. It took him 4 years of hard working. He made a platform which allows making software out of separated entities which live by their own lives. Those entities (components) are developed by individuals. Therefore, projects built using a set of living components needs less maintenance work because a project is built of components which are maintained by someone else.

The only way to keep this evolution of the components going on is to benefit the makers of the components. The users of the components will pay a fee for the makers of components. Thus we get a win-win. A maker of a component can create an amazing, let's say, billing module and continue working on this single piece of code for years while being paid by 1,000 users of the component. While the users of the component just pay a small fee, hit the 'plug' button and do not care about the maintenance anymore.

This sounds like a magic, but it already works. The guy who made it already got his 100+ customers.

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Hiring Freelancers

#20

Post by TheLoafOfBread »

> Step 1: Hire a freelance developer

yeah that's the point where most of you get stuck, because lot of Freelance developers are outright liars. Before you will find somebody who at least understand what you want from him, you already wasted 2 months of your time. This can follow into a guy who understand what you want from him, but has no clue what to do and creates horrid mess.

Eventually you end up redoing everything what your cheap Freelancer did.

Another dimension is that if you can't separate Freelancer from you codebase, you can easily leak IP through Freelancing. Which might be even worse than sloppy job.

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