[job]Automotive Classifieds
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- RobertGonzalez
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How many pages is your design specification? How much data do you have at the moment and how many paying clients do you have on board or committed once the business goes live? What are your market research analytics showing about potential business?
I agree with astions and the others on this offer... it is quite a big job for one developer to commit to for the prospect of a US automotive website. I know from experience having began something similar before. There is a huge amount of potential income out there for the automotive marketing sector, but it requires a huge financial investment from the business owner. If you have the kind of investment capital needed to actually grow the business, and the business centers around the website, why are you only considering a $1500 payment to the developer of the one business tool that is going to keep the business afloat?
From a business owners perspective, if my clients are not financially soluble it is risky to take on that business. If your business will essentially be your website and you are only willing to offer $1500 up front (equity positions not withstanding) to build the face of your business, it is hard for a development business owner to take the project seriously. Typically, in this type of arrangement, you will end up with a lot of not-so-serious developers bidding on your project and after seeing the insane amount of work coming up, scramble to find the excuses needed to drop you. I am not saying this will happen to you, but I have seen it happen in situations like this before.
I would be interested to see the answers to the questions I asked to open this response. I do bid youi good luck in your efforts and I certainly hope he business comes out the way you expect. The automotive marketing sector in the US is very strong, very profitable (potentially) and very hard to enter successfully. But it can be done and I hope you the best in trying to crack that egg.
I agree with astions and the others on this offer... it is quite a big job for one developer to commit to for the prospect of a US automotive website. I know from experience having began something similar before. There is a huge amount of potential income out there for the automotive marketing sector, but it requires a huge financial investment from the business owner. If you have the kind of investment capital needed to actually grow the business, and the business centers around the website, why are you only considering a $1500 payment to the developer of the one business tool that is going to keep the business afloat?
From a business owners perspective, if my clients are not financially soluble it is risky to take on that business. If your business will essentially be your website and you are only willing to offer $1500 up front (equity positions not withstanding) to build the face of your business, it is hard for a development business owner to take the project seriously. Typically, in this type of arrangement, you will end up with a lot of not-so-serious developers bidding on your project and after seeing the insane amount of work coming up, scramble to find the excuses needed to drop you. I am not saying this will happen to you, but I have seen it happen in situations like this before.
I would be interested to see the answers to the questions I asked to open this response. I do bid youi good luck in your efforts and I certainly hope he business comes out the way you expect. The automotive marketing sector in the US is very strong, very profitable (potentially) and very hard to enter successfully. But it can be done and I hope you the best in trying to crack that egg.
- John Cartwright
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Out of the things you listed, majority can be found as scripts online. The others are purchasable scripts(i.e. zipcodes) or services($ processing).onion2k wrote:Well, off the top of my head you'd need:eksai wrote:What is a classifieds website, but a searchable profile database?
Searchable profiles of cars advertised
A user registration system for both buyers and sellers
Uploadable images with thumbnail generation for advertised cars
Bank integration for advertisers to pay to add an advert
Scheduled removal of expired adverts
A complete database of cars with models and variations so advertisers can categorise the car they're selling
Some sort of geographical mapping system for users to locate nearby sellers
Administration tools to report on total money taken, adverts added, users etc to tally against total money taken for accounting
Some sort of anti-fraud capability to combat people trying to add adverts without paying
Probably a couple of dozen more things I've not thought of yet. You're right that a classified adverts system is an easy build. But once you start adding payment systems and stuff it gets very complicated. Noone ever realises how complex even a basic ecommerce site is until they start building one.
Yes its not as simple as making an informational website, but all of it has been done a hundred times before
since I don't want to clog up the space with the quote, my answers will be to each paragraph. A lot of my answers will be vague, because like I said its a pretty unique concept, so I don't want to make it publicEverah wrote:.
#1 Between 10 and 20 pages. No paying clients yet, considering its hard to sell w/o a product. Potential business is unlimited of course, but realistically with the marketing plan, a 5-10% market share within the first year should be achievable.
#2 Yes technically it is supposed to be a huge money pit. But I don't believe that it has to be that way, with the marketing plan I will initially pursue, there won't be a need for a 7 figure marketing budget. Why $1500? Because I want people to take the equity option. Which seems to work because out of the 7 people that've emailed me so far, only 1 wanted to take that option. As far as why such little expenses? Because I want to avoid huge fixed costs, you have to look at a site's EVA, not just the revenue stream. By having low fixed costs, I can actually wait for the site to grow to its potential. Thats one of the reasons why I am not pursing venture capital
#3 Yes for a business owner a project like that is a bad investment. But for a freelancer with free time on his hands? Just right. And yes there is a chance the not-so-serious developer will run for the hills after one week, but thats the risk you take. And thats why selecting the right person is very important.
#4 Thanks
code? a few years, download a ready script? 5 secondsOren wrote:Yeah... easy to speak, let's see how much time it will take you to code a small upcoming events script with an option to upload images and an admin area...
Upcoming events: http://www.hotscripts.com/PHP/Scripts_a ... index.html
Image Uploader with admin area: http://www.hotscripts.com/search/14871894.html
First, what makes you think we sit at our homes and have plenty of free time?
Second, I haven't got it... What exactly your part in this "deal"? What you are going to do/invest in this project and why we need you? We could build this site for ourselves and get 100% of the profits if there was so much money in it, why we need you?
Anyway, I'm not going to take part in this discussion any further.
Good luck dude.
Second, I haven't got it... What exactly your part in this "deal"? What you are going to do/invest in this project and why we need you? We could build this site for ourselves and get 100% of the profits if there was so much money in it, why we need you?
Anyway, I'm not going to take part in this discussion any further.
Good luck dude.
Well lets see:Oren wrote:First, what makes you think we sit at our homes and have plenty of free time?
Second, I haven't got it... What exactly your part in this "deal"? What you are going to do/invest in this project and why we need you? We could build this site for ourselves and get 100% of the profits if there was so much money in it, why we need you?
Anyway, I'm not going to take part in this discussion any further.
Good luck dude.
a) business sense, lets face it, you may know how to write code, but there is a lot more to running a website/business than that. Which is exactly why all of these internet start ups are run by business people.
b) actual knowledge of the industry
c) marketing plan, that I know will be successful, which once again I'm not discussing either
d) running operations, once you finish coding, after your brief marketing part, essentially you'll be sitting on your ass, receiving your paychecks, maybe an occasional quick fix here and there
e) oh and lets not forget the actual idea. Like I said this isn't your cookie cutter classifieds website
But yes you are right, if you had the idea, and the marketing plan, and the business sense you could do it yourself. But without, you would be the same cookie cutter automotive classifieds website, that wouldn't even make a blip on the radar.
a. That isn't true. Every successful start-up I've been involved in, and the ones I know anything about, have been either a partnership between a technologist and a business person or a technologist who has learnt the business side of things. Certainly if you look at the really successful tech companies (Microsoft, Google, Oracle, eBay, Amazon, etc) there's been a coder as at least one facet of the founding team; most often all the team now how to program.eksai wrote:Well lets see:
a) business sense, lets face it, you may know how to write code, but there is a lot more to running a website/business than that. Which is exactly why all of these internet start ups are run by business people.
b) actual knowledge of the industry
c) marketing plan, that I know will be successful, which once again I'm not discussing either
d) running operations, once you finish coding, after your brief marketing part, essentially you'll be sitting on your ass, receiving your paychecks, maybe an occasional quick fix here and there
e) oh and lets not forget the actual idea. Like I said this isn't your cookie cutter classifieds website
b. I imagine you have this.
c. Fair enough, that's specific business information and not relevant here.
d. Oh how I wish that were true. Most people outside of the software development industry believe we write code and that's our job done. It's not true. Code needs to be looked after, maintained, patched and so on. Applications need support despite our best efforts to write code we can forget about.
e. Again, business specific and not something you should post about if you don't want to.
Yes there are coders at the start, but to market and operate the business you need someone business savy like you mentioned. It has to do with schooling, when I was in college, I initially majored in computer science(mainly because of parents, dad has a PHD in CS and mom has a masters), then the dotcom bubble burst and I switched to business, and the difference in teaching philosophy was very obvious.onion2k wrote:a. That isn't true. Every successful start-up I've been involved in, and the ones I know anything about, have been either a partnership between a technologist and a business person or a technologist who has learnt the business side of things. Certainly if you look at the really successful tech companies (Microsoft, Google, Oracle, eBay, Amazon, etc) there's been a coder as at least one facet of the founding team; most often all the team now how to program.
Yes that is true, what I meant is that the major part of the development is over. + like I said before this is a scalable project, so as the money starts rolling in more people will be hiredd. Oh how I wish that were true. Most people outside of the software development industry believe we write code and that's our job done. It's not true. Code needs to be looked after, maintained, patched and so on. Applications need support despite our best efforts to write code we can forget about.
It's not practical to download a patchwork of scripts and weave them together into a cohesive, smooth and efficient web application. This is something that only programmers understand. If a programmer were to try, it would most likely take longer than building it from scratch. If this is what you think is going to happen, your website will fail, because the quality will be poor and it will show through. A majority of the scripts on hotscripts are of a pretty low grade of code anyway. If it was so easy don't you think all programmers would just copy and paste code all day rather than write their own?
Pre-written scripts are a lot different than pre-written classes which you can find in the pear repository, and even then it's questionable as to whether it will save development time.
I'm sorry to say this, but if you want your site to work, your going to have to either save up the money to do it, or find a developer willing to develop it from scratch.
Either way, good luck.
Pre-written scripts are a lot different than pre-written classes which you can find in the pear repository, and even then it's questionable as to whether it will save development time.
I'm sorry to say this, but if you want your site to work, your going to have to either save up the money to do it, or find a developer willing to develop it from scratch.
Either way, good luck.
that was mainly to show that scripts like that do exist. But yes I want things to be developed more or less from scratch, but if you are stuck on something, it doesn't hurt knowing you can look at another script to see how they solved that problem.
And yes, that is exactly how a large portion of programmers work. They consult their prior code, there is no sense in writing the same code 10 times when you can just reuse your old code for searching. Thats one of the reasons why most work places have a code library where you can consult prior code.
as far as it being far fetched that I'll programmers, like I said I already have a few people who want to work on this, so come Tuesday I'll contact the top candidates and decide on who to work with.
From your post, it sounds to me like you are trying to inflate your ego by making it look like what you do is some god's gift to earth. Face it, even though its somewhat complicated, it doesn't take a genius to learn this stuff. Pretty much the only reason programmers get paid as much as they are, is because most people dealing with them are not computer savvy, and they deal with the notion of programming of 20 years ago. I mean if someone looks at your resume, chances are they'll be impressed by the 20 or so code languages you know. But programming is actually quiet simple once you learn the ropes, very large portion of it is repeatable. An IF statement has the same structure in Basic, C++ and chances are in every other language. And if by some chance the structure is different, the difference is usually very minor. Which is why I think in the next 5-10 years we'll see a decline in programmer's salaries as more and more computer savvy kids grow up, and more and more projects get outsourced to India, Russia etc. But thats just my 2 cents.
And yes, that is exactly how a large portion of programmers work. They consult their prior code, there is no sense in writing the same code 10 times when you can just reuse your old code for searching. Thats one of the reasons why most work places have a code library where you can consult prior code.
as far as it being far fetched that I'll programmers, like I said I already have a few people who want to work on this, so come Tuesday I'll contact the top candidates and decide on who to work with.
From your post, it sounds to me like you are trying to inflate your ego by making it look like what you do is some god's gift to earth. Face it, even though its somewhat complicated, it doesn't take a genius to learn this stuff. Pretty much the only reason programmers get paid as much as they are, is because most people dealing with them are not computer savvy, and they deal with the notion of programming of 20 years ago. I mean if someone looks at your resume, chances are they'll be impressed by the 20 or so code languages you know. But programming is actually quiet simple once you learn the ropes, very large portion of it is repeatable. An IF statement has the same structure in Basic, C++ and chances are in every other language. And if by some chance the structure is different, the difference is usually very minor. Which is why I think in the next 5-10 years we'll see a decline in programmer's salaries as more and more computer savvy kids grow up, and more and more projects get outsourced to India, Russia etc. But thats just my 2 cents.
- Chris Corbyn
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Before I make my comment, I'm keeping out of the debate as to whether this work is a money-spinner or not.eksai wrote:An IF statement has the same structure in Basic, C++ and chances are in every other language. And if by some chance the structure is different, the difference is usually very minor. Which is why I think in the next 5-10 years we'll see a decline in programmer's salaries as more and more computer savvy kids grow up, and more and more projects get outsourced to India, Russia etc. But thats just my 2 cents.
I agree with this quote to point, however, speaking of if statements and general syntactical rules of a language is a typified attitude that all there is to programming is knowing the syntax. If that were true we'd probably know all of the "curly brace" languages after a quick look at the API reference for them. However, the fact is that nobody's paying you to know that stuff. Languages have a huge depth to them beneath that sugarry surface and only experience in the language can gain you that knowledge. If you want to program something like you're saying, then sure, learn the syntax, get the function reference and make a start. It'll be great. It might even work. Then suddenly the bugs begin to crop up, your developer went walkabout so you have to pay someone else (here starts your expenses) to fix it, the code is a total mess, the other developer spends 5 times as long fixing it as he should need to to and you pay 5 times as much. The fix he puts in place is a total hack because the code is so badly written in the first place, and you very quickly begin to turn what looked like a working application at the time of purchase into a very stodgy, ugly pile of spaghetti which you spend a fortune trying to pay people to clean up for years. You may even scrap it and get it done the way it should have been done in the first place.
The only way to avoid that kind of mess is to pay someone with plenty of experience who can demonstrate their knowledge beyond the syntax of a language, delve into design patterns, unit test your code and provide you with all the documentation to back up what you've been sold. Then you can (probably) trust that what you've been sold is worth the price you paid for it.
(And no, I don't freelance so I'm not "inflating my ego"
- John Cartwright
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