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Comment by dangero | Hacker News Reader

I look at it like this: There are 4 directions that a software project can be constrained: Time, price, scope, and quality.

1. Elance or ODesk can offer you fixed time, price, and scope, but highly erratic quality.

2. An expensive contracting agency can offer you fixed time, scope, and quality, but with high costs.

3. This site promises fixed cost, and quality, but makes no promises on scope or completion timeline.

All that's left is for someone to make a site that has fixed timing, like "Software Prototypes in One Week". I'll wait for that one to hit the front page of HN. As a developer I'd actually prefer that because I know when it's going to be over.

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"All that's left is for someone to make a site that has fixed timing, like "Software Prototypes in One Week"."

Looks like someone already did that too: http://protoverstas.com

10,000 EUR + 2.5% equity (o_O);

More realistic though; you really cannot do anything for $3500 (E2500). Well you can do something but it won't be very nice I don't think. E10k is good for a proto.

"Done In One Week"

Quality, Cost and Scope will be "best effort"

Honestly, it might sound silly, but it would be useful. Give a client an idea of what can be done in a week, lets them know what can be off the shelf and what has the be built, etc. Something like $85 an hour @ 3500 a week. Better than spending a week in meetings arguing about scope.

Yeah, as an engineer it sounds like a blast. If I could line up work doing that week after week I'd definitely give it a go for a while.

Same, specially that I love doing prototypes.

Sprinkle a little 'agile' magic dust...

self-plug: You're almost describing my company, Prontotype: http://prontotype.us/

We're not trying to build one-week twitter clones, but well-working prototypes out of unique ideas.

Hmm, so as a software consultant I'm impressed with your business model because it seems like a scheduling nightmare. How do you manage to have available resources when people contact you? Do you sometimes have to say no if your team is busy with something else?

Since we're focusing on prototypes/MVPs the process is very iterative and feedback oriented, so scheduling just consists of fitting well-defined blocks together. We've also got a balanced team which helps us parallelize. There haven't been any scaling problems yet, but when there are we're ready to bring on extra talent.

How do you find clients?

Now: Word of mouth spurred by high quality output. Before: Job boards and friends in business schools.

I have used elance for graphics work 4 times. The 3 was fine, acceptable result, nothing outstanding. That one time it was an awful poor choice. But for a long-term project, expensive project I'm not sure if eLance is the way to go.

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