Review my Idea: Building Prototypes as a Business in Silicon Valley | Hacker News Reader

Review my Idea: Building Prototypes as a Business in Silicon Valley

5 pointsyankoff9 comments

Basically, I want to help entrepreneurs to build very first versions of their products, quickly validate their ideas before they found serious tech-cofounders and get funded.

Why would entrepreneurs be interested in it

- it's cheap and quick;

- I'm in SF and can meet in-person within the Bay Area;

- they can get things done and get first working versions without a team.

Why would I do that

As an interesting alternative to remote/free-lance job. Help to network and gain new experience. I can't consider getting a real job because of the F-1 status.

Tools: Ruby on Rails, jQuery, mysql/mongo.

Any ideas on will this work? Any similar services in the Bay Area? And the main question: How to estimate the price of the work?

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With so many non-technical entrepreneurs looking to start web businesses, I think there's A LOT of demand. Like everything else, you might need to spend some time trying to find your market, but I think you'll find it quite quickly. As an aside, email me offline: hello [at] launchbit [dot] com. (My website LaunchBit helps new web entrepreneurs do their customer development and vet their markets first before writing any code. As a result, many of my users are non-technical and may be interested in speaking with you after they are done vetting their markets.)

There are a lot of freelancers in the Bay Area that do this already. But, that said, my best guess is that the demand currently is greater than the supply. There are also some shops that take equity in exchange for their help. (e.g. Originate Labs)

The range of these freelancers/shops is tremendous. I've heard people quote between $30/hr - $200/hr for both frontend and backend work. Like bradleyjoyce mentioned, I think it's more of a factor of how much work you're looking to find and how quickly. You can start out lower and raise your prices with future customers.

The job of the entrepreneur is to build prototypes and quickly validate their ideas. That's what they get the big equity stake for. Once they can get funded, they can hire other people to productionize it.

Why would you do this instead of starting the company yourself? Lack of ideas?

I can think of a number of people that would interested in a service like this (search HN for "How do I find a technical cofounder?" or "I just need a programmer") However, from your perspective you're sorta getting a raw deal because you're doing most of the work involved in getting a company off the ground yet have little of the upside. And from their perspective, there will be knowledge transfer issues (if it catches on, you're the only one who knows how the software works), trust issues (how do they know you won't just steal their idea and run with it, like Zuckerburg?), and possibly money issues (idea guys who can't code themselves and don't know any technical cofounders tend not to have a huge amount of money to throw around).

Why would you do this instead of starting the company yourself? Lack of ideas?

I have enough ideas and always do side-projects. But I still have to earn the living. Just looking for a more interesting way to do that.

entrepreneurs don't have $$ to hire you and most of the time they'd rather do everything themselves anyway. you should look into contracting at a startup. it allows you to work as much as you want, or as little as you want

Hi Yankoff, This discussion came up on a Google Alert for "Originate Labs" and I'm in charge of Corp Dev for both our San Mateo and Los Angeles offices.

What you are looking to do is what we do at Originate every day and we use primarily RoR in addition to mobile development. If you're interested in chatting about employment with Originate now or in the future (maybe when you get your OPT), we can certainly help you develop your entrepreneurial aspirations within the confines of a stable incubator type company.

My email is rob.mallery (at) Originatelabs (dot) com if you want to send a resume or your contact info.

Cheers!

Rob Mallery Dir of Corp Dev Originate Labs

This is called custom software development, and thousands of development shops around the world do this... in fact it's how I make my living.

Is there some particular angle you're taking that makes it non-standard?

Entrepreneur needs X... you charge Y per hour and estimate it will take Z hours, but charge for however many it actually takes.

Thanks for the response. Yes, there's no any particular angle I guess. Maybe only it's more focused on unfunded startups on very early stage. I'm a bit confused with how to estimate Y for now.

my view on rates is that it depends heavily on (1) how well referred you were to the potential client (2) the level/quality of your portfolio (3) scarcity of similar services in your area.

my very first gig I charged $35/hr... now I charge almost 4x that.

I'm doing this already. Let's chat via email (my email is in my profile).

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