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

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

#171

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 23, 2015, 8:03 AM UTC

levlandau wrote: post #165

Shenglong wrote: post #162

Can anyone related to this explain to me why Yahoo Weather is listed under their "success stories"? As the PM on the project, I can say without a doubt this was not done externally. It was built through the sweat and tears of the wonderful engineers and designers on the team. https://www.dropbox.com/s/fie0qrk7ecpphib/weather.jpg?dl=0 This just seems like blatant lying to me.

One of the main developers of the Yahoo weather app is a gigster (developer on the platform). The statement is that it was built by "one of our gigsters" and is intended to showcase the quality of work developers on Gigster have done. Had that developer been on Odesk or TapFame they would have listed Yahoo Weather as part of their portfolio. In this case they actually do list it as part of their portfolio. Definitely…

[deleted]

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

#172

Post by chillacy » Thu, Jul 23, 2015, 8:29 AM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #150

TylerJay wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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-…

> And the worst part is, it scales linearly Assuming optimum talent and project selection, it should scale sublinearly. The N+1 th worker bee will be less productive than the N th, and the N+1 th project will have a be willing to pay less than the N th in terms of $/unit output.

I think it's even more bleak than that, because adding the N+1th worker bee adds N new communication paths, unless you start segmenting people into org trees, which at that point you now have to maintain managers and middle managers.

Roughly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%E2%80%99_law

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

#173

Post by Inthenameofmine » Thu, Jul 23, 2015, 8:37 AM UTC

TylerJay wrote: post #101

markkanof wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-…

> And the worst part is, it scales linearly \cue groans\.

Actually, If they specialize their tech stack sufficiently for fast prototyping and take equity in these super early ideas, that should not be a problem as they could be in for the long game via equity.

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

#174

Post by jitix » Thu, Jul 23, 2015, 11:00 AM UTC

levlandau wrote: post #10

cjbarber wrote: 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.

can you give a breakdown on how the business model is sustainable? No real data but x number of projects, y number of staff, with total revenue of N and profit of M.

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

#175

Post by exelius » Thu, Jul 23, 2015, 1:48 PM UTC

pbreit wrote: post #143

exelius wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not "productized"; it's exactly the same as the thousands of other companies that do this. I'm not saying they won't make money (it's actually a pretty profitable business), but this is not a business model that scales geometrically. It's also a really, really crowded space where relationships, project management and financial discipline (aka staying on top of your collections from day 1) are bigger factors of s…

Well, I can think of one and its name starts with "g". I've done Elance/odesk several times and its far from pleasant.

I'm thinking of something a little more full-service than that. There are a number of small contract dev shops that will do end-to-end product development. I've had fully designed apps churned out in as little as 6 weeks for under $50k, and they handled design, project management, QA, requirements gathering, etc.

The problem is that you have to find companies like this, and they tend to be small because the model doesn't scale past a certain point -- once you expand past a few teams, it becomes very difficult to control quality. Customers get upset and refuse to pay, which causes a cash flow problem. The best way to keep your accounts receivable aging down is to do quality work consistently, and the best way to have consistent quality is to keep your scale of control small.

This is not a business model that lends itself to VC well.

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

#176

Post by markbnj » Thu, Jul 23, 2015, 2:10 PM UTC

LoSboccacc wrote: post #160

markbnj wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha, exactly, except that too good to be true usually is. I have a hard time believing the "low ball high volume" strategy is going to lead to well-executed projects.

I think the actual strategy is push idea guys into sharing equities so they get both some money for the initial investment and make it big on equity with relatively low risk if the project succeeds. From another pov they are vc to idea guys, only instead of giving the money for equity they give the product for equity. With the difference that they also get paid for it!

That's the smartest take on it that I've heard.

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

#177

Post by nadams » Thu, Jul 23, 2015, 2:17 PM UTC

harryjo wrote: post #168

nadams wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google is pretty strict about side projects done by its employees; its IP release claims ownership over anything IANAL nor do I play one on TV but I don't know if I actually believe that is legal - and if it is then it's a huge legal nightmare. Take this project for example[1]. He worked on it before he was an employee of Google and after - does that mean Google automatically gets copyright over the project? What a…

Greg was not in CA, and snap is open source, so this example is a non-issue and the author didn't care.

> snap is open source

But Google now lays claim over its copyright which gives them the right to sell it or take it down completely. But thankfully - if you have an old version - they can't retroactively change the license. However - that won't stop Google from sending DMCA takedowns if it gets big enough.

> so this example is a non-issue

It's a huge issue - when people and companies don't even understand the terms of the GPL [1] copyright and licenses could make a huge impact. Yes - someone can fork it and call it pans and make all sorts of awesome changes - but that's horrible for software development. Now there are 2 different versions with different features - I would rather one project that completely works than 2 similar projects that kind of works.

> the author didn't care

The other contributors did - and that's equally important. I would not want to piss off the people who are contributing code to my project. Once other people start contributing code - a good open source project should respect the opinions and comments of the community.

[1] https://github.com/github/dmca/commit/85c03a289fe56c67636ed6...

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

#178

Post by joesmo » Thu, Jul 23, 2015, 3:05 PM UTC

tedunangst wrote: post #159

joesmo wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They cannot claim legal ownership of copyright or patents on projects developed outside of Google working hours and not using Google equipment. I believe there have been some cases already in the California courts over the matter. It doesn't matter what their agreement says, the law says otherwise.

1. Assumes nobody cheats and works on the side project at work. I'm not sure how happy I'd be with an outsource agency that went radio silent for 8-10 hours in the middle of the work day. 2. They can claim just about anything they like, then you get to defend yourself.

I assume nobody cheats in a way that can be proven. :)

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

#179

Post by LoSboccacc » Thu, Jul 23, 2015, 5:02 PM UTC

markbnj wrote: post #176

LoSboccacc wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the actual strategy is push idea guys into sharing equities so they get both some money for the initial investment and make it big on equity with relatively low risk if the project succeeds. From another pov they are vc to idea guys, only instead of giving the money for equity they give the product for equity. With the difference that they also get paid for it!

That's the smartest take on it that I've heard.

Thanks. I had an idea similar to this while working at a larger company. I wanted to start a tiger team to follow startup technically. Leveraging the employer name we could have vetted them to increase our success ratio and be sure both of the business idea as part of the vetting and of the technical side. Sadly this project would only have netted millions and the previous company wouldn't touch anything under billions.

Go figure. They prefer to acquire company after they hit success for top dollar and run them on the ground instead of actually fostering innovation.

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

#180

Post by boomshucka » Thu, Jul 23, 2015, 5:32 PM UTC

jqm wrote: post #126

msellout wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure they're planning to throw VC money at the problem until it goes away ("it" being either the problem or the money).

I don't think estimating will be that much of a problem if the right formula is used. Is this straightforward and the team a has done stuff like this before (most cases)... apply the component formula and add the markup. Is it hairy with lots of unknowns? 1.2 million dollars.

No disrespect meant, but no one with any real software development experience would suggest that a quick formula can be used to estimate the cost/time to develop a given project. Very experienced people spend lots of time up front trying to estimate cost/time and are usually not very close.