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Ask HN: Place for developers & designers to barter small units of work?

37 points by jayliew ↗ HN
E.g. I'll build you a site if you'll design my logo & vice versa? (roughly equivalent in effort for each person, say X hours of coding for X hours of design - or however the two parties agree to is fair)

The key here is that you're exchanging something relatively easy for you to produce in exchange for something that's relatively difficult for you to do but relatively easy for someone else to do. Not a big upfront commitment, i.e. a job or contract.

It's generally hard to be an expert at it all: back-end, front-end, design & UX. Is there a place for people to barter their services? If there isn't, maybe there should be ;)

Related (also posted on Quora): http://www.quora.com/Is-there-a-place-where-back-front-end-developers-designers-trade-work

18 comments

[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 45.4 ms ] thread
akkartik
Neat idea. All these things, however, require feedback. Even if you don't have the skills you often need to drive the trajectory of things we try out. Given that, perhaps we should instead barter 'pairing time'. "If we can work on my project for a day today, then I'll help you with your project for a day."

You can modulate the 'promiscuity' of this idea, from pairing with random people you meet on some site, to having a handful of people you pair repeatedly with. The latter seems to kill two birds with one stone: you get something done on your site now, and also make progress finding and trying out potential co-founders.

swanson
I wish there was a good way to find designers that are trying to build a portfolio or just like making stuff for the hell of it. I hack around on weekend projects for fun all the time, but I don't have much desire to start a business or try to make it big -- it would be nice if there was a good way to find like-minded designers that would throw together a logo or color scheme.
kennet
I'm trying to prevent myself from being baited into making a website out of all this--i'm booked, but it is definitely something that the HN community should band together and provide. It sounds _very useful_.
proexploit
I'm always available for anything that's gonna take less than an hour and seems fun. For longer stuff, I'm probably available too as long as it's something enjoyable and not busy work. More freedom for me = better results for you.
jambo
It's a great idea for a founder who isn't a U.S. citizen or national.

Sadly:

The IRS requires barter value to be reported as income: http://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc420.html

and barter exchanges have to send out 1099s: http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=113437,00....

ohashi
So it's just a favor and you owe me one, I want my one now.
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tdavis
In the process of building such a service, we've already spoken to a couple lawyers about these issues and it's quite a legal gray area right now. We're working on ways to structure the system to avoid these particular requirements, at least in the short term. It really comes down to how you implement the bartering platform itself as well as the terms under which exchanges are made.
jayliew
http://www.thesuperfluid.com/

I saw this as a response to my question on Quora .. I wonder how they do it

abulafia
superfluid has functionality for commercial (with IRS-reporting, per jambo) and non-commercial efforts. So it handles both the barter exchange and favor-bank sort of model. -The IRS has exclusions for non-commercial services.

superfluid:p2p is international, superfluid:business is US-only, for now.

proexploit
I've posted a couple topics before trying to get something like this going as I've had a lot of fun working with some other guys on HN. I don't know of a site like this but my thought is it's better done informally. Maybe a google group that's invite-only (not exclusive, but able to restrict membership as an alternative for feedback)?

While we're on the subject: I'm a designer / front-end guy always open to bartering. Logos aren't my think but Design/UX/HTML/CSS/HAML/SASS is what I'm good at. I've got a ton of different side projects in tons of different languages I'm learning to hack away on.

ndaugherty18
We use each others wisdom all the time at the co-working facility I frequent.

I wouldn't call it bartering but knowledge transfer or "mentoring"

jgv
Forrst is a community that has both designers and developers interacting, although it's not explicitly about bartering.

http://forrst.com