We’ve praised new hosted forum startup Tangler on a number of occasions – most recently calling it the bleeding edge in new discussion board/forum startups.
Apparently someone else likes it too. Someone in Turkey is willing to pay up to $1,500 to anyone who can “clone Tangler.” But don’t go too far – the listing also states “do not steal tangler.com images and do not violate copyrights. The clone should have the same functions, but the design should look different.”
Two bids have been placed already, one for just $1,000. Of course, building a scalable forum platform that allows syncronous and asyncronous messaging via a javascript interface may require more of an investment than $1,000 or so. But hey, why not try.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen something like this. Someone tried to buy a Techmeme clone for just $500 in 2006, and a fresher listing shows a $300 request for the same thing.
To whoever wins the business – my recommendation is to ask for the money up front, because it’s very unlikely you’re going to have a happy customer when you hand over a week or two of work on your Tangler or TechMeme clone.
Update: See DRM for other cloning projects he found. eBay for $1,500. $1,000 for Digg. Twitter for $1,365.
A techmeme clone could be built for free using Open source tools:
http://code.goo...m/p/openreview/
And a Metropix clone…
http://www.scri...130515534.shtml
I think this happens to all successful websites, but fortunately the results are never much of a threat.
thats cheap.
I don’t know if I should laugh or cry.
I second Michael’s recommendation. If you’re chosen for this project, demand payment up front.
To whoever posted the project – good luck! You’ve chosen to take a trip down the Highway to Hell. If you don’t have a LOT more than $1500 for this and won’t accept anything less than half-decent results, I would advise that you push the “Abort!” button now.
You’d be surprised. You can get any website built for sub-$5000, and well done. t How much do you think Tangler took to develop? Coding is the easy part of a start-up. The rest is hard.
Our company has use GAF for a number of projects in various sizes. The first project was also to “clone” a shopping site (shopzilla or shopping.com). Cost 1000 usd. Result: very satisfying.
Naturally, it is not a 100% completed product (if anything ever is 100% completed in web design…), but it is a very useful framework.
Don’t forget that 80% of the world’s population earns less than 300 usd per month, and many expert developers in India, China, Eastern Europe etc. are in this salary level. 1500 usd would buy you 5 months full time programming.
(we have employed some of the initial consultants full time, paying them around 900 usd per month, and are very satisfied. They are satisfied as well it seems, as the relation is full time since over a year.)
Well, Tangler is just a piece of software and as this it could be possible for a developer or a team to clone its functionality, and I think building the same business logic + adding a simple user interface maybe would be easy enough for an experienced developer to do that in the $1500 worth period of time. What would be harder is to build a *good* user interface for such a system.
By the way as I said using Tangler won’t help your website or forum to get more traffic from search engines while such “not-so-bleeding edge” and even sometimes free systems like phpBB, vBulletin or any CMS with forum functionality will.
same thing happend to us with an american offering 750 $ for stripgenerator clone with graphics. he actually got some indian programmers on board and it went live in 2006 but was closed in a few months.
#6 – Can you demonstrate the results that you’ve gotten? I must admit that I’m skeptical and have to see it to believe it.
Right now, $1500 is not competitive in a global marketplace such as GetAFreelancer.com for this sort of project. It’s a seller’s market. The top coders from from around the world are charging top dollar.
Yes, in theory it’s possible (like #7 explained), and this project will surely get many bidders. However, most of these will not be qualified, and chances are whoever is chosen won’t be either, despite what the resume will have you believe.
It all depends on the expectations of the person who posted the project. If he or she wants a solid product that is relatively secure and has minimal glitches, delivered on time, all while staying within the budget, then good luck.
Outsourcing a coding project without realistic expectations and a flexible budget is like playing Russian Roulette, except filling 5 chambers with bullets and leaving one blank.
“Mark Arrington” is right. Moreover, Techmeme itself runs on top of openreview. Setup was a snap once I located the check box for “tech news” on the config page…
The programming, outsourcing, part is the relatively easy process.
but the much more difficult part is marketing/promotion, and it’s respective costs…to ultimately get users to use the service, and to stick around on a regular basis
lawrence – and scaling.
$1,500 is a completely ridiculous figure. Now if it was $2,000, then we’d be getting warmer. And thanks lawrence (dad) for pointing out the marketing challenges… Can I get $1,500 now?
As a note from inside the trenches, the Tangler team have their head down working hard on taking Tangler to the next level. Coming soon.
Mick from Tangler
P.S And mimicry is the highest form of flattery
Mike, we can provide a similar interface to Tangler, with either the AJAX or an EZBoard type template for 60k CAD and 1/y of labour. Who ever keeps changing my name to asshat on the tech team, now is not the time. We have people specialized in lightboxes and script.aculo.us functionality.
Techmeme has an AI type engine to find the hottest related stories. We have an AI engineer in Europe I could try to bring back. That job would also be 60k and 1/y of labour with an AI specialist with a masters degree.
When you bid on these sites, you do not get top qualified pros. We can show you their school qualifications. We hire the types of people that have real jobs and are not at home in their underwear scraping rentacoder message boards for work they can’t possibly do correctly.
Why the nerve of those people ? Don’t they know you need a lot of money to do something great? Imagine one guy writing a blog trying to take on big news orgs. Or some young punks trying to take on microsoft. Yeah worth a good laugh
http://www.link...n/medericsalles
60k CAD + get fee and I hop on a plane to France, and I don’t come back until he’s our employee again. I’ll save you the trouble, he won’t work for you, anonymous. That’s our service. You’ll have something that scrapes in similar way to techmeme in a few months.
hmm, I have seen ppl bidding on google search engine clone on elance.com
Responses from companies are like , “We can build all the functionalities and UI” similar to Google. All for 500$
Yeah, rite. Even one GOOG stock is more thanthat.
What a moron the guy is
“Yeah, rite. Even one GOOG stock is more thanthat.
What a moron the guy is”
Real companies do not use services like elance or rentacoder. I used rentacoder once for site translation and from what I heard they didn’t even get that right. I only used them because we didn’t have people that spoke those languages in the area.
People that use those services for actual code are clueless on both the buyer and the seller level. It’s the blind interfacing with the blind and 99% of the time nobody wins. It would be nice if it were as easy as giving some poor Indian part time farmer $500 and getting the software comprising Google in return, but that’s fiction. It’s like Jack and the beanstock. Except there is no beanstock.
You also have to wonder for $1500 how long will the clone work. I have had code built through sites like freelancer before and the problem often is even if you have the “clone” built the code sucks and when you encounter your first problem the code builder is gone and so is your money – no threat to tangler. also if the group is only spending $1500 what would they spend to market the site? lol
Yup. We had a similar issue with PassPack. A potential competitor put up an ad on (of all places) rent-a-coder:
http://tinyurl.com/2xebr3
Services like rent-a-coder don’t have quality coders on there. We’re talking about a *password repository* here — can we please be a little more serious?
You’ll note that project was canceled.
“no threat to tangler. also if the group is only spending $1500 what would they spend to market the site? lol”
That’s a very good point. The people who put these jobs up have no money for support staff or for marketing. Even if you did get a fresh equivalent clone of the Tangler software, it would be dead in the water because of that.
Sites that have actual people behind them are freshly updated and have real support. I can also tell you that users are not stupid, they often times see who’s behind the website they are using, and make sure it’s an established business with employees.
People are always trying to put X, Y, Z automated services together just right to be successful, but it usually doesn’t work, unless you are scraping content for adsense money and frauding pagerank. I’ve heard of people making millions on that, where they scrape content automatically and spread it across thousands of subdomains and domains. That’s really popular amongst eastern european hackers. That would be the type of project you would WANT to get done on elance and rentacoder.
Umm, wasn’t Digg built for $10/hr after Rose posted an elance or similar ad for hire?
Entirely possible to securley clone tangler. Emphasis on possible. What success your site has after though is up to the Internet Gods and the person/s behind the site.
The problem with these guys is the estimates…they’ll say”YES” to anything to get the job….then they figure out they under estimated the job and they lose interest, unless you pay more $…of course you have to because your 3-4 months into the project and dont want to lose the your deposit (and time).
People just find it easier to copy some one else work by making clone of site but they forget that it is not that much easy to achieve success, any such site need heavy promotion and marketing and that cost eventually.
“check out http://www.megite.com, we have this system ready and willing to license.”
http://www.scri...143176314.shtml
so megite sell it selfs for $10.000.
megite was reviewed in TC, wasnt it?
for 10k i have to think it is a one man company, not bad…
“I’m pretty sure it’s ‘beanstalk’ – what’s a beanstock?”
Oh burn, that’s what I get for ignoring my spell checker! I was on my way to McDonalds and in a hurry. Gimme a break.
“Umm, wasn’t Digg built for $10/hr after Rose posted an elance or similar ad for hire?”
Kevin Rose was also on TechTV for a long time.
http://en.wikip...wiki/Kevin_Rose
Say the new Kevin Rose did the same thing today. Kevin Perera
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Pereira
It wouldn’t matter what the software is, because they are already famous. People will use anything they make just to get a chance to talk to them or to be closer to them in a WEIRD way.
You and I can’t exactly do the same thing. I would have a much better chance than you, but you know what I mean.
Kevin Rose’s fans are also mostly stay in mom’s basement types that have no lives and would give a limb to get cited by him for faithfully promoting his site, no matter what the F it is 24/7. Normal people without that exposure simply can’t do that. It’s NOT about the software. MySpace WASN’T about the software. That’s what people don’t seem to understand. It’s 10% software, and 90% everything else.
I just had an epiphany. Here is the ultimate reasoning.
A. Person A who has to organize a concert hires a 16 year old for $50 who just learned how to play Mary has a little lamb BUT bought him a $11,500 Gibson Les Paul limited guitar.
B. Person B has to organize the same show. He purchased a $50 Aria guitar but used the other $11,150 to hire Joe Satriani.
Who’s going to have more people at their show?
Is it about the guitar, or about the person playing it?
If you can answer that question, you can win on the internet. Or you can just hire an Indian person that’s kind of a coder and out of work to make you a Techcrunch scraper, then re-aggregate it on 1000000 sites until Google kicks you off of adsense.
I’d do it for $1500
“Of course, building a scalable forum platform that allows syncronous and asyncronous messaging via a javascript interface may require more of an investment than $1,000 or so.”
Actually, I think you’re overstating the complexity of the website (which, despite being in beta, has many design flaws)
How about $100 for a BoardTracker clone?
http://www.scri...148569459.shtml
Ahh well.. competition is good for business..
Building the site is not the problem … because you can get scripts for Youtube , myspace, digg etc .. That does not mean much , you have to have business skills .
Let me make it simpler
If everyone in America was/were given $1 million at the beginning of the year most people would be broke and only a few would be able to double the money by the end of the year .
The question is more of a “Would you” than a “Can you.” A good developer could clone the functionality with a low amount of effort but would probably find the compensation risible. Like the previous posts noted, the software isn’t the hard part, the vision and promotion are far more important.
A huge part of scalability is the deployment architecture. For a project like this, where there does not seem to be a lot of crunching involved, the hardware will be much more important to scalability than the software.
What I find most interesting about the projects posted on these freelance sites is value assigned to signed such projects. What does it say about Web 2.0 when a large number of people think, rightfully or wrongfully, that the software behind these startups are worth only a couple thousand dollars and can be duplicated in a week.
The process is a three step.
1. The idea
2. The technology
3. The business
All three things should be solid for extreme success. If you have the idea and business but technology is a simple two hour installlation of an open source software, than everybody will copy it as soon as you gain popularity.
I’m sure it didn’t cost $1.5m, either
“What I find most interesting about the projects posted on these freelance sites is value assigned to signed such projects. What does it say about Web 2.0 when a large number of people think, rightfully or wrongfully, that the software behind these startups are worth only a couple thousand dollars and can be duplicated in a week.”
This isn’t a web 2.0 phenomena. Hotscripts has been around since the 90’s.
The people who use these websites don’t notice that they’re not 100% automated. They think fixes, security testing and upgrades happen by themselves. The coder above that offered the $1500 is from Argentina. I know that the cost of living is lower there, but generally so is the edu, and the quality. I’m not saying he personally isn’t a great coder or whatever. I know that back when I used to take hourly work at $30 an hour, I had to fix a lot of this code that was done by these people. Most of the time they were so bad that they were rewrites.
People that have degrees simply will never work for under 60k per year, not even in poor countries, because the even semi-good ones are hired away to the US under special work visas. The people left behind are the ones that end up on these sites doing this work. I hate to say it because I feel bad for them, but it’s true.
Well it has been said a thousand times…startups are not about creating flashing websites..it is the unique concept….excellent execution..which includes viral marketing….positioning the portal with the right consumer group..
Blazing speed video search
http://www.meet...earchVideo.aspx
One more comment …
If you just want to test your idea…getting it done this way is not a bad idea either.
Blazing speed video search
http://www.meet...earchVideo.aspx
If your market is mostly the U.S., it’s probably a good idea to block China and other countries at the IP address level. We block China, Korea, Romania, Russia, the Philippines, and a few other countries. Our site contains a large database that you could just crawl and throw online and it would bring in a certain amount of income with contextual ads. Whenever we detect crawling, and if the country it’s coming from is not a market for us, the whole country gets banned.
for 1500$, I’ll only create the banner !
dailymatons.com
++
It’s in Flash, doomed to fail.
“Whenever we detect crawling, and if the country it’s coming from is not a market for us, the whole country gets banned.”
I find it amusing that the people from these countries don’t realize that they can simply purchase a dedicated server for $40 a month with a CC in the US and a 10+ IP address block and continue crawling 10 minutes after they were blocked.
Perhaps they can’t even get a CC there that would work to get a US server??
They have so many roadblocks that we don’t have, it’s no wonder a lot of them want work like this.
How can you pay your bills and feed your family on $1500 for what amounts to at least 6 months of work? That’s like $250 a month. That’s not even enough money to live on in China? There’s no way they could do a reasonably good job on that. They have to be lying.
You know what they may do also? Like an evil Leprechaun that gives you 3 wishes, they may use the wording of the specification to give you something you totally didn’t want, then say that in the strict interpretation of the spec it fits. That’s the only way I can see it happening.
=~ s/Leprechaun/genie/;
the problem with any webboard solutions is that they are insular. and so they don´t archive well, and that´s why they won´t last very long. try to make a google search through web forums only for a certain year. thanks to the web, the forum space is still a mess only comparable to the mess of the babelized IM space. if you don´t want conservation of conversations then go for it. this is the backfiring effect of the old castles, such as AOL, Yahoo, microsoft establishing trying to hold their users hostage. sure there is google groups as a “social” webboard solution which includes an nntp (usenet) backend, but who wants to put trust into the google grid in the long term? usenet 2.0 needs backwards compatibility which was never a bad idea in an OSI architecture and it needs decentralized control of the servers which is not exactly what the google grid is about. if web2 tries to achieve to establish a new “social” layer, it needs to be more consistent and interoperable with the lower layers. replacing them with flaky half baked apis centralized around flocks of a temporary user masses means gambling with but not learning from the history of the internet.
Woah, I thought this would be an interesting debate on the competition amongst programmers in terms of pricing across the web and the increasing idea of ‘getting everything for nothing’ that is occurring more often than not. Instead I have to read 42 comments, some of which are exactly what I wanted to read through, but 8 of which are from ‘Chris R.’ who really needs to be marked as spam to improve comment threads on Techcrunch overall.
Perfect for the young entrepreneur that wants to try to out-do tangler
- step 1: sign up for this deal
- step 2: build the app, deliver to client, collect money
- step 3: run the app yourself using money for hosting fees
Too me, it’s only a decent deal of you also keep the code yourself and keep cranking on it as your own solution
@36 DigMyPage has it right. It takes some combination of these three things:
1. idea
2. technology
3. business
To prove this point let’s even take a look at the Harry Potter books. The value there is entirely ideas. It’s all of the creative ideas J.K. Rowling had to assemble the story stretching the 7 books. The technology is the vehicle for delivery, i.e. the printed pages assembled into books. The business part almost got missed as most publishers rejected the book initially. She would have in effect been sitting on a goldmine with no way of cashing in without the business part.
Or, this blog… The idea was to write about interesting technology startups. The technology is the website which delivers the content, and the business is selling ad placement. You get the idea…
So much of Web 2.0 is about users storing their personal data that a new website also has to inspire trust in the user– trust that the user’s data will be secure, that it will be kept private when requested; trust that the site will be maintained and updated and scale well.
Regardless of the initial quality of the site, if the business owner is truly committed to the idea it will show in time with improvements, but for users to trust the site with their time and data there has to be a certain base level quality or they just won’t bother.
gimme 15k and give you something years ahead of tangler. won’t use php though.