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Poll: What Do You Hate About Contracting?

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Re: Poll: What Do You Hate About Contracting?

#31

Post by rbranson »

daeken wrote: post #16
wavephorm wrote: post #13

I would say, the unwillingness for companies to outsource the interesting work. IME, most consulting work is just grind, no interesting problems, and the pay rarely really makes up for the real amount of work.

Find your niche and only contract in that space. For quite a while, I only did reverse-engineering contracting; I gained a reputation for doing it, and my available work and hourly rate rose as a result of that. Figure out the intersection of what you're interested in, what people are willing to pay for, and what you're good at and you're set.

Yeah, I actually think you've got a better shot at specializing in interesting work as a consultant. As a staff developer, even if you work on interesting things most of the time, you can still get stuck with bottom-of-the-barrel shit like the equivalent of writing a VB app to track the secretary's time.

Re: Poll: What Do You Hate About Contracting?

#32

Post by tptacek »

drewcrawford wrote: post #4

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…

My friend Mike has a company that does upside sharing for contract dev work, and their solution to the problem is to require 50% in cash as earnest money; makes the conversation simpler: if you're willing to put down 5 figures in dev expenses, you're probably for real.

(Thankfully, revenue sharing doesn't make sense for our business).

The other big problem you touched on that isn't in the poll is client scheduling; clients will slip and slide all over the calendar, and it's nothing to them (they're used to slipping), but for an outside firm, it's havoc.

Re: Poll: What Do You Hate About Contracting?

#33

Post by rbranson »

rjd wrote: post #9

People wasting my time with stupid ideas. The amount of Groupon clones I've had come in front of me with "a special twist that will take the market by storm" is ridiculous.

We had this clown come in once all sweaty wearing a suit with no socks, and he tried to pitch us on some idea which involved building a Windows client application and distributing it using the "AOL CD distribution model." He also went to a private college and blamed his parents for his business problems.

Re: Poll: What Do You Hate About Contracting?

#34

Post by tptacek »

rpwilcox wrote: post #11
drewcrawford wrote: post #4

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…

Amen about the lead qualification. I just had this happen today: I spent a few hours on an email for a potential client whose project sounds like 3-6 man-months of work. Now, does he really have that kind of dough laying around (ie: angel funding), or will I never here from the client again because he was hoping to get it done for $200? (Or worse: profit sharing / equity arrangements. Equity doesn't pay my rent.)

How big a problem is that variant of qualification, really? Why don't you just approach these things as if there's no real business there?

I may be jaded about this because so many of our bids are competitive, and even a simple bid takes a couple hours to put together. We win most of them, but you get used to sinking time into deals that don't pan out and build it into the process.

Re: Poll: What Do You Hate About Contracting?

#35

Post by andrewljohnson »

My biggest problem is educating customers on an iterative process. We don't do strict contracting, but we do license our iOS software platform and provide custom development work for the apps.

Both for our own products, and partner products, we like to begin beta testing apps at quite an embarrassing, early stage in the process. We also basically refuse to spec anything but the most basic features of the app, until we hear from users.

In almost every case, the partner agrees to this structure, but then when it comes down to it, they see what we want to release to beta (50-100 users), and then they push back and try and get us to implement features they think are important, or fix bugs they believe matter. They are somewhat incredulous when we push back and decline to bill them hours.

It always works out in the end. When the partner starts hearing the incredibly valuable things users say when they test the apps, they immediately understand the value, and it's smooth sailing from there.

But trying to get a company to release crappy, buggy, unfinished software to 100 of their real customers seems to always take some doing.

We've never had an issue getting paid, and we always require money up front. I did have to struggle once to get 10% of a contract, but I honestly believe it was just accidentally FUBARed.

Re: Poll: What Do You Hate About Contracting?

#36

Post by rpwilcox »

famousactress wrote: post #24
rpwilcox wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amen about the lead qualification. I just had this happen today: I spent a few hours on an email for a potential client whose project sounds like 3-6 man-months of work. Now, does he really have that kind of dough laying around (ie: angel funding), or will I never here from the client again because he was hoping to get it done for $200? (Or worse: profit sharing / equity arrangements. Equity doesn't pay my rent.)

This is interesting to me. Budget isn't something the conversation leads with?

I've been thinking about revising my tactics some, to try to get a potential client to spill what kind of budget they have to work with before I even start thinking about anything else.

It certainly helps sometimes in picking out project infrastructure ("I have to do this cheaply, so let's get inventive")

Re: Poll: What Do You Hate About Contracting?

#37

Post by scal84 »

superkinz wrote: post #5

I hate finding projects. I know they're out there, but it's all word of mouth. Sucks.

This is my favourite part - I find it helps if you treat it like the game it is. Meet people, ask about their business, be friendly and before you know it they are asking your advice on an app. Get in there and close the deal, do a good job, get a referral, rinse and repeat.

It's all about networking and talking a good game. It doesn't come natural to engineers I admit but once I decided to just go for it I found it can be fun.

On the plus side you do get to meet a lot of interesting people and discover interesting ideas for apps.

Re: Poll: What Do You Hate About Contracting?

#38

Post by tptacek »

aantix wrote: post #28

The paperwork, namely creating detailed line-item invoices. That's why I created this gem, Big Bucks No Whammies, to automatically generate my invoices from my git commits. https://github.com/aantix/big_bucks_no_whammies Here's a sample invoice : https://github.com/aantix/big_bucks_no_whammies/blob/master/...

I'm not sure providing detailed line-item invoices like this is a win. How are you getting cornered into pricing on a commit-by-commit basis?

Re: Poll: What Do You Hate About Contracting?

#39

Post by tptacek »

cperciva wrote: post #12

Getting paid. I finish work; I send an invoice; I get an email back saying "thanks, we'll process this right away"; and I wait. A month later, I send another email and get told that it "slipped through the cracks" or "got lost", and a week later I get a check in the mail. I think I'm batting roughly a 50% average on getting paid without sending the "uh, where's my money" email. I always get paid eventually and withou…

Welcome to life in the big city. Your most lucrative clients are likely to end up being the biggest pain to handle receivables from.

There's not a whole lot you can do about it, is there? It's usually not your direct contacts who have anything to do with it, so it harms the relationship to complain to them about it (they have better things to do). Tracking down the right person in accounting or purchasing to get things moving is a waste of your time. For a long time, before we had a dedicated finance person, we just built these delays into our process.

Re: Poll: What Do You Hate About Contracting?

#40

Post by andrewljohnson »

daeken wrote: post #16
wavephorm wrote: post #13

I would say, the unwillingness for companies to outsource the interesting work. IME, most consulting work is just grind, no interesting problems, and the pay rarely really makes up for the real amount of work.

Find your niche and only contract in that space. For quite a while, I only did reverse-engineering contracting; I gained a reputation for doing it, and my available work and hourly rate rose as a result of that. Figure out the intersection of what you're interested in, what people are willing to pay for, and what you're good at and you're set.

Exactly... we do nothing but mapping apps, leveraging a platform we license out. Our partners know that the apps we produce are going to rank and make money, and so they pay.
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