Would You Turn Down $10,000?
Posted by Jon Lee in Personal, Web Development, tags: money, web development, web-design
Ever since I started this blog, I’ve been getting offers from people and businesses to help with design and development. Since web development isn’t my full-time job but rather something I enjoy doing in my spare time, I’ve been turning down these offers. I was not ready to drop everything else in my life to work on a week-long project for a couple thousand dollars.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had several people approach me for help with implementing a feature or with a bit of programming. I was very glad to help and offer advice and would never think of taking even a dime for it since it only took a moment of my time.
Temptations
So last week I was approached by a new startup company (who wishes to remain anonymous until launch) to develop a dynamic website with a custom content management system (CMS) and a sophisticated but optimized PHP/MySQL backend. They needed a complete working site within a month’s time (that includes design, development, SEO and testing). I have quite a bit of experience in this kind of web development but I could not drop everything else and work on this for a month straight – even though they offered $10,000.
$10,000 for one month… 12 of these projects and that’s $120,000 a year! Am I crazy for not taking it? On the surface, $10,000 may sound like a lot but for the amount of work and effort that needs to be put into this along with what I personally have to give up, it did not make sense for me to take it. Not to mention the stress of having a timeline of only a month to create an entire custom backend from scratch (which their project definitely needed).
What’s Web Design/Development Worth?
This seems kind of contradictory to what I said two weeks ago when I criticized companies for charging so much for logo and web site designs. But to those companies, this is their full time job and the end product looked like crap. 
Would you have taken it? I was asked not to reveal the nature of the site but the level of sophisication is on par with say… Google Docs — well maybe not that complicated, but definitely not something you can whip up in a weekend (especially with just one person).
P.S. I’d do it for $100,000 
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