Skill trade: Design for Dev
Hey all, I recently posted about looking for a developer partner to work on some ideas with me, as I'm a designer and have a bunch of projects I'm working on. Although I didn't really find anyone to partner up with on the projects, I met some really great people and had some amazing conversations.
I realized through meeting folks, that it's way harder to find a partner for an idea YOU have. Sometimes the idea is too small, sometimes it's too big, sometimes it's too niche, or sometimes it really one solves a personal need for the one who came up with the idea. This makes it incredibly difficult to sell a stranger on your idea.
This is why I'm no longer looking for a co-founder, but rather a skill trade partner.
If you are a developer, who has built cool products that have bad UX and an ugly UI, I can help design it for you, and in return, you can build the products that I've that I've designed but don't have the skills to build. No need to bring profit-sharing, or equity discussions into this. No need to sell each other on our ideas. Just a straight trade swap.
What do you think? Is this a fair trade? Would love to know if anyone has set up this type of relationship before, and your experiences!
As a tech/dev with no design skills, I obviously love the idea of a barter arrangement, however it's too easy for bad actors to abuse others - you can't exactly force one party or the other to do work-in-kind.
I don't know how gnarly the legalities might look like, but an equity exchange where both parties exchange equity in their projects, and then each party can choose to claw back their own equity when they deliver their share of the agreed upon bartered work, could be interesting.
This way, a bad actor might "get away" with taking work but at the expense of having to give equity to the other person. Like any other equity situation, if the bad actor doesn't materialize the work into anything of value, the victim ends up holding worthless paper and ended up doing work effectively "for free" but this is actually no different than any other normal startup situation, anyway, so the worst-case scenario isn't worse than working for any startup.
Hi Shaun,
I’ve built a community around this idea.
You’re invited: https://karma-community.com/
Rémi
Sounds like a brilliant idea! 👌
Hey Sean - just want to say thanks for raising this!
A community of us is currently making a platform called CollabClub for this exact type of trade.
We've finished our design and are currently working on the build, but it would be great to get your views on this. Also about how the experience has been for you with reaching out to users here.
Here's our PH upcoming page and Twitter account:
https://www.producthunt.com/upcoming/collabclub
https://twitter.com/collabclubco
Hi @seanfarrell! Let's have a chat, hit me up at stan@razorlabs.com
I'd be interested in chatting! shoot me an email at [me][at][jetpackjoe][dot][me]
Certainly interesting! Please be more specific. I’d need to know more about your project idea to make my own estimations:
Assuming you’re a designer, this means you probably have custom designs you want implemented. Sharing the same mental model and setting clear goals help.
I have done some skill trades in the past, but normally with family or friends on small projects.
Thanks for the reply! Would be more than happy to talk further about all of this, including the ideas. Shoot me an email and we can chat!
This comment was deleted 2 years ago