Comment by inmygarage | Hacker News Reader

Comment by inmygarage | Hacker News Reader

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The assumption that people who pay $99 for a prototype are "cheapskates" who don't understand mobile development completely ignores the fact that the market for mobile development is growing like crazy in so many different directions and is at such an incredible premium right now that the bottom end of the market has been pretty much ignored (if you are a great iphone developer right now why would you even bother?)

But it is going to get huge. Think about web developers in 1997. They could charge a premium because there were few of them and few out of the box options (ie ugly template websites where you pay $50 for a full ecommerce site, 99designs, etc.).

Starting out doing consulting means you get to know a part of the market that most people are too snobby to touch (the whole "talking to your customers" thing) - though they are just as legitimate a customer segment as the people who will pay the egregious rates for custom.

Eh, I agree that it will be a large demographic, just like the large demographic of customers who want a WordPress clone written in PHP and ranked #1 in Google for $500. I suppose they are "legitimate" in the sense of being legal persons, sure — but "legitimate" in the sense of "profitable" or "preferable to other options," not so much. If you want to work for an effective rate of $12 an hour, my experience is that a job behind the counter at Barnes & Noble will probably be less of a headache.

(I once had a client whom I'd given a ~50% discount. Upon completion of the contract, he declared that he'd only pay me half of my already halved invoice. If this sounds like fun to anybody out there, by all means, pursue $99 app customers.)

Turn-key solutions for creating basic sites have lower margins but make it up by being able to sell at larger volume either by offering the same set of themes or offloading design costs to the community or customer.

If that's what he's going for, then it's workable, and I agree with you, it's a good market to target. But that's rather different from creating custom prototypes for $99.

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