Poll: What Do You Hate About Contracting?

Source: I've run an iOS contracting company for the last three years. Here are some big problems:<p>* Lead qualification. This is an enormous problem. Lots of people want revenue sharing deals, etc., and it takes too long to work out whether they're serious about the project and whether I'm the right fit. What do they do for a living? Is this a corporate or personal project? etc.<p>* Client acquisition cost. Most of the options out there for advertising, etc., don't have a good ROI. It's super difficult to measure advertising effectiveness because you only have a handful of "conversions" (new clients) and thus your results are never statistically significant. It's all black magic and voodoo.<p>* Pricing. We do 99% fixed quote so hourly rate isn't really the issue. In my market, you adjust the scope to fit the budget, not adjust the budget to fit the scope. The problem is that clients play very close to the vest on what they want to spend, meaning I have to guess what they want to spend. If I guess right, I get the project, if I guess wrong, I will never hear from them again. The whole market is a game of chance, not a game of skill.<p>* Slow clients. It doesn't matter if the feature takes 1 hour or 5 hours if the client takes 4 weeks to get back to you. Tightening up our business process has improved this considerably from what it used to be, but I imagine a number of contractors experience this schedule unpredictability.<p>* Client education. Milestones, scope, test builds, etc., are just not in the vocabulary for non-software-background clients. Why the Estonian firm quoting $2000 for a $20k project is lying. How to collect crash reports. How to describe issues so that we can reproduce them. etc.<p>These problems are WAY bigger than anything you've listed. But about those:<p>* Project length - Rarely have I thought about this apart from the "Slow client" issue. There are no projects too short, or too long, for me to do, particularly if it's well-paying work.<p>* Good requirements - we usually write them. Being in the fixed quote business, we're pretty good at it.<p>* Scope creep - this is a minor problem for us, but we've tightened up the business process and are close to completely eliminating it as a problem.<p>* On-time payment - Another minor problem, recent changes to the business process are close to eliminating it.<p>* Negotiating the rate - we rarely do hourly work, so our version of this problem is the "Pricing" problem above.<p>If you are working on a startup in this space, please sign me up to give you feedback, as I could go on for hours :-)

Getting paid. I finish work; I send an invoice; I get an email back saying "thanks, we'll process this right away"; and I wait. A month later, I send another email and get told that it "slipped through the cracks" or "got lost", and a week later I get a check in the mail.<p>I think I'm batting roughly a 50% average on getting paid without sending the "uh, where's my money" email. I always get paid eventually and without complaints, so it's not as if people are trying to avoid paying; it just seems that people who hire me almost universally suck at doing paperwork.<p>And really, that's a bad way to suck. I suck at doing paperwork, but I at least pay my bills promptly.

Not owning the product and lack of creative control.

My biggest problem is educating customers on an iterative process. We don't do strict contracting, but we do license our iOS software platform and provide custom development work for the apps.<p>Both for our own products, and partner products, we like to begin beta testing apps at quite an embarrassing, early stage in the process. We also basically refuse to spec anything but the most basic features of the app, until we hear from users.<p>In almost every case, the partner agrees to this structure, but then when it comes down to it, they see what we want to release to beta (50-100 users), and then they push back and try and get us to implement features they think are important, or fix bugs they believe matter. They are somewhat incredulous when we push back and decline to bill them hours.<p>It always works out in the end. When the partner starts hearing the incredibly valuable things users say when they test the apps, they immediately understand the value, and it's smooth sailing from there.<p>But trying to get a company to release crappy, buggy, unfinished software to 100 of their real customers seems to always take some doing.<p>We've never had an issue getting paid, and we always require money up front. I did have to struggle once to get 10% of a contract, but I honestly believe it was just accidentally FUBARed.

I hate finding projects. I know they're out there, but it's all word of mouth. Sucks.

You forgot acquiring customers and being on call with nearly unlimited liability...

Most parts of my projects go pretty nicely, but getting paid has always been a pain after the first couple of months on a project.<p>Getting a deposit up front definitely helps with clients paying on time the first couple of months.<p>I work with a lot of "green field" projects though, and it seems like many clients operate under the impression that the site is going to start making money right away without any marketing or advertising. I usually help them put together a plan for that (and help them with AdWords), but they are for some reason reluctant to actually start making calls, sending emails, reaching out to bloggers, etc.<p>After a few months, they inevitably start paying later and later as they start to get concerned about running out of money.

Honestly, never had to deal with any of these. My brother and I would only work for people who had the money and knew what they wanted up front. We were very straightforward (and firm) about our rates, and if someone didn't pay us on time, we'd stop all work on their project until they did. Scope creep was never an issue because we worked hourly ;).<p>The thing I didn't like most about contracting was having my time split up so much between different projects. I like to work on one thing for days at a time, and this wasn't always realistic with several projects going at once.

Scope creep is always the worst for me. It happens with almost every single side-project I take. That said, since I started billing hourly (with nightly updates to work / invoice), it's gotten a lot better.

The paperwork, namely creating detailed line-item invoices.<p>That's why I created this gem, Big Bucks No Whammies, to automatically generate my invoices from my git commits.<p><a href="https://github.com/aantix/big_bucks_no_whammies" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/aantix/big_bucks_no_whammies</a><p>Here's a sample invoice : <a href="https://github.com/aantix/big_bucks_no_whammies/blob/master/sample_report.pdf?raw=true" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/aantix/big_bucks_no_whammies/blob/master/...</a>

People wasting my time with stupid ideas.<p>The amount of Groupon clones I've had come in front of me with "a special twist that will take the market by storm" is ridiculous.

My biggest issue is synchronizing with the client. You make a perfect schedule with the right set of milestones that works for you and your other projects, but you have to be ready to answer the phone and break your flow to attend a client that is really excited because they got a whole bunch of assets for the site and they'd like to see them live :). So you have to ready to push your calendar and move people around.

Perhaps finding clients should be there. How are you guys finding clients? Im looking for clients that I can deal with on the side along with my day job. How did you guys go about getting first client

Getting unlimited calling from clients who are not serious is number one by far! signal to noise ratio in the freelancing market is dismal.

Having to work away from home, family and friends.

I would say, the unwillingness for companies to outsource the interesting work.<p>IME, most consulting work is just grind, no interesting problems, and the pay rarely really makes up for the real amount of work.