This is a great idea, It's hard for people with little tech experience to find a good hacker/coder and it's hards to find clients with a sufficient budget for a project.
So here is my biz dev advice..
1) Your concept of screening coders for talent is important, only accept people who can get things done.
2.) Only charge developers a monthly fee. The collective fees should be enough to cover the cost of an ongoing marketing campaign to attract the right businesses and entrepreneurs.
3.) Educate businesses and single entrepreneurs about the cost of projects, and cost of talent and explain trade offs for paying less.
Experienced coders may cost more, but they have the experience can work faster, less learning on job....coders who charge less may be less experience, in different time zone, not so fluent in native language, etc. Provide rough estimates based on info on past projects. i.e. Angry brids cost about $150,000 to create.
(http://www.develop-online.net/news/37242/Angry-Birds-cost-Ro... )
4.) The education is important and it provides prescreen of potential clients, only accept projects that fall within reasonable guidelines.
5.) Do not charge businesses a monthly fee. as mentioned by MatthewB "If it takes any more than a month to find a dev, there's something wrong with your system."
Once developer has been found, charge business/entrepreneur fee per projects because you're providing technical screening service.
Note: So the idea is to take some elements of successful services like elance, etc and raise the bar.
setting up useful guidelines and an effective marketing campaign will not be easy.
Only charge developers a monthly fee? Last I checked it is hard to find developers and not hard for developers to find work. I doubt many developers would pay to be listed, I know I wouldn't.
Sure there are many developers who won't need the service, but there also plenty of developers who wouldn't mind having a service to filter out the silly and bogus request. It's not about finding any kind of work, it's about finding the right work at the right pay. The goal is to match quality jobs with talented developers.
I'd check US employment law first -- here in the UK, I had my first proper startup attempt holed by discovering UK employment legislation that stipulates you can't charge a worker for finding them work - you can only charge the person who ends up hiring them. There are nuances and exceptions to this, such as when someone's contracting via a corp/company etc, but it definitely applies to individuals freelancing, etc. Hope that helps.
That's interesting, there are number of website that have success doing this, Elance, Sortfolio, to name a few. It may be just the way the service is structured, i.e. it's just a listing where employers can find you.
Comments
This is a great idea, It's hard for people with little tech experience to find a good hacker/coder and it's hards to find clients with a sufficient budget for a project. So here is my biz dev advice..
1) Your concept of screening coders for talent is important, only accept people who can get things done.
2.) Only charge developers a monthly fee. The collective fees should be enough to cover the cost of an ongoing marketing campaign to attract the right businesses and entrepreneurs.
3.) Educate businesses and single entrepreneurs about the cost of projects, and cost of talent and explain trade offs for paying less. Experienced coders may cost more, but they have the experience can work faster, less learning on job....coders who charge less may be less experience, in different time zone, not so fluent in native language, etc. Provide rough estimates based on info on past projects. i.e. Angry brids cost about $150,000 to create. (http://www.develop-online.net/news/37242/Angry-Birds-cost-Ro... )
4.) The education is important and it provides prescreen of potential clients, only accept projects that fall within reasonable guidelines.
5.) Do not charge businesses a monthly fee. as mentioned by MatthewB "If it takes any more than a month to find a dev, there's something wrong with your system." Once developer has been found, charge business/entrepreneur fee per projects because you're providing technical screening service.
Note: So the idea is to take some elements of successful services like elance, etc and raise the bar. setting up useful guidelines and an effective marketing campaign will not be easy.
Only charge developers a monthly fee? Last I checked it is hard to find developers and not hard for developers to find work. I doubt many developers would pay to be listed, I know I wouldn't.
Sure there are many developers who won't need the service, but there also plenty of developers who wouldn't mind having a service to filter out the silly and bogus request. It's not about finding any kind of work, it's about finding the right work at the right pay. The goal is to match quality jobs with talented developers.
> "Only charge developers a monthly fee"
I'd check US employment law first -- here in the UK, I had my first proper startup attempt holed by discovering UK employment legislation that stipulates you can't charge a worker for finding them work - you can only charge the person who ends up hiring them. There are nuances and exceptions to this, such as when someone's contracting via a corp/company etc, but it definitely applies to individuals freelancing, etc. Hope that helps.
That's interesting, there are number of website that have success doing this, Elance, Sortfolio, to name a few. It may be just the way the service is structured, i.e. it's just a listing where employers can find you.
Thanks for the feedback - very helpful!
No problem, I hope it does well. Keep in mind design is part of marketing so take heed to the comments about improving the designs.