slindstr

I've been freelancing for a while now and in general it's gone like this:

1. A potential customer requests a quote for a project

2. I send them a quote and (usually) they agree to have work done

3. I complete the work on time and everyone is happy

4. A couple of weeks down the road they want minor changes made to the site (copy, images, etc.)

The problem is #4 - while what they need done is extremely minor (maybe 5-10 minutes of work per shot) the REAL problem is that they consistently want these extremely minor things done every week or so. I didn't charge them anything initially because they were my first customer and they've been referring new work my way, but the little bits of time are starting to add up.

Would you charge a retainer/maintenance fee for a situation like this? How would you present it to your customer? What do you recommend for terms for a retainer/maintenance fee?

Thanks!

I really love surfing, so recently I decided to start taking cold showers so it wouldn't be a huge shock when I jumped in the water in the winter months. Wetsuit, or no wetsuit, believe me when I say that it's still a "special" feeling the first time cold water splashes you when you paddle out.

Anyways, I happened to take a cold shower one night before going to bed and I had the most amazing night's sleep. Since then I've been religiously taking a cold shower before bed and it's great.

I just wanted to share this trick because I'm sure there's some people out in HN land that have a tough time with sleep. I was also hoping you could share any tricks like this that you use in your life.

Thanks!

I'd like to build a website, cultivate it a bit, and then ultimately sell it so I decided to poke around on www.flippa.com today to see what people were actually buying. For the fun of it, I sorted by price and was looking through some of the sites that sold for around $10K (USD) and I was shocked to see that:

- a lot of them didn't seem to be much more than a hastily thrown together Wordpress blog

- a lot of the sites claimed high Google page ranks but the only way I could find them was by Googling their actual URL (They didn't specify the keywords they had high ranks for)

- a lot of them didn't even claim traffic numbers

What do you think is going on with that? Are there people out there that'll really buy a website no matter what and try to make it big? Have you ever bought or sold anything on Flippa? Any tips?

Thanks in advance HN!

It's been a while since I've seen this question asked and since the landscape changes so frequently I'd really appreciate your input (especially since I'm about to launch some mobile apps).

Which mobile advertising platforms do you use for iPhone and for Android? I'd much rather sign up for a CPM deal than CPC or CPA.

Knowing your competition is a very important part of business and I'm curious to get your input as to how you figure out who your direct and indirect competition is.

I recently needed to do a specific task and while there were a couple of solutions out there, I really disliked their implementations (basically they were too difficult to use). I think I can do a much better job in implementing the idea (which I am working on now), but I'd really like to have a better picture of who's out there doing the same thing.

Do you have any suggestions for finding potential competitors aside from just mindlessly Googling words and phrases?

Thanks in advance!

I'm trying to buy a domain name from someone that's just kind of squatting on it. They bought it back in 1997 and using http://www.archive.org I was able to determine that they were trying to start a web hosting company. Since 2001 the domain has been parked and it's registered until September 2012.

The way I see it I can do 2 things:

1. Try to contact the person using the contact info in the whois records

2. Wait until it expires and do what Mike Davidson did to buy newsvine.com (see below for link)

The domain is registered with private registration (of course), so I shot an e-mail off a couple of weeks ago to the contact person at the registrar to see if they could put me into contact with the owner. No answer as of yet.

What would you do?

Article Link From Above: http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2005/03/how-to-snatch-an-expiring-domain

[Edit: Fixed formatting. I'll get the hang of it yet!]

Last Friday was a pretty interesting day. A friend of a friend's dad whom I have never met randomly called me out of the blue and said he wanted to have lunch with me to discuss some potential web development work. I went and had lunch with him and he's a great guy - we both went to the same school, same major, captain of the same sport, etc.

I can't really get too detailed, but long story short, he and a friend of his have an idea that will satisfy a fairly boring need for a fairly boring industry and as far as they can tell this idea has never been done before. I was skeptical, so I did my own research and it looks like they might be right. What makes this venture so interesting is that they legitimately know all of the key players in the industry and can probably rally them all to use this product.

He wants a prototype built (which will be pretty simple to do given the requirements he gave me) and eventually it came time to talk about compensation. He said that I could submit a quote, but he also started to mention that I could do it for "free" and have a vested interest (I assume a percentage of ownership) in the venture. That's about when we parted ways.

Here's my question: How would you negotiate this? As far as I can tell it's never been done before and I'm confident that they know the right people and would most likely be able to convince them to use this product/service. I'll be doing most of the grunt work (design, development, deployment) and his friend will be contacting his connections to use the product. As far as I can tell, my friend's friend's dad is more or less the middle man that happened to come up with the idea. Any help would be greatly appreciated!