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Gigster (YC S15) Does The Dev Work To Turn Your Idea Into An App

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101–110 of 192 posts

Re: Gigster (YC S15) Does The Dev Work To Turn Your Idea Into An App

#101

Very interesting that a well-marketed agency/service biz got VC funding to the tune of $2.5m. Service businesses are notoriously hard to scale and run on thin margins, not usually of interest to SV investors chasing 10x'ers. What's the secret sauce here that makes it more scalable than the traditional agency/dev shop model?

I was wondering the exact same thing. The reality of an agency model is that to scale revenue you have to hire more worker bees. As part of that process two things happen. One, logistics become more complicated because of the additional communication overhead between people. Two, standards have to be lowered for new hires, otherwise they will quickly run out of people to hire. So even assuming that they currently hav…

> The reality of an agency model is that to scale revenue you have to hire more worker bees.

And the worst part is, it scales linearly \cue groans\. Funny how in business, that's terrible (it's literally the worst it could possibly be to have a potentially profitable business), but with algorithms, it's the holy grail.

Interesting point BTW about reduction in quality of workers over time. (Like the pretentious-but-true saying "A-players hire other A-players. B-players hire C-players, and C-players hire losers") I've noticed the same trend though in product-centered businesses where I've worked. Unfortunately, I feel like the fact that the amount of work to be done doesn't scale linearly with revenues actually exacerbates the subsequent-employee-quality-decline-problem because even if the new guys are less... good, the company is still making more money so nobody except the coworkers and managers of these people (who actually have to work with them on a daily basis) even cares.

It's probably not a problem at places like Google and Facebook, but it was kinda heartbreaking to watch my super-talented and motivated dozen-person startup team become something completely different because we were growing so fast and were told to spend money and hire like crazy after taking an investment round.

Re: Gigster (YC S15) Does The Dev Work To Turn Your Idea Into An App

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe theres no bidding, so gigster only accepts gigs that can pay the dev reasonably. Correct me if i'm wrong.

This is correct. We price out the gigs ahead of time and match them with developers who like the price.

Sounds like this will have a perpetual race to the bottom as inevitably there'll be developers asking high prices and not being paired with the work, and those asking less with more pairings.

Re: Gigster (YC S15) Does The Dev Work To Turn Your Idea Into An App

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true! SV has a great brand for PM's. Customers love knowing they are working with great talent, especially with all the noise out there.

Maybe you should hire a sarcasm-identifier on TaskRabbit?

I don't understand either, do you (or someone) mind explaining? Are SV Product Managers considered to be bad?

Re: Gigster (YC S15) Does The Dev Work To Turn Your Idea Into An App

#104
post #8

>Dickey runs me through the process. “Say you want to build an Uber for pizza delivery. You get [a Gigster sales engineer] who’ll ask about the details. ‘How do you want to handle delivery?’ ‘Are you going to use your own fleet or a fleet service?’ Does it have to show exactly how long until the delivery?’ They figure out figure the budget and work schedule, and you pay with Stripe. On the backend we assemble a team…

> handle maitnaencae for life. – bug fie

Read this as "...and we handle maintenance for life. \brushes off shoulder\ bug life. "

Re: Gigster (YC S15) Does The Dev Work To Turn Your Idea Into An App

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe theres no bidding, so gigster only accepts gigs that can pay the dev reasonably. Correct me if i'm wrong.

This is correct. We price out the gigs ahead of time and match them with developers who like the price.

How do you handle a situation where you estimate a given price and don't have any developers willing to complete that project at the given price?

Re: Gigster (YC S15) Does The Dev Work To Turn Your Idea Into An App

#106
post #4

Wow, this looks pretty awesome if they are able to uphold the talent bar. Would be good to get more info of how much you can make as a developer and how much projects are likely to cost, though.

Hi! A good developer can expect to make $10K - $20K per month on Gigster :) The developer also can expect to do no sales or management work on the project. You just write code on interesting projects and get paid :) Much like Uber hands drivers rides and they just have to accept them.

I really hope this is true, and if it is then I guess it's time to quit my job :D

Re: Gigster (YC S15) Does The Dev Work To Turn Your Idea Into An App

#107
post #77
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hold on, are we talking employee or contractor? If it's the latter, I'd consider at least the following two points: 1. $20k/month every month ? Unlikely. 2. Self-employment taxes + other business expenses. edit: formatting

Does it matter for the context of my post? $240k is a hefty income either way for a freelancer who needn't live in an expensive metropolitan area. And it seems you agree with me either way with the way you ended your first bullet point. A lot of startups in the sharing economy space have been guilty of grossly exaggerating how much their contractors/employees actually make. Is this just yet another instance of that o…

Sorry if I wasn't clear... I do agree with you - if anything I'm more skeptical :)

Re: Gigster (YC S15) Does The Dev Work To Turn Your Idea Into An App

#110
post #6

"If the project is behind schedule, Gigster just assigns more developers to it or fires under-performing ones so it gets done on time." - Somebody hasn't read Mythical Man-Month.

Hi! We don't assign more people blindly. But what do you propose we do if a developer gets sick or has to travel? We are engineers ourselves and are certainly careful to not just load up a bunch of devs on a project. We've done that before and it was painful :) Thanks for the feedback!

> But what do you propose we do if a developer gets sick or has to travel?

- don't run a skeleton crew dev team unless you are ready to handle the risks, - better project management upfront to cater for this risk - maybe allow customer to choose risk tolerance upfront like some fintech companies do and - include some internal reward mechanism for over delivery so you can better manage resources.

There are prob a ton more but these are the 3 that popped into my head. Apps don't solve problems but good business models behind apps do. Sort that out 1st.

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