Proposal Day!

Before I go into this, let me start with a quick story of another idea that I tried to get developed. In college I got really into Chess, like full blown obsessed. I played Chess instead of paying attention in class, I spent my friday nights eating pizza and playing Chess. Chess was all I thought about.

I play on the platform lichess. It has a phenomenal UX, is responsive, light, and 1000x better than Chess.com. My idea was to create an analog to lichess with p2p wagering on games. Why not add a little money to make things for interesting. My plan was to have a barebones UI/UX with multiple wager levels ranging from $1 to $10 per game. The matchmaking engine would have a heavy bias towards similarly ranked players to avoid any blatantly unfair situations.

Now the obvious, elephant in the room, question is how do I know that someone isn’t cheating and making a brand new account and playing people far below their actual level? Like a true engineer, I figured there was some anti cheating software already out there so I didn’t worry too much about it.

Anyway, I wrote up some documentation explaining the game and sent it off to an Indian development company. They took an upfront deposit of $10k. Obvious red flag but the company was recommended to me by a family member so I brushed those red flags away and sent it. At first it was wonderful, we had meetings, they sent me a technical design plan, and we worked on some UX wireframes. When the harder stuff came along, like finding a payment provider for internet gambling transactions, or choosing a chess engine, or even understanding what Chess is, it became clear that these guys drastically over promised. The final straw was when I received a PDF explaining how every piece on the chess board moves and was quoted 20 hours of work. I demanded my money back and actually got it, so no love lost and in hindsight I got very lucky that I got out unscathed.

Then I turned to Freelance.com, which is conceptually a wonderful idea but a nuclear dumpster fire in practice. I put my proposal for quotation, got 50 responses within 5 minutes, all enthusiastically saying that they could 100% get my project done. Two elements stood out:

1. How could they understand my full project, and read the full documentation i provided in only 5 minutes?
2. Every quote was for the exact upper limit price I budgeted.

The answer to question 1 is that no, they had not read a damn thing. While I am sympathetic to the struggles of making a living, particularly outside of the United States, I am not running a charity and you need to put more effort than that before I commit to a potentially months long and tens of thousands of dollars commitment.

The second point solidied my fear that no one bothered to pay attention to the actual work I wanted them to do. I left freelance and will never use them.

Ok anyway, all of this brings me to January 13, 2021. Ryan Shank used Upwork, and I very cautiously am going to use them as well. I went through the site extensively and I found really impressive developers with legitimate portfolios and real businesses. I decided on 5 parameters that I will use to judge the applicants to work on my DApp.

Developer Grading Scheme

1. Hours worked on Upwork.
2. Income earned on Upwork.
3. Relevant projects.
4. Price Per Hour.
5. Effort put into understanding my project.

Upwork seems like the Mercedes’ of freelance websites, with freelance.com as the Hummer’s of the freelance world. Grading points 1 and 2 tell me that the developers are legitimately involved in projects and are used to taking on large, end to end, responsibilities. I need someone who is in it for the long haul and can stay focused.

Point 3 is critical because I cannot afford to be someone’s “lessons learned” project that they grow from. I need to be the guy who you build a project for that works and get $20k out of it and everything goes smooth. One day I’ll invest into helping people grow but it’s not today.

Finally Point 5 is directly due to my experiences on Freelance. Upwork requires every proposal to include a cover letter and requires the proposer to answer some questions that I put out about my project. I want CLEAR signs that the person read my proposal and has thought about the question and their approach. Obviously I dont expect a full architecture but I want something, anything, that tells me that you did more than the bare minimum.

As of right now, about 5 hours after posting, I have 17 proposals, 3 or 4 of which I am going to interview and 1 of which I am very excited about.

Hoping to find the A+ dev soon!