Idea feedback: Getting paid to answer programming questions
Idea feedback: Getting paid to answer programming questions
As a non-technical founder, I find myself stack overflowing, googling and reading a lot to accomplish what may be trivial to an expert or someone who is doing it as a job. Also, lot of the times you have to wait until someone responds.
I am thinking why not have a monthly subscription which allows to directly chat with someone and get the problem resolved rather than wasting time to read up on each and every detail.
Are there any services like these available. Will it be useful to anyone else?
anant
Trending on Indie Hackers
One important question is, how do you make it attractive for experts? As a user, this seems like it would be pretty attractive. Pay X dollars a month to ask questions and get answers quickly. As an expert though, I'm much less interested in the concept. Here are my thoughts:
I feel like money fundamentally changes the equation. People will give large amounts of their time to help others out on communities like StackOverflow. They give their time in exchange for the gratification of helping others, and the recognition from their community. There are also side benefits like being more attractive to prospective employers.
Once I'm getting paid to do a task though, it becomes an obligation. My customer expects a good outcome, and I must deliver. This is now a much more straightforward time vs money equation.
Ensuring users ask good quality questions is important. As an expert, when I see a question, I need to have some idea of the scope. Since I'm not going to make much money on any individual question, how do I ensure that I can answer a question in a reasonable amount of time?
For example, a user might ask what sounds like a pretty reasonable question. "How do I add an email button to a web page". This could be from a developer who knows a bit of HTML and CSS and just needs some tips about hooking a button to a 3rd party email collection service. Or, the user could be someone with a WordPress blog who knows nothing about web design, or any of the other related technologies. If you need to help the user fill in the background, the question will take much longer to answer.
It's important to keep in mind that the user may not know their own skill level, or what information they are missing. I find when answering support questions that users either don't know what information to give you or don't feel like taking the time to give you the details. On stack overflow, you can simply give a reasonable answer and move on. If someone has paid me to answer, I am obligated to give a good response.
Hi Brendan,
Those are valid concerns (also raised by @thomasm1964). My thoughts: it will be X dollars for Y minutes of advice. This way the person requesting advice will be motivated to provide as much information as possible. Although, I do think it's ok to not know what to ask or what information to provide since you may genuinely not know. If you can just ask and have a real person help you, and the $/minute is reasonable, i think it will benefit a lot of people.
Experts will be paid on time basis and not on number of questions. In an event of conflict or wrong match, both the expert and requester can mutually decide on the time and input to the system. This way, it's fair to everyone. In addition, an expert can have their own set of screening questions to gauge the requester's skill level.
Also, for the gratification, if someone helped me to move on and go faster in my product/project development, I'd be more than willing to thank them and provide review. It also goes the other way. If someone asked a question that even the expert might not have thought of, but could benefit, they can join the question. What I am trying to say is there will definitely be a feedback loop.
Btw: One of the biggest benefit is, if you have talked to someone, most likely you may just ask them again since they already know your skill level and what you are trying to do.
My only goal is to reduce the number of inventor-hours wasted trying to search for best practices or solutions to the problems that have already been solved.
Look forward to more feedback and/or concerns. This is super helpful.
Thanks again.
Anant
That's a great answer. Paying by time, and negotiating it up front should help a lot with the issues I mentioned. Reviews and repeat customers will help provide an emotional reward in addition to the financial one.
This sounds cool. Let me (and everyone else) know when it launches :)
Hi Anant,
I think you're on to something here, but not answering specific programming questions and not a monthly subscription...
Rather a course for the likes of you and me...non-tech founders who want to talk the talk...to be able to converse with engineers to get what they want and understand what they're getting...
Hmmmm...anyone else like the sound of this?
Hi Chris,
Yes the courses would help a lot. But, i also think if you can chat or schedule an online meeting with someone instantly about an issue or a problem that you are trying to solve, it can save a lot of time. The monetary part for a programmer was to enable instant replies.
Currently on stack overflow , you have to wait till someone finds your question interesting and then chooses to reply. More often than not, information may be available but still, it takes a lot of effort to find what you are looking for.
I am curious to find out how many people face this problem. Well again, depends on who will read this and reply.. :)
Thanks again for the comment.
Anant, I think that is a really good idea. You would be something in between stack overflow and remote jobs platform like upwork. You're occupying the space of fast short term problem solve. The target I think would not be so much non-techs founders as more half programmers or newbies in coding searching for a short and fast problem solving to keep continuing. So is how I feel it for myself
@acgt623 and @ChrisKyle, I think you both make great points that many people face - it also seems like you are looking to solve for slightly different problems.
What are your backgrounds? How technically involved are you in your projects, short-term and long-term?
It seems like Anant is looking to get help for something specific - are you looking to get help with a certain technology stack or programming language? (If so, Slack groups may be helpful?)
I know it's been a long time, but following up on this..
In order to solve this, I am thinking what if a user can post what they want to implement or learn, others join their topic and experts who have implemented similar solutions in production reach out for helping.
As a group everyone votes who they want to learn from (based on the experts previous experience, reviews etc..) and schedule the session. Expert's cost is shared by the entire group.
Example: A person might know how to set up EC2 instances. But, he/she might not be sure if they are following the best security practices. What if someone from Netflix who is on the AWS infrastructure team can teach and help implement best practices.
Will this be helpful? Respond to this message if you would like to be informed when I launch..
Thanks
Has anyone done anything with an idea like this. I saw startuplandia sort of mentioned they tried once.
Hi Everyone,
following up on this topic. Has anyone used codementor ?
Hi Anant, I literally tried to build a code-review marketplace a few years ago, also airpair and hackhands tried to build these types of services. I think it is an interesting area to consider but I don't know any active platforms. That being said, I'm always avail to ad hoc pair and support technical development :)
Hi John,
Thank you for the references. Am curious on the code-review marketplace. Were you able to launch? Any insight will be helpful.
I launched it for sure, had a few customers, i've kind of been in a product trap though since i've been coming up as a developer, having enough runway to see my projects through vice getting low on cash, not seeing enough traction and abandoning. (i abandoned it) but general feedback was positive, there is a lot of complexity around the nature of how a code review is a discreet thing but understand the context of the code itself is sprawling. you can hit me up if you want to talk in a video session or something, i def think it is a viable product, airpair def was, not sure where airpair is at today, the founder had a lot of issues in his approach to people that I think spilled out into the product.
I'd love a paid code-review service. As an experienced software developer, I don't have too much trouble getting my head around a new set of tools or technologies.
I find it fairly easy to get past the "hello world" phase and build something non-trivial. However, the hard part comes next. Going from "I can build something and make it work" to "I am confident in my skills and can build robust software" takes time. Usually, you just need to do it enough to feel comfortable, make some mistakes, etc... However, one of the things I've found that helps the most is just having someone experienced walk through your code with you. That way, you get to learn from their mistakes, and not just your own.
Right now, I'm working on a React Native project. It's my first. I'd happily pay someone by the hour to go over my code via Skype.
yes that has been one of my strong needs too. that's why i wanted to add a meeting option so that you can show someone and discuss/review.
thanks for the feedback.
Thanks for the feedback @Zaesar @bss @JoshuaKhan
Below are my thoughts:
Convenience like twitter:
A simple message, rather than going through contracts and deliverables. Of course, if both parties want to take it further and get into long term engagement, it may be easier since you already know the person.
Verification by LinkedIn:
So you know the person's professional background. Add stack overflow and github link.
Zoom or Google meet link
Show and tell
Rating on the help
Process:
Still thinking on the payment part.
I also think it can be used for solving anything. Be it wine making, hardware design etc..
Any feedback on the process ?
This comment was deleted 7 years ago.
I'd definitely maintain my own database. The linkedin and/or stackoverflow part is to help the customer initially, since without much data it will be harder for someone to decide on who to take advice from. But, definitely I'd never depend solely on linkedin. Twitter example was to illustrate convenience. Nothing to do with using twitter.
Thanks for the feedback.
Hopefully, I can regain an expert :)
I freelance on Upwork and I've had two clients in a similar position to yourself. One required advice / mentoring on the Angular framework; the other more generalized advice on what tech they could use to achieve their idea.
Neither of these gigs were high paying, but it can fill in the time between more involving projects. However finding these gigs through Upwork is a bit of a chore and they also take a huge 20 % of income for smaller jobs. (It does not drop to 10% until $500 is reached).
Whilst I do prefer long term projects, I would definitely be interested in a platform that could provide a steady stream of of this type of work.
This comment was deleted 7 years ago.
Good point. Understanding customer's skill level is an important element for an expert.
This comment was deleted 7 years ago.