Getting Killed By Competition

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supermike
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Location: Somewhere in the Desert, USA

Getting Killed By Competition

Post by supermike »

I'm a PHP freelancer and I'm getting killed by the competition this week. It's like someone just dumped a bunch of site scripts on the market and I missed the memo. I had a proposal come across my inbox for a video game review site that was sort of like Reddit, but simpler. However, it would use a richedit control and a combination of jQuery and AJAX for some of the desired effects, such as instant comment posting, instant plus/minus reviews, and then an admin interface that was geared towards moderation -- not just a bunch of table editors. He'll need pagination of reviews and comments. There's also user profile management from a user's perspective and an admin's perspective, and email notification with levels. It needs to be composed in a fresh, Web 2.0 style with XHTML/DIV/CSS and all the usual effects, color choices, and graphics, much like what you see for most of the sites on webcreme.com.

I quoted it at 200 hours, but, in a pinch, I might be able to knock it out at 150, and 100 if I cut down a bunch of testing.

Well, someone quoted him 30 hours and like 75% my rate. :crazy:

What's he going to do, grab a site script and customize the heck out of it? Are there really good site scripts out there like this? More than likely, here's what's going to happen to that freelancer:

- There's just no way humanly possible he can satisfy the client's needs for anything less than 100 hours, if not 150.

- He won't have a site that's fully tested.

- The admin interface will be nothing more than a glorified table editor, not geared to moderation of users or their listings much at all, and with no stats feature, password reset feature, security stats and IP blocking, and usual stuff that an admin interface should have.

- He'll screw up the site or have it half-completed.


Sure, I'm learning to optimize the heck out of my work because competition is stiff. I've moved on to:

- 80/20 admin scaffolding so that I can have an admin interface that's 80% written and I customize the last 20%.
- Using jQuery to reduce time spent on cross-platform testing and fighting with DHTML quirks.
- Reusable PHP source templates so that I don't have to think about what to do next -- I just fill in the blanks.
- Keeping the parameter-templated SQL in a single conf file so that I know where to find it in order to make tweaks.
- Either outsourcing the XHTML/DIV/CSS initial page templates or just use Blueprint CSS.
- Creating attractive forms in 3 CSS styles that I can just bolt in depending on client tastes.
- Borrowing concepts from previous difficult parts of other project.
- Creating my own set of site scripts that I can reuse for common projects you see such as this one.

However, I guess it's not enough. There's too many liars out there.

:banghead:
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onion2k
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Re: Getting Killed By Competition

Post by onion2k »

If you're trying to sell to clients who are willing to go to the cheapest person to get their site written, and your strengths are in writing high quality custom code that's well designed and well tested ... then you're selling to the wrong clients. You need to sell to people who want your service.

Unfortunately that's sales and marketing, and that's the hard bit of running a web development company for me. I find writing code is easy in comparison. That's the main reason I don't freelance any more.
supermike
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Posts: 193
Joined: Tue Feb 28, 2006 8:30 pm
Location: Somewhere in the Desert, USA

Re: Getting Killed By Competition

Post by supermike »

Onion, I would agree that doing PHP and MySQL is the easiest part of the freelancer job, and that diplomacy, winning project bids, meeting near impossible deadlines (because your competition is ruthless), and then all the non-PHP/MySQL coding you have to do such as in Javascript/DHTML/DOM work or with AJAX -- these are the toughest parts of doing freelance work, not the PHP + database work. You're right, PHP/MySQL is easy compared to these other things.
matthijs
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Re: Getting Killed By Competition

Post by matthijs »

We had a discussion about this in the General Discussion as well.

Onion2k is right: you can not compete with these people. Reading your example, 100-150 hrs seems very low already. That's just about 3 weeks! Maybe if you have a very very clear specification of what you must build, can reuse a lot of code you already have and there is no need to discuss anything (and thus change), then maybe, just maybe, you could pull it off.

But 30 hrs is crazy. Even for a small static html site that's barely enough. Don't even think about trying to compete with that.

Another problem I have had with these kinds of estimates, when you're trying hard to lower your hours because of "competition", is that you're often end up losing a lot. Certainly in smaller projects, time spend on non-coding related stuff can quickly form a large part of the total. And it can easily expand. A phone conversation here, a meeting there, a little change here, another change there. Before you know it you've spend 60 hr on that 20 hr project... In my experience, the clients who say it should be cheap and "really simple" are the ones with endless changes.
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