Hi All-<p>I am currently involved in my own startup project, but had what I think is a great idea for an app. I was wondering how I might best go about finding a decent developer at a fair price. Are there any sites out there that cater to mobile freelancers? Personal Recs? Reader's who might give a poor startup founder an HN discount? What should I expect re: hourly rate? I took a look in the history, but most of the posts regarding this stuff are fairly old and I assume this stuff is fairly fluid.
The best place to find one is via your network, if you do not have someone in your network that you know personally then your networks network is the best place, find someone who knows someone at that point in my experience if you have to go to a 3rd degree then it is a wash and you can probably do just as well to hire some random Joe. As for pricing, iPhone is a hot commodity expect to pay above $100 an hour for a truly experienced iPhone dev, you can take you chances with a college kid or off-shoring but to me it sounds like you need a dev that can get you from A to B you need a dev that is going to be in the > $100 range (most are $150+).<p>A few tips I gan give you, is no matter how crappy, draw a picture of every screen, the developer may totally change the way the screens look but this will at least give them an idea of "what" you are trying to build. Also every item on the screen explain what it does and what should happen if it does not do it. If you have that level of detail, then you can get a pretty detailed estimate on what it will take to build. If you want to contact me, my email is in my profile. I am way to busy to take any more work but I can help you head in the right direction.
Check out the Hacker news contractors sheet<p><a href="https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AlD_6iEb8Ed9dGs3clVJYi0yYVBka181Z0ZKRW9kQ0E&hl=en#gid=0" rel="nofollow">https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AlD_6iEb8Ed9dGs3clV...</a><p>As an iPhone developer, there is currently no shortage of projects so make sure you have done as much of the thinking/wireframing as possible to make the project short, unless you want to pay a high price!<p>Breaking the project down into its simplest form and delivering key milestones should assist both parties rather than paying hourly
You could also try a reasonably cheap solution, create a vWorker accout and hire someone from there:<p>www.vworker.com<p>You could find someone that will do the job for 3 - 400$, don't go with the pay for hour model, you will be more satisfied (financially) paying for deliverables which mean you will pay only of the developer has done his job.<p>Hope this will help.
I wish I knew. Finding one that doesn't suddenly get one of the following problems:<p>Computer fried
Got sick
Out of town
too many projects
etc<p>is my bane...just when I think I have a good one, they get a bad something or other. It's not like I'm paying peanuts or make life difficult either.<p>Wish I had a better answer, but if you find one, let me know.