Show IH: Get paid per pull request (YC W18)
Waiting to get paid from clients is never fun. Eliminate awkward conversations about your payments - get paid per pull request with TrapFi (YC W18).
Here's how it works:
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Submit a pull request
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Add your hours or fixed rate to the PR's comments
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Get paid as soon as the pull request is approved
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After the payout, we automatically generate updated invoices for you and your clients
You never have to leave git to get paid.
Submitting a pull request this week or next? Use TrapFi to get paid for it.
Really interesting and nice UI.
I'd like to point out that software engineering is largely project-based. The individual commits themselves rarely matter. What matters is whether the commits all add up to something that works, where the individual commits can even have negative value (e.g. they need to be reverted or redone).
So I'd like to challenge you a bit and ask who your target audience is. At the moment, it comes off as very general on the website. But I think that may be a mistake, because of these patterns:
Software engineers working for a company, where their peers need to evaluate whether a pull request is good enough to be accepted. Peers aren't required to put a $$ figure on pull requests (there are many reasons why you wouldn't want your reviewer to control how much you make, or even know that number).
Software engineers working for themselves, where a non-technical client accepts the result of their work if it does what the client wants. The client can't review code or technical documentation. Therefore, a software engineer could plump up the $$ of a pull request and the client has no way of evaluating whether that's fair.
If your target is somewhere in between, I'd love to know what that is. I'd also encourage you to be very explicit about that when you're selling yourselves on your site, because it raises fewer eyebrows.
Thanks @edahlgren. Great questions and insight.
We best serve freelance engineers working for a company on an hourly basis here. For example, the engineer and company agree on a $45 hourly rate. The freelancer submits a PR with TF10 in the comments, we generate a $450 payout once the PR is approved.
This point is spot on. For, non-technical client situations we're exploring a partnership with PullRequest.com to offer code reviews as a fair way to navigate this situation. Today, non-technical clients receive the value of monitoring a real-time invoice of commits being made but we absolutely want to improve this on both sides.
We're aiming to be an innovation in the granularity of work that will enable new marketplaces for work. Tasks that were too small or too specific can now be commodified. For the seller, that feels like small-scope, on demand gigs for things you're good at— "integrate stripe". It's a place to process these "software developer odd jobs" that didn't exist before. For the buyer, that feels like off the shelf solutions to problems. Code, but also expertise, for particular needs.
Thanks for the explanation. Can you make that clearer on your site?
Absolutely, thanks for the insight there as well.
Hey Cameron, I really like the direction of TrapFI as there's tons of potential combining better payments with developer tools. I used to lead the BD / Ecosystem team at GitHub so I've seen a few attempts in this space but nothing has quite broken though.
Why did you choose to focus on the freelancer side of the market? I would think you'd have a more captive audience if you were going after OSS projects who have to deal with paying contributors as contractors).
All in all, I'm excited to see your progress :) Congrats on YC and good luck !
Thanks @jdubbs! We felt best qualified to support freelancers based on our past experience . However, you make a great point about OSS projects -- we'll definitely put more thought there.
Side Note: We're looking to expand our team soon and I'd love to chat sometime about your experience at GH. Here's my email if interested: Cam@TrapFi.com
I love this concept (and the potential partnership with PullRequest). This might be something that the crew at Lambda School might be interested in exploring.
Thanks @datadavis! I reached out to Austen after seeing your post here, we may figure something out soon.
I salute the hustle. Let me know if I can assist in any way.
Really cool idea, Cameron!
When I sign up through GitHub, can I choose which organizations I give access to? Or do I have to give access to all of my organizations?
Thanks @jherg! You choose. We only access your personal account, organization access happens per repo. When you add a repo URL and we'll process pull request payouts for that specific repo.