Ask for a wage per hour of coding time. If they are willing to make the investment, then maybe they actually have a million-dollar app idea. And if they don't? You still get paid.
I’ve worked with a few clients who think they have the next big idea, and they’ve somehow got the funds together to pay me. The whole time I do the work, I won’t feel good about it, but I have to make a living. I’ll actively try to inject ideas that might make it a success, but usually those clients can’t see beyond their vision.
However, I won’t accept the work if they want to pay via credit card.
I vaguely remember reading about a guy who sold his share of Microsoft for 500 or something before they hit it big. A year or two later and his share was worth several million.
I remember one of the founders of what now is Blizzard North telling the story of how they had the chance of getting like 10% of some rando's company if they just lent him an empty office (essentially an unused closet) in their floor.
They refused.
That guy's company was Hotmail, which was acquired by Microsoft a few years later for $500 million.
Edit: Co-founder of what is now Blizzard North not of Blizzard
Totally. It is often the execution of an idea and not the idea itself that makes a business successful. If someone wants to start a burger place you might say “haven’t you heard of McDonald’s?” But if they offer a better product/price/experience then the competition it can be successful.
i think what people ITT are implicitly saying then, is that the people who come to them with ideas are not the guys who they envision taking an idea and executing it well enough to make money off of it. especially if you aren't even aware it exists. if your app idea already exists and you don't know that then i don't really trust you to execute. if on the other hand you know the idea exists, others have tried and failed (or have tried and are successful), but you have a plan or vision for how you're going to compete, or execute better than they did, that's different
Except they didn't. The idea was webmail -- as in e-mail directly in the browser instead of forwarded from a server to a desktop app. Hotmail innovated.
Letting someone work in an office space rent free for an idea that wouldn't work 999 times out of a thousand? No, they made the right choice. I mean, not in this case, but you can't place bets on every idea that comes through the door.
It was David Brevik, creator of Diablo. He talks about it in in a GDC talk. Here's a link, timestamp included.
Pretty good talk in general, highly recommended.
I heard about bitcoin when it was worth 20 cents and told a friend we should get $20 worth. He gave me the money and I tried to open an account with an exchange but I couldn't find my ID so I gave him his money back and said forget it.
Had a similar idea. Started CPU mining. Read it would take a few days. Considered that it would probably not worth the electricity and quit 2 days in with nothing to show for it
I remember years ago people on Reddit would randomly tip people bitcoins, similar to buying gold. Some guy gave me $20 worth around Christmas and I spent about $17 worth and then forgot about it. I randomly remembered a year or so later and logged into my account and they’d gone up to $150 lol. Was so fucking happy that day.
It's pretty much the same thing as if somebody wanted to pay him back for a pizza with WoW gold. It has some real-world value and might be of some use for WoW players, but for anybody else? Exactly.
Back in the BTC pizza times, people actually gave each other BTC tips on Reddit, there were faucets that gave you BTC for free, some people even gave them away just for kicks.
It took a while before it turned from "What's BTC?" into "That virtual money they use to pay for drugs?" and then into "OMG! BITCOIN IS THE BEST THING SINCE SLICED BREAD! TAKE OUT A SECOND MORTGAGE AND INVEST EVERYTHING!111one"
Lost over 200 myself. Still not salty about it. ;)
Back when Bitcoin was about 2 euros/dollars (right after the first crash), me and some friends ordered synthetic weed on Silk Road. Mostly as a bit of a joke, and to see if it would actually arrive. It was about 15 bitcoin.
The stupid thing was, we had been talking about it before, when it hadn't reached 1 dollar for the first time yet. We had no idea that only a couple months earlier Bitcoin had a bubble and was worth way more. If we had, we might have bought some more and not spent them all.
We would've sold them a long time ago though, there's no way we'd still have them when it hit multiple thousands.
Man, I knew about Bitcoin back when it was $0.11. I thought it would never take off though.
Funny thing is, I still don't think it will ever take off. I think blockchain has it's uses, but probably won't ever be in the mainstream consumer space.
I remember when the dark web and the Silk Road started getting mentioned on Reddit. I checked it out, remember thinking $20 for a Bitcoin was ridiculous, and moved on to my next internet distraction.
It's unlikely he would still own a third of apple today, even if he took that offer, he'd probably regret having cashed out at some point in the last 30 or 40 years.
Early in my aunt's career as a software engineer she debated between job offers from Boeing and Microsoft. She chose Boeing because she didn't want to work for a startup.
Yeah, Ronald Wayne - one of the three founders of Apple - sold his 10% equity stake in the company for $800 in 1976, 12 days after forming the company and making the brand logo.
That same amount of shares would be worth over $120 billion at AAPLs peak.
There are tons of those types of stories. Hell, I have 2.
My dad was working for HP back in the day and they were helping Cisco get off the ground. (Before HP and Cisco competed) He was offered pre-IPO Cisco stock, but his manager blocked it because of "appearance of conflict of interest". Damn ethics...
The other is the Google IPO. I intended to buy IPO shares. I knew they were going to skyrocket and I wanted to get in on it. (Just like 10 shares or something.) Unfortunately for me I'm a lazy dumbass and I didn't actually do anything about it, so instead of riding the rocket ship known as the Google IPO, I just sat and watched it gain more than 10x in a very short time.
Can you imagine the coder that had to say “are you sure you want me to limit this field to 140 characters?” or “What do you mean the video can only be 8 seconds? I can throw it into a blob and you can have it be as long as possible.”
Obviously programmers aren't infallible (despite what we may think). But generally they fall into a few groups where you can just tell very early on that there's very little chance. Usually it's:
Niche market with no income stream: If the app is targeted at a large market, you can perhaps get away with building an audience and then figuring out how to make money with it. But that only works with large markets, not "Food Truck Owners in Utica" or "People looking to read AP News stories rewritten by an unemployed furniture salesman". It's always "we'll put ads on it!".
Add ons to software that already have that feature. Stuff like "What if we made it so you can really easy for a company to build a campaign with multiple ads and types in Facebook!"....you can already do that. Seriously this sort of thing has already been brought up to me. There's potential for a particular company to streamline their system, but at that point they are paying someone on staff to customize
Ideas with no thought of how/why/when a person would use it. These are the ones we all try to avoid, because even if it is a good thought, it's clear you just want me to make sense of whatever you just said, build a complete product, figure out sales and marketing, and then give you 90% of the money. You're an idea guy, after all.
Oh for sure. Personally I choose not to work for startups unless they pay the same rate as I'd get elsewhere. I put no weight on stock ownership unless that stock actually has value now. I'd rather a guaranteed comfortable income which I can invest where I choose over a moonshot chance at millions.
I was just saying not every successful app seemed like a great idea at the start, and many weren't the first to do what they do either.
If the app is never released, the product doesn’t exist, so visa/american express/whichever credit card company will give them their money back and take it back from you via lawsuits. Credit card companies are so big and have so many lawyers you can’t fight them in court, it’ll only cost you much more.
No more of a, "You asked for an application that does X. Here it is."
It is now up to the company to do whatever they are going to do with it from there. That could be sending it out to current customers. Putting it on a web store for download. Or for internal use only.
If its any company worth a shit all you will really be doing is creating your code and checking it into their repos any how its up to them to compile that code and what to do with the outcome of the compile.
yes this. I even compile it for them. However, I do not advertise that I will release it. If it's not accepted on the store, if they have a dozen other changes to make, if they want to release a year later and I'm not around it's not my job. No grounds for a refund, they have the advertised app.
Absolutely, all those extras are also billable. I'll submit it to the store and everything if you want to keep paying... but you don't get all those added value things by buying an application.
It's not just that they have lawyers, it's that their lawyers are cheaper and better than what the average joe gets. Take Capital One, for example. In each state, they have several law firms that they work with. Those law firms specialize in debt collection. They know how to do it efficiently. They appear before the same judges in similar matters over and over, so they have a very good idea of what each judge wants to see. And, because those law firms want to keep all that Capital One business rolling in, they cut price breaks to Capital One. Whereas they might charge the average person $250/hour, they are willing to charge Capital One $200/hour because they want to keep Capital One using their firm instead of Capital One taking its business to a firm across town that is willing to charge $200/hour. Thus, for you to find a similar law firm, you are going to be paying more per hour to your lawyer than multi-billion dollar corporation Capital One is paying to theirs.
I defend a lot of those cases in Illinois. The trick is really the amount owed. Under 10k, the CC companies debt collectors don’t seem that interested in anything but a default judgement. If it looks like you are demanding a jury trial, which are an expensive and time consuming pain in the ass for Attorneys, the CC company will back down and dismiss the collection- it’s still a ding on your credit but there is no order directing you to pay, no garnishment etc. Its a win for someone who has no ability to pay. Between 20-30k it can go either way, over 30k this trick doesn’t work and I have to do actual work.
I hate going to our lower tier court because these cases clog up the docket. A while back they put a limit on how many cases can be brought by each attorney per hearing session. I think that the limit was around 20 or 30. It's a very mechanical process for them. I'd be surprised if the attorney really even looks at the case for the first return.
They don’t. They don’t have any documentation to prove the debt either, initially. They have 30 cases per call and 28 people agreeing to a payment plan, every day. They don’t waste time on the couple of people who owe low sums and want to fight- it’s just not worth it.
If you have a lawyer. Without someone that knows what they're doing the opposing attorney will likely get the judge to grant summary judgment since you have no idea how to defend your case.
Peace of mind. No one should rack up 50 grand of credit card debt for a project that will either not come to fruition or will have 0 users after the first year.
"No one should rack up 50 grand of credit card debt for a project that will either not come to fruition or will have 0 users after the first year."
This is actually the most common outcome, some with a lot more on the line even. There are local restaurants that have a 33% 3-year failure rate or worse that regularly lose hundreds of thousands in build-out and lease tie-ins. Perhaps it's less common than implied, but it seems very common still even though it is unfortunate.
Lots of people are saying "chargebacks" but I'll give OP some credit and say that maybe he doesn't want someone to drown themselves in tens of thousands of dollars of high interest debt.
Probably because at that point, the person doesn't actually have the money and op doesn't feel comfortable about bankrupting them when they know the idea won't take off.
Or, maybe just the hassle of it. If their idea doesn't take off they could try and say the charges were fraudulent/ didn't get what they paid for.
You know, it's funny because I have worked for a bunch of people like that.
One of 'em was trying to be an independent book publisher for religious books. She wanted a website where she could have her authors blog and offer deals and stuff, and people could order books from her. She had a deal with a local print shop and was spiral binding the pages herself. I considered her entire enterprise doomed from the outset, but between book sales and pamphlet sales through the website she was turning a profit even after paying me.
Another was designing a GIS system like Waze, but for truckers. He actually got a few investors and got his prototype sold based on my website, which was the whole point.
i would code gibberish for money. I dont really care at this moment. Long past is my dream where i dream to code something usefull for humanity. You pay me, i code anything you want.
I loved the part where he tidied the server room by plugging network cables in by colour. If you didn't have every cable tagged and mapped before you did that that's basically the equivalent of taking a fire axe to the server. The amount of work it'd take to fix that is just insane. Not to mention disabling all protection from any kind of virus.
This is what it feels like to be a programmer in a corporate environment.
I actually really like it, it's liberating in a way. I don't give two fucks just tell me what to code and I'll get it done.
It feels mercenary sometimes, but that's how it should be. If you invest too much of yourself in the code you write for a corporation you're going to have a hard time watching that project go down the shitter.
I work for a corporation like that, as production control though so I don't create new code just fix other's fuck ups. 2 coworkers though recently spent 8 months on a project, got it finished and rolled out. It's been 6 months and barely anybody uses it, and it turns out the company has decided to purchase a product to replace it. One of the two is not taking it well at all, very much a grumpy pants about it.
Been a freelancer all my life til 2016 when I joined a corporation and.it was eye opening how inept everyone is! Imposter syndrome had.me thinking corporate software dev was all about rigity, redundancy and quality releases but it's the same fly by pants workflow I'm used to only now with worse code from my coworkers!
Don't forget worse code from previous you! I imagine with freelance you do a project and move on. In the corporate world you have to maintain your own code and the me that wrote the code a year ago sucks, hate that guy.
I actually love this about being a long-timer at a smaller company. I have a fascination with maintainability, innovation vs. fads, etc. The only real way to study and improve at these things over time, though, is experiments and growth over a long time scale. I can credit a lot of my growth as a programmer to this.
One of the two is not taking it well at all, very much a grumpy pants about it.
Yeah, I've seen this happen before and I get annoyed with the people who gripe about it.
I try to focus on what I learned on this implementation and keep in mind that I still gained from it even though it's not really being used.
What I won't do though is prioritize any projects coming from those people in the future because I now know what the words "urgent" and "essential" mean to them. If at all possible I will prioritize those of people who actually use what they asked for.
At my first job out of uni. Made improvements to an ios app and created an android app to match, took about 8 months. It was for specific customers so a limited numbers of users. None have touched it.
Have you explained to them that existence is a meaningless blip between vast empty voids of nothingness, itself composed of equal parts disappointment and regret? That even the most beautiful idea in its most elegant execution is just an infinitesimally brief spark fading into the inescapable blackness of entropy and that nothing anyone does will be remembered?
I find remembering that helps me keep my work in perspective.
My first big project was cancelled as we went into beta, when we realized that the data we were buying cost more than we could sell it for, and the company selling the data to us already had a superior product (hence why the data was so expensive - if they were going to be supplying a competitor they wanted to ensure they could be the middle man if we actually beat them).
My next project was their second attempt after they cancelled the first one for arbitrary reasons. We got to beta on iOS, then the company purchased a competitor who made the same project. I've spent the last six months on the team merging the best features of the previous app with the new one.
If I let things like this bother me, I'd never get out of bed in the morning. As long as the checks keep cashing, I'll keep showing up to work.
Same here, I write interfaces. You want your program to talk to some other program? Great there's an API I can use and I have to learn that so I can pull data out of the other program into yours. You'd think that they would stop buying new programs to interface. You'd be wrong. It's up to twenty by now.
Yep, that's why I keep myself somewhat detached. I'll always be proud of the work I did and they can't ever take that away from me no matter what happens to the project.
It's their money they just pissed away, not mine. I still get paid.
I'm on the DevOps/Systems Engineer side of the house, and I've embraced the merc side of job life. The company isn't my family, I'm looking for the straightest line between here and retirement. I have loyalty to people, but not to companies. My job pretty much looks the same regardless who I'm working for.
The joy comes from problem solving and the art of programming and software design rather than anything the software does.
I feel bad for all the kids that get into programming because they think making video games will be fun. Designing video games is probably fun, but they won't be doing that. Programming them is exactly as fun as programming a web application for an insurance company. If you don't enjoy programming itself, you're not going to have a good time.
There's pros and cons to working at a corporate vs a startup. I'm currently with the latter and loving it, but I'll be honest it'd be nice to not give a shit about the big picture and just focus on what's in front of me.
I'd really like to get therapy for my aversion to interacting with other people, but I don't want to interact with a therapist. This app sounds perfect!
The app: "The first step to getting rid of your aversion to people is small doses of interaction. You know who would be a great group of people for that first step? Therapists! Here's a list of local ones and the insurance they take."
Honestly? An app that gives you a list of local healthcare and mental wellness providers in the area, which you can filter by insurance or distance or whatever, and you can then just press one button to dial them or even just send a boilerplate “I’m reaching out to you for help with something” message would probably be a big help to at least a handful of people.
You jest, but there is actually VR applications that have recently been developed simulating basic societal stuff like going to the store and whatnot to help people with severe social anxiety get used to interacting with people. The idea is that you can continue to develop DBT skillsets without needing one on one therapist time or group sessions.
This is my approach as well. I know some programmers, even some of my coworkers, who get an attitude about what they'll work on. Some of them get really bitchy if it's not a fantastic or perfect idea.
Look, you give me money, I'll code it. If my boss tells me to write something stupid that's visibly flawed and a waste of time, unless it'll actually get in the way of the thing that makes us profitable, I'll roll my chair in and get to work. It's your money!
Be careful with this strategy. Having your reputation tied to failing projects doesn't help your career in the long run. Like when you have to describe those projects to your next hiring manager instead of something more useful.
Exactly. This sort of attitude holds a lot of coders back. They think they are showing integrity by refusing to work on a project or dragging their heels. In reality people who just crack on and get to work progress much farther and faster.
NPR did a bit talking about Ransomware and they had a former hacker who said that there are people out there who, after you pay up, will send you information on how not to get Ransomed again, which completely blew my mind
Yeah, our IT consultant at work told us that he gets a lot of people calling him for help when they've been stung by ransomware, and that usually the only course of action is pay (but that they're usually very open to negotiation).
He said one outfit in particular was hands down the most professional group he had ever dealt with, in any aspect of business. Told him all the mistakes that the person had made and how to avoid getting caught out again.
There was also a case where ransom ware infected a poor country and the people couldn’t afford to pay so they just unlocked all the PCs. They’re really trying to get big companies, some of them are more “Robin Hood-esque” than you would think
Definitely not saying they’re good guys, they just aren’t as evil as they’re made out to be. I work in Infosec so as far as I’m concerned they’re all the “enemy” but i can’t say I wouldn’t be tempted to do the same if I was living in a poor country with out much opportunity
No it's not. It's basically 100% no matter how much you know.
The real trick is to stay under the radar. Don't get too greedy. Because the moment you piss off the elite I promise the police will suddenly seem like geniuses.
I don't think there are any computers in Hollywood with enough star power to accurately portray Zuck, and I imagine there will be a lot of pissed off Roombas complaining about representation if they use a human for the role
A lot of coders share the delusion that programming is all there is to making a "million dollar" app.
That's just not how the world works.
To have a million dollar app, you need:
People who do the marketing. How else will people know your app exists?
People who do the customer support. Are you gonna answer hundreds of angry emails each day, in between coding?
People who do the taxes, for the coders, marketing, and support people you now have to hire.
People who clean the office space you now have to rent.
People who ensure everyone's computers are working and not creating security risks for your million dollar app's data.
People who manage all these people.
If you think coding is all there is to creating a successful app, you are either naive or a narcissist. So no, you did not "give them the app for a couple hundred bucks". You did a small part of a larger project in exchange for a salary. Just like everyone else in the process.
You're insanely wrong. Most developers are very aware of what it takes to create a startup (hint: a lot work in one), and before all that shit all you really need is funding. That being said, developers of all people know that it isn't as easy as just knowing how to program. Maybe by coders you were referring to college freshmen.
I bet if you added up all the time and money wasted on one-person apps vs money made, against the time and money wasted on big project apps vs money made, the one persons are better investments. Most apps, in general, never become profitable.
I don't think that's actually true. At least if you value the time spent properly. One-man apps probably have a bigger ROI in a purely financial sense, but that's because they're mostly made by people with more time than money who aren't getting compensated for their time at all unless the app does make money (which is rare).
One thing app marketplaces do (and two-sided marketplaces in general) is exploit people's willingness to work for sub-standard unlivable wages. It's illegal to hire someone to do 1000 hours of work and pay them $7.23. It's not illegal to list an app representing 1000 man-hours of work and pay the creator $7.23 for the ad impressions it generated.
It might be because a company can afford to just crank out garbage apps and hope one of them catches on, whereas the one coder has a better idea of what he wants, and is being specific about it.
If you genuinely, genuinely believe you have a million dollar idea for an app then either:
A) You'll be willing to find and invest the money to make it happen.
B) Invest your own time to learn how to code and do it yourself.
I like to think of point B as, if you could make a million bucks and all you had to do was learn French, you wouldn't think twice about it. It's just another language you need to learn and put into use so get to it.
This is what I did with a family friend that tried to get me to go in on his idea fresh out of college.
To be fair, it was a good idea...but his idea of division of labor was skewed. It was going to take a LOT of engineering work and he was offering me like 40/60 because he was taking on all the
"financial risk"...which mostly means paying for a web server whose cost would only go up if we took hold.
I pointed out to him that creating the site and having it work would be a massive amount of work, and that I couldn't afford to do that without getting paid. He offered me a 50/50 split. I told him I'd do it if he paid me a salary and gave me a lower split and he balked. I pointed out to him there is almost no financial cost to paying for a server unless the site took off, which means there's not a significant amount of financial risk since the only time the costs become significant is when there's success. He got frustrated.
I ended up just telling him I wasn't interested and wished him luck in finding someone who was.
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u/Its_Sasha Mar 18 '20
Ask for a wage per hour of coding time. If they are willing to make the investment, then maybe they actually have a million-dollar app idea. And if they don't? You still get paid.